Astronautical: Immersion in Mass-Market Gnosticism

At fourteen my reading was broad, shallow, social and largely random. The
Woolworths' bargain bin was a prime source, one as likely to produce a Sax
Rohmer as a Samuel R. Delany. But local bookshops still existed too, and I
would tour them on a Saturday with a friend whose obsession was H. P.
Lovecraft. From a corner tenement shop in Kilmarnock Road, just past the
concrete walkway rising to the modernist heaven of the new Shawlands
Arcade, I was likely to emerge clutching a Solzhenitsyn one week, a Len
Deighton the next, or a book on environmentalism on a third, all the while
resisting the slim volume of Marc Bolan's poetry exhibited as temptation by the
till.
This semi-random process is at some distance from what either Walter
Benjamin or the Folio Society would regard as building a library, but is a more
honest mapping of how the silt of everyday "character" accumulates.
An increasing proportion of the shop fell to promotional displays of bright
visionary books: Was God an Astronaut? Resisting for a few weeks, I persisted
with Solzhenitsyn. We never make mistakes. But curiosity drew me in.
Something here appealed to my novice atheism. On offer was a materialist
demythologisation, as other generations might have found in Feuerbach or
Holbach. After all, with the synchronic space programme, accepting reciprocal
alien exploration might be not so much a credulous leap of faith as a radical
and sophisticated refusal of myth.
Never trust a teenager with a key. Once used to unlock, it invites a riotous
commotion.
An explanatory device is an irresistible force. Buy into it and the holder is
granted the gift of discernment, a sifting of evidence that does not overprivilege the conventional received wisdom (that they have scarcely bothered
to receive). But discerning as consumer, not producer. In this instance, the
evidence, such as it was, had been eked out and spoon-fed by Von Dniken and
his editor. The books provided no mode d'emploi other than its retelling to
those who are unknowing, an impetus that is of course very powerful in
consumer economics. It is that word of mouth now coveted in the marketeer's
dream of #goingviral. Certain goods require conspicuous consumption, a telling
by one to any other who will listen, as the only way to maintain velocity. Wile E.

Coyote hovers stalled over the ancient astronaut tracks at Nazca.

Grayling suggests that the core of any religion can be learned in 30 minutes. So
too with para-sciences. Those who invest learn and tell, and tell again. And at
the same time, cultivate their own connoisseurship. A trading-up strategy:
there is Von Dniken, of course, but isn't this other (Pauwels, Michell) ultimately
more satisfying, premier cru? It can even present itself as sophisticated, ironic,
countering the absolutism of the scientific edifice through playful bricolage, as
in the Fortean Times or the "Illuminatus!" books. But, by and large, a consumer
cult creates and demarcates only a sodden clay field.
So much for all that, you might say. Put childish things behind you. Ineffective
and forgotten. Hardly even a footnote in popular culture.
But what lingers is its recurring weave through the drab fabric of the 1970s,
specifically among a subclass of people, who hold opinions but are not opinion
formers, expressive of strong views but essentially passive. Hidden from
history. Of these, then, three episodic examples.
Around the time of the first oil shock, there was a period when everyday life
centred on hanging around one friend's house. The people there were in and
around a band, a pop showband, and ourselves, younger brothers and their
friends. Among the first, one was the strong-willed girlfriend of one of the band
- a role both secondary but primary, which was displacing the previous main
dynamic at the core of the band. (Has anyone really captured the minutiae of
these group dynamics: affinity, displacement, hurt, withdrawal?) Her position
had become central, ours a barely tolerated peripheral gaggle. One evening, by
whatever chance, it became known that she had read Von Dniken. So had I,
and for a one and only time there was a bridgehead of contact, as we talked
cognoscenti nonsense across the room at one another. Totally inconsequential,
save perhaps for reinforcing her subjective position, while drawing my friends'
rightful irritation onto me.
A second episode came some five years later while sharing a flat with a guy
who did manual work in a distillery yard. He was independent-minded and open
to discussing the unusual, such as libertarian politics. But the lack of filtration
in his self-education led to a blockage. His bookshelf was dominated by massmarket mysticism: not just Von Dniken, but also plunging to T. Lobsang
Rampa, the English plumber gazing inscrutably from multiple variant covers.

Any attempt to turn a discussion consequential was snuffed in a peculiar

superiority: that these were mere earthly concerns, paltry in comparison with
the cosmic truths. Almost audible was the bad sci-fi voice booming "Foolish
Earthlings!" with a thunderbolt of superiority from above. The autodidact used
his specialist learning to disengage, with a frustrating air of superiority.
(Though which of us does not do likewise? The only difference may be whether
the shore defences are invisible or risible.)
If that experience was doubly frustrating - unable to go forward in developing
discussions while sucked back to an adolescent past - the third episode was
more so. This came on the very cusp of the Eighties, long after Von Dniken's
shelf-life expired.
The afternoon of January Second in a dank winter, and I am trudging through
the centre of Glasgow, once again with the friend who had the Lovecraft
obsession. In eight years our lives have hardened from possibility to
practicality. He works in a bar, but it is closed for the still-observed holiday. The
trouble is, so is everywhere else and we can't find a pub that is open.
Eventually we get a carry-out from a grocer in Woodlands Rd and go back to his
flat with his partner and her friends. Her inclination had always been the
druggy end of alternativism. The bedsit damp, the atmosphere a fug, and the
conversation elevates to Ancient Astronauts. And stays there. On and on. This
time it is purely a matter of politely listening to others' vices (Montesquieu),
delivered wild-eyed and repetitively. Nothing can be interjected, just the
obligation to keep nodding; nothing can be of consequence in this blabber and
smoke. The stars down to earth. Never was the alternative swamp so evident,
so damp and clammy.
Three episodes then: diverse applications of Ancient Astronautics - for
subculture status collateral, as defensive blockage, as social glue - but by
definition, nothing of consequence, just a tale told.