Canada is weird.
Take this disordered time (tape) loop, with its lurches forward and backwards:
1900-1972: The great majority of mayors and councillors in Toronto and its surrounding areas were part of an occultist group Orange Order of Canada that had symbolic ties to Freemasons and Gnostics. This has had lasting weird effects in architecture and city organization (satanically named streets, prevalence of concrete structures, etc.). On a geotraumatic register - a geology to accompany our genealogy - the cities of Canada are structured around the flows of a deep, cryptic, occult.
Nick Land wrote 'the city is a time machine,' but might it also be that the city, like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which sits on the 'Hell Mouth,' is the crystallization of a demonic power? A city is a demon machine.
1957-1964: British Psychiatrist and head of the Canadian Psychiatric association Donald Cameron carries out CIA mind control experiment MK Ultra in McGill University Allan Clinic, Quebec. It is here he lures innocent women and children into his assylum under the false pretense of helping them only to dose them with LSD and expose them to tape loops of static and repetitive phrases.
Cameron was surely a demon, or at least in communion with them not unlike the doctors in Jacobs Ladder
or the psychiatrist in Hellraiser II
1966-2014: David Cronenberg writes, directs, and produces weird horror films (including a William Burroughs adaption) that cover topics such as postmodernism, anti-psychiatry, bodyhorror, psychoanalysis, xenofeminism, technoviruses, etc.
1973: Felix Guattari travels to Canada for a lecture (Intersecting Lives pg. 273). I wish there was more to it than this.
1979: Lyotard is commissioned by the government of Quebec to publish The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The text maps onto some of Felix Guattari's wok on language, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.
1980: In A Thousand Plateaus D and G talk of languages that pull from disparate elements to create a weird 'minor' language that breaks with structuralist conceptions of language. As an example, they mention Quebec
“It is also said that ‘the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by any system of spelling’…the Quebecois language must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in relation to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syntactical elements, in order to set them in variation” (pg. 101-102).1981: A Guattari revival begins thanks to "Greek- Canadian academic, Constantin Boundas, a philosophy professor at Trent University in Canada" (Intersecting Lives).
1981: UK Prog rock band The Police record Ghost in the Machine at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book of the same title, while the album artwork is intended to represent the 3 members of the band and their hairstyles, but appears to be '3:33' on a digital clock. Almost corresponding numerologically, the album was ranked 323 out 500 in an album ranking magazine article.
This 3:33 should of course remind us of Nick Land's twitter avatar.
1982-1983: The Police record Synchronicity, the follow up to Ghost in the Machine, at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title, album artwork, and two correspondingly named songs, all reference psychoanalyst Carl Jung's (and Arthur Koestler's) scientific-mystical concept of synchronicity, a non-causal but related and meaningful coincidence (not identical but certainly similar to the CCRU's hyperstition).
The song Sychronocity II follows the story of an impotent, castrated worker and family man going about his day while, in an unrelated time and place, "something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake" a something which, by the end of the song, crawls onto the shores and becomes "a shadow on the door." A boring, regular Capitalist day is penetrated by a unnameable, slime monster from the deeps (Cthulhuic much?).
1984: Lyotard's Postmodern book is republished.
1987: D and G's A Thousand Plateaus is republished, translated by Brian Masumi
1989: David Lynch's Twin Peaks takes place in a fictional town about 20 miles from the Canadian border. In the show, the plot brings our main character - a mystical, psychologically minded detective - to Canada in an attempt to solve an uncanny mystery.
1990s: Felix Guattari takes on a new popularity in Canada, some of which is associated to McGill University in Quebec. Gary Genosko, one of the scholars - if not the one - responsible for reviving interest in Guattari is based in Ontario. Brian Masumi, translator of both Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari, teaches at the University of Montreal. Etc.
1995: Boards of Canada, a two-man, Scottish, cryptic lo-fi synth band that, consistent with the explorations of the CCRU to come, creates their music out of drum machines, modified synths, and creepy cut up magnetic tape loops of number codes, documentaries, and children talking (not unlike those used in MK Ultra), release their first music on a major label. The name is a reference to 'the national film board of canada' founded in 1939 by a British man and centered in Quebec.
2003: shortly after the turn of the century, with the dissipation of the CCRU, and after burning out on LSD and speed, the mad black Deleuzian Nick Land disappears. It is rumored he takes solitary refuge in Canada before moving to China.
2010: Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow is filmed in Canada, a setting which has an important role in the director's upbringing. The psychedelic and antipsychiatry ridden film takes place in the 60s and then the 80s and follows a telepathic woman held against her will by a sadistic psychiatrist in a strange future mental health clinic. The director cites Burroughs as inspiration.
2020: Nick Land returns again to Canada to flee the spread of hypervirus COVID19 through China.
20XX: N1X (Nyx) Land via Šum Journal 12 captures the near future where "Canadian supremacy over North America is largely won."
XXXX: ...
The geographic territory of Canada seems to be haunted by the occult and its adjacent binaries - psychiatric domination of females / anti-psychiatric feminism, psychoanalytic Oedipal / Anoedipal axes, science / mysticism, enlightenment / postmodernism, etc.; binaries that play out across different planes of expression - film, music, architecture, institutional control, etc.
It's likely that there are historical-material (genealogical and geological) processes that lead to these connections - perhaps the overlapping British/Scottish/French colonial expeditions, perhaps something else - but regardless, one could say that certain manifestations seem to resonate - synchronize - around Canada.
For Jung, the 'mind' is merely an articulation or production of the physical, base material of the Outside. Being that the 'objective' Outside and the 'subjective' inside are of the same 'stuff,' when the Outside matches the inside in a way that seems to have no agentic or local causality, its material-code redundancy is felt to be a meaningful event - a meeting of long separated twins (syzygy).
This is not unlike Guattari's conceptualization of diagramming redundancies of signifying substance and asignifying materials - the inside is simply the outside folded inwards, and the inside is used to traverse the outside. We often neglect our own resonances through a mythic and fictional oedipal disconnection - the ego and the superego - which fools us into thinking we are a proper 'thing' as opposed to a husk being played by an Outside force.
Synthesizing these thoughts: hyperstition is a techno-magical coincidence intensifier, a fiction that makes itself real through diagrammatic force that concentrates redundancies into interlocking with the Outside.
Let's not slip too much into exposition and isntead end on a weird coincidence: in Canada in 2018 women were still being arrested for witchcraft. In one article documenting this trend, the author writes
"Is it a coincidence that all of this [the arrests] is going down within days of Halloween? If you want to talk crazy coincidences, what about the fact that both Canadian women accused of witchcraft — Dorie Stevenson from Milton, Ont., and Samantha Stevenson from Toronto — have the same last name! (Police are currently looking into any possible connections.)"What are the odds? Are these perhaps long lost, unconscious twins (syzygy)? Certainly an interesting coincidence.
