MDMD2: Magnetical Stupor

[John Lundy]

Paul,

I'm sorry to lower the intellectual tone of this, but does anyone else 
recall that during a match in that great symbolic cold war contest, the 
World Chess Championship, Bobby Fisher and Spassky quarrelled after Spassky 
refused to continue until Fisher changed his tie?  Spassky said that the 
psychedelic patterns on the tie were clearly designed by the CIA's 
hypnotists and were planned to have a mesmeric effect that would see him 
putty in his opponent's hands.  I thought it was hilarious at the time and 
it all came flooding back.  By the way, I believed Fisher's protestations 
of innocence on the grounds that his appalling dress sense was pretty much 
matched by most Western males in the 70s.

(I'm enjoying your exposition of all of this.  I'm learning lots.  Harry 
Houdini to me was and remains a grim-faced Tony Curtis upside down and 
manacled in a cylinder of arctic water with a how-the-fuck-did-I 
ever-agree-to-try-this look on his face.  So all this is a revelation.

On Monday, 24 September 2001 14:40, Paul Nightingale 
[SMTP:paulngale at supanet.com] wrote:
> Roy Porter, in Mind-Forg'd Manacles, tells the following story. In the 
1790s
> mesmerism would become an unlikely secret weapon for Revolutionary France 
in
> the war with Britain. James Tilley Matthews had been briefly imprisoned 
by
> the French Jacobins; and he it was who exposed the plot upon his return 
to
> England in 1796. Teams of "magnetic spies" aimed to mesmerise government
> ministers, he claimed: "Thus, for instance, when the Secretary of War is 
at
> church, in the theatre, or sitting in his office and thinking on 
indifferent
> subjects; the expert magnetist would suddenly throw into his mind the
> subject of exchange of prisoners." Matthews was committed to Bethlem in
> 1797; this, he argued, was part of a Government/Mesmerist plot to silence
> him (Penguin ed, 1990: 237-9).
>
> Hence, mesmerism as popular science is associated with threats to the
> established order, or even just order, as well as paranoia. It is part of
> what Foucault called Unreason in the Age of Reason. From Dixon's point of
> view Mason has taken leave of his senses, seduced (too strong a word?) by
> the Learned Dog (juxtaposed to "an Actress one admires"; something
> to do with his dead wife). This is all part of Dixon's introduction to 
the
> city, a dream-world he finds baffling throughout Ch3: his "clear
> Stupefaction" becomes, is transposed into, Mason's "Magnetical Stupor". 
And
> then, if the Dog does 'stand in' for Cherrycoke in this chapter, he
> transforms the observer whose story-telling is merely reactive into the 
kind
> of narrator who is more manipulative, ie a writer.
>
>
>