Shapes of the Mind at the Death of Doris Lessing

It is assumed that buildings shape the mind that enters them. Even from a distance, any idea, image or metaphor does. That is how poetry has meaning. This gets unforeseen mention in the Preface to The Sirian Experiments (1981). Lessing says, in the context of a battle “between Forces” involving Canopus and Sirius: “I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had been used for the purposes of experiment by more advanced creatures…that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess and that there might have been a science in the past which we have forgotten…that we may be enslaved in ways we know nothing about, befriended in ways we known nothing about” (viii).

Three enemies of the human use buildings to Shape Mind: collective mind, artificial intelligence, and the ruse of ET. They are part of one strategy to dwarf the human by size or number, which architects outwardly hide under cover of science. The preoccupations of Lessing's narrator are: “the chief one is the nature of the group mind, the collective minds we are all part of, though we are seldom prepared to acknowledge this. We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique…with billions and billions and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that each of us is unique, or that if all the others are mere dots in a swarm, then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own” (ix).

Those billions absorbed in the greater collective mind make none believe they are unique. This is called elsewhere "the wisdom of crowds." The battle of the great against the small and all together against any one separate is a the cosmic doctrine that preoccupies this "science." The War On Neptune is the most recent of our pamphlets taking part for the mouse, or human against the cosmos that insists we experiment on mice to save ourselves, but then invites that the human to be the mouse. The individual is not countenanced by these “forces" whose mention occurs from the Old Testament forward (Daniel 11.38). Lessing demonstrates how this war casts the individual under the bus of the collective: 1) We do not acknowledge the collective, 2) we think we are autonomous, unique, 3) that our minds are our own. Such exaggerations are the purpose of the cosmic to reduce us to control in the midst of ballyhoo about freedom and access to information. The masses are ruled with impressive collective control. From Lessing’s birth in 1919, the world population  (1927) tripled from 2 to 7 billion (2012). The means of control however, as Opiomes shows, cubed, those buildings as exteriorized ideas at HistoPossum (still a work in progress).

 Doris Lessing died (17 Nov 2013) exactly at the moment  this paragraph was composed. Checking to correlate the population statistics with her birth, because the argument of control is so much more profound if the population has tripled in 72 years, 2 billion in 1927 to 6 billion in 1999. This alone is suspicious. It was found she had literally just died during the writing. Look at the date/time stamp. I had not contemplated the Sirian Experiments for years since those days as a book scout for Bonita Porter, and certainly never contemplated taking up questions of the Alien Colonies, but reexamined the Canopus series the previous night to awake that morning to compose this Preface. Lessing's Neanderthal Ben, or Grendel, further speak of the disaffections that Brief our discensions.

 These pieties spell out the SF dictims, now furthered by gov-sci and genetic tinkerers (which you can peruse in the raw Legends of Kurk Wold), whether Pleiadian or not. A good summary of the Canopean appears here (p 242f) where we learn that the Canopeans genetically engineered the human and sent benevolent alien giants to tutor them in their protohuman state, just opposite the Book of Enoch where the Trojan prototype is buried in all books to deceive us to take the Horse into the city. That the Ur human supposedly fell by failure of the cosmic influence is entirely backwards. The giants are malevolent and the purpose of latter day genetic engineering to make the man immortal is to make him a bastard to himself. Lessing is to be admired for her disdain of the Nobel committees who honor their own. It is said she got the Nobel award for her enlightenment of feminine relations, a put down, for she is a poet, a spokesperson against tyranny, and that is her reward. I call her a poet, but it is merely a matter of the greater and the less to celebrate being, family and home in which no pretense of culture is needed or occurs, and which does not lessen the less for that. Or the greater, failing the less as a refuge, for the less is always desired, is driven out with a chip of ice in the heart (Graham Greene) to conduct symphonies in the case of fiction, or solos and quartets, in the case of poems of  universal pain and suffering. It doesn't matter whether it's poetry or prose, whether the Descent into Hell is exteriorized in a man on a life raft, as Lessing has it, or sent into verse below the sea and earth, as Dante, the subject is the same. But don't pretend the middle is of any value between these two. The middle is the thought controlled mass of the collective.


Last night I was also reading the passing of John Donne in R. C. Bald's Life, whose end is moving, that so great a man as this also died. It is a comfort to be associated with these. His epitaph reads:

Having been invested with the Deanery of this Church,

November 27, 1621,

he was stripped of it by Death on the last day of March 1631:

and here, though set in dust, he beholdeth Him

Whose name is the Rising.

Doris Lessing, (22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013), R.I.P. See her last Telegraph interview and Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction. Paris Review interview 
15 Bizarre Buildings here

Unscientific postscript:  Lessing's Ben In the World and Briefing for a Descent Into Hell  resemble Canopus in that one moment of provocation causes suspicions that circle and intersect with character, dialogue and action and pretext dialogue and events, but are not substantive themselves. When Ben is kidnapped, disappeared and put in "the cages" it is most provocative, but the suspense that it would happen and the outrage the characters and reader feel during and after are the real issue. It is only of threats, not reality she writes. Toying with the bone as an end in itself is a British fascination rather like Henry James' Beast in the Jungle or The Turn of the Screw. The same occurs with Briefing when the "disc" takes the companions but leaves the professor on the boat longing for reunion, consummation with the disc. Lessing's social life has all the right people. Her Sufi like zen saffron religion of Charlie Rose is a spirituality of diffusion, as long as you go along. Don't go along and this religion of patriotism, famous people worship and self aggrandizement turns vicious. In our day only journalists are priests. This continues here.