JOHN CONSTABLE (a.k.a. John Crow) Interview
www.gooseandcrow.co.uk
John is
our Wonderful & Naughty "Tea Dance Posse" in London.
His Powerful Singing & Orgasmik Dancing at ritual is always leading us
upto Real Heaven.
His
Mysterious & Extream
Literary
Activity Since 60s is so interesting,
& has been connected with multi-platform Alternative/Psychedric cultures
"Release the reality" Crew
Interviewed our great Ayahuasca literati, John Constable.
This Interview was held via e-mail By CosmiK reporter, Akira
Natchi on JUNE 2003.
This text is not related at all with any real activity of Santo-Daime
group in England & Brazil.
For further informations, please contact us at "elf@releasethereality.com"
JOHN: "Most Peaceful" - I like that! People often see me as a bit of a Wild Man.
A: Basically, you are Poet & Playwriter, aren't you ?
J: Yes, I've been writing and performing since the '70s. I started out doing strange performance works at ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY (David Medalla's London squat-gallery). Back in the early 'eighties. I toured Europe with Sheer Madness (performing SHAKESPEARE'S GREATEST HITS, a street-theatre version of four Shakespeare tragedies presented at breakneck speed!) and with two Amsterdam-based theatre groups. I moved back to London in 1984, when Foco Novo produced my play BLACK MAS (inspired by experiences in the Trinidad Carnival). Over the next ten years, I wrote many plays for adults and children - including TULIP FUTURES (Soho Theatre Company). My SHA-MANIC PLAYS are published by Oberon Books. I've also adapted other people's work - including two John Wyndham novels for BBC Radio 4, and a stage adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gothic GORMENGHAST trilogy, which was performed at The Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, followed by several British and World Tours.
By the mid-nineties, I'd become disenchanted with the British theatre establishment - including the so-called "Fringe". The work being produced seemed increasingly formulaic, a retreat into naturalism, reflection and commentary - Art imitating Life - whereas I've always believed that Art should seek to transform Life. I wrote a solo show, a mythic autobiography called I WAS AN ALIEN SEX GOD, inspired by my youthful experiments with LSD and other psychoactive sacraments. I performed the show, playing myself as "John Crow" on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Independent called it "mind-blowingly weird."
And, by reenacting my first acid trips, I realised that I was only now beginning to comprehend and deal with their contents, and that the show I'd written was really a coded account of John Crow's shamanic initiation.
A: How these extream activisms are associating with your art works ?
J: We're getting there...
A: Okay, Back to Fact, How these experiences like Saint Daime/Tea Dance you have started ?
J: As a consequence of my experiments with other psychedelics...
A: Indeed, We are Logically Progressive... Can you tell me bout your any other psychedric experiences before DMT ? 'Cause I guess, You are the one of very artisticly experienced person in the psychedrics domain, You have been in the early movement of Ecstacy (MDMA) in 80's ?
Can you tell me all bout your "Drug + Spititual" Chanellings ?
J: I smoked my first joint in Paris, 1969. I was 17. I scored some hashish off an African in a dim-lit back-street and smoked it with some Parisian kids who'd broken into an empty basement. Spent the night sprawled on a mattress, with a vivid cartoon history of the planet playing in my head.
In 1970 I began experimenting with LSD. On my third trip, I has a full-on shamanic experience, shape-shifting into a crow and flying. I took to lysergic acid straight away, and She seemed to take to me - I always think of the lysergic Goddess as female, a sakti energy. She took me, shook me, danced me, tranced me, loved me up, taught me everything I needed to know... At the time I was still only 17 - couldn't fully process the information overload - a lot of the time I'd just be smiling beatifically and mumbling "Uhhhhhhh... Uhhhhhhhh..."
Over the next seven years I took maybe a hundred acid trips. I also used mescaline, mushrooms, fly agaric. I occasionally flirted with speed and opium; few snorts of coke and, much later, a couple of ketamine binges; even enjoyed the odd chase of the dragon - though I've never been addicted to any drug except nicotine. In 1977-78, I lived in Japan (a village across the ricefields near Saidaiji, Nara), got into Zen Buddhism and gave up all "drugs", even tobacco. I wasn't involved in the early MDMA experiments or the rave scene in the '80s. I tested some dodgy pills which put me off Es for a long time. From 1980-1995, I didn't do any psychedelics. Looking back, it's as if during those years I was maybe in denial of my shaman's path - putting everything into writing plays
But by 1995, the old shamanic tendencies were resurfacing. I conducted an Earth Magic Ritual (THE BECOMING OF THE RAINGODS TO GARBAGE GARDENS) on the site of THE LAND IS OURS occupation of derelict land by Wandsworth Bridge (right behind the building where you and I last met!) The same year, as a direct result of performing I WAS AN ALIEN SEX GOD, I resumed my experiments with lysergic acid. I quickly discovered that the "party acid" of the '90s was nothing like the "strawberry fields", "purple haze" or "california sunshine" acid of the early '70s. (Older freaks report this strange phenomenon. No-one seems certain why this is so. Is it simply that the doses are so much weaker? Are we exhausting the image-bank? Or have the past 30-odd years of psychedelic (r)evolution subtly changed the planetary aura, so that the Doors of Perception no longer burst open with such dramatic effect? Back in 1943, Dr Albert Hoffman's first trip was triggered by a microscopic amount of LSD accidentally ingested through his fingertips.)
On 23rd November 1996, I took a huge dose of liquid acid. I performed a ritual, invoking the protection of Kwan YIn (Kannon) and the Heart Sutra (All Is Empty - All Is Mind And Mind Is No Thing), then drummed and danced myself into a trance. My shamanic persona, John Crow, emerged as a separate entity, with his own voice. He put the thought into my head that - rather than him being a fictitious creation of my imagination - he had somehow invented me. I was immersed in a kind of automatic writing, channelling John Crow when, suddenly, another voice kicked in. A female voice, more ancient and more powerful than my Crow familiar. It was the voice of the Goose, the spirit of a medieval prostitute, who claimed her bones had recently been dug up at the "Cross Bones graveyard". She led John Crow on a journey in the Vision World, around the ancient Liberty of the Clink, through a Secret History spanning 2000 years. And I recorded their journey, filling a notebook with scribbled, channelled texts - the Goose's archaic verses, prophesies, riddles and rhymes. At the time, I was afraid I'd finally lost it, gone mad, or conjured up a hungry ghost. But over the next few months, as the verses arranged themselves into THE BOOK OF THE GOOSE; as I researched their contents - and found that Cross Bones really existed, on a site 100 yards from where I leave, and had been recently dug up during work on the Jubilee Line Extension; that prostitutes known as 'Winchester Geese' were, historically, licensed by the Church, yet buried in unconsecrated ground at Cross Bones - I began to sense that I had, perhaps, found it! It was as if I'd tapped into the Spirit, the Akashic Record of the place where I live.
Suddenly my past - my chaotic teenage initation, and all the shamanic experiences that succeeded it - began to make sense. Back in the '70s I'd been a passive recipient of visions and voices. Now, I found myself intimately involved in the destiny of a wandering spirit. I gradually overcame the primitive fear of being "possessed". With The Goose as his guide, John Crow could navigate within the Vision World. And the more I learned to trust the Goose, and to honour and serve her, the more she opened doors.
In my shaman's work I continued to honour the Lysergic Goddess of Mercy. I also found that I could, increasingly, turn on psychedelic states without using chemicals. This happened particularly when I performed the poems, raps and songs received from the Goose - it was as if their rhythms, rhymes and invocations were opening up neural pathways, releasing the brain's own chemicals. I also use breathing, pulsing, drumming and dancing, repetitive movements, walking rhythms, chanting, ritual, crossing my eyes, shaking, spinning and other shamanic-tantric techniques for entering altered states.
As I learned to serve The Goose, she seemed to open my heart, my mind, my psychic connections. I'd started out thinking that my work was to heal her wounded Spirit. The deeper I went, the more it seemed that she was the Healer. The medieval prostitute opened her soul to reveal the Goddess of Mercy, incarnating out of compassion for suffering humanity...
A: I m quite interested how your teenage was, ,,, Tell me your personal history of Psychedric Crusading until now.
You got accademic education for all litterture & Theater thing ?
J: I went to school in the 1960s in a small market-town on the English-Welsh border. I won a scholarship to a public school, then read English at Cambridge University. By then I'd already embarked on my own shamanic and poetic experiments, so didn't get to do much formal studying. My early influences were William Blake, Kafka, William Burroughs (not forgetting Kerouac and Ginsberg), Jean Genet (and Jean Cocteau), Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lindsay Kemp, Theatre de Soleil, Samuel Becket, Sam Shepherd, Carlos Castenada, Ram Dass (not forgetting Timothy Leary), Freud and Jung (in small doses), Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman, Gordon Wasson, Jerome Rothenberg, Wilhelm Reich, Alan Watts, The Situationists, The original Dadaists, Max Ernst. My life and work was also influenced by my time in Asia - especially Japan, Bali and India. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Roshi of Ho-Shin-Ji Temple, Obama, who taught me (back in 1978) that Zazen is our life and work in the world - not just sitting in a temple staring at the white wall.
A: Your interenet site "www.gooseandcrow.co.uk" has phunky Real Player Videos of your performances. Especially the live act for every Halloween happeneing at the graveyard of southwark prositutes, it's quite Spacy and Radical, I found.
can you tell me more bout this performance and your company ?
J: THE BOOK OF THE GOOSE was the first of seven Vision Books, epic poems (each between five and twenty minutes in performance) charting The Goose and John Crow's journey in Eternity. Some texts are quasi-archaic, exploring obscure historical events and echoing the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Others are punchy contemporary raps revealing how the hermetic teachings of The Goose and The Liberty pass to a new generation of heretics and outlaws. These Vision Books, together with the Mystery Plays and Glossolalia, make up THE SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES. This epic work is unlike anything else I've written - a gift from the Spirit World. It brought together all the threads of my life - performance, poetry, shamanism - setting me on a path that I've walked in wonder and gratitude for the past seven years.
I started out performing The Vision Books at various Sacred Sites around Southwark. Southwark cathedral and local community groups saw the work and invited me to write a new Cycle of Mystery Plays for the Millennium. (Mystery Plays were originally performed in medieval times, retelling Bible stories in the language of the time.) The commission was a challenge for me - I felt that it had to represent The Whore and her Outlaw Vision, rather than Christian tradition. I wrote a series of linked Mystery Plays, set in Southwark on Judgement Day, with Satan claiming the souls of The Goose (the whore), John Crow (the heretic) and all the other sinful souls of The Liberty. But then Jesus shows up on his mountain-bike, with his radical new doctrine of forgiveness - and all hell breaks loose!
The Mystery Plays were produced, as an epic community drama, on 23rd April 2000, in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The final play, a subversive interpretation of the traditional Harrowing of Hell, was performed in Southwark Cathedral. Some fundamentalist Christians were outraged by Satan (played by a young woman wearing a dildo) and, perhaps even more, by the fact that Jesus showed no interest in condemning people because of their sexual orienatation. Here's the report from the Daily Telegraph (14th May 2000):
DEAN REJECTS CRITICS OF "SWEARING JESUS" MYSTERY PLAY
A religious play staged in an Anglican cathedral has provoked fury after it featured a swearing Jesus and Satan wearing a phallus.
THE SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES was produced by Southwark Cathedral and Shakespeare’s Globe in south London as part of the capital’s "String of Pearls" Millennium celebrations. It mixed bawdy medieval scenes with modern imagery and referred to bishops engaging in homosexual sex with altar boys and priests visiting prostitutes. The character of Jesus, who rode onto stage on a bicycle, was shown apparently condoning a range of sexual activities, while Satan told scatological jokes and ordered Jesus to "kiss my a***" At one point Jesus was admonished by St Peter for his swearing and responded: "In the house of the harlot, man must master the language." At another, Satan, played by a female actor, strapped on "a huge red phallus" before using it to beat his sidekick, Beelzebub.
The play was written by John Constable, who said that he had deliberately wanted to challenge Christians. "Profanity is a theme of the play," he said. "The point of it was to explore the sacred through the profane. " Mr Constable said he had worked closely with Mark Rylance, the Globe’s artistic director, and the Dean of Southwark, the Very Rev Colin Slee, who conceived the idea of a joint production to mark William Shakespeare’s birthday falling on Easter Day. He said the clergy had made a number of suggestions about the content, but he had not acted on all of them. "They did ask me to make sure that Satan did not wear the phallus in the presence of Jesus, which I did," he said.
The first section of the play, which contained much of the bawdy material, was staged at the Globe, and the final part, the "Harrowing of Hell" in the cathedral. "Colin Slee was very robust in keeping me on the straight and narrow," Constable said. "The play is a new version of the traditional medieval Mystery plays, which were religious in nature but accepted human imperfections and took place in a carnival atmosphere. It seemed to be well received by most people who saw it."
But one member of the audience, Simon Fairnington, has condemned the play as "disgustingly offensive", saying that it "revelled in the glorification of vice." In a letter to the Dean he complained: "Had the play been a purely secular production, one might not have been surprised at its treatment of Christian belief. What was dismaying was that it was sponsored and performed in part within a Christian cathedral. The cynical part of me wonders whether this is simply a sign of the times, and the way the Church of England cares about its Gospel and its God." Anthony Kilmister, chairman of the Prayer Book Society, said: "this is not the sort of play that should be performed in God’s house. It is quite disgraceful."
But the Dean, who was the centre of controversy a few years ago when he allowed the cathedral to be used for a Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement celebration, defended the play. The performance was in keeping with traditional Mystery plays and "portrayed graphically the life and history of the area" which was "where the seamier side of life was to be found", he said. "The message was that even the worst sins are not beyond redemption," he added.
On 31st October 1998, we conducted the first HALLOWEEN OF CROSS BONES ritual. This ritual drama features poems and songs from The Vision Books, set in their historical context, performed by John Crow and his Liberty Crew of actors and musicians, and a Tantric Ritual performed by Jahnet de Light, followed by a candlelit procession to the site of the old Cross Bones graveyard (a vacant lot scheduled for development - over our dead bodies!!!) to honour the outcast dead with prayers, songs and precious gifts. The HALLOWEEN OF CROSS BONES has been performed every Halloween night since then, attracting more people every year. In 2000, the event was staged in The Drome (now SEONE, a club in the brick-arch caverns under bridge - and, says The Goose, the original site of the Roman Temple of Isis). The midnight ritual included a group OM ommed by a couple of hundred people. The 2001 and 2002 Halloween rituals were held in the Green Angels space, a hundred yards south of the graveyard. Film-clips of these events can be seen on our website: www.gooseandcrow.co.uk
We have staged many other site specific performances and ritual dramas from THE SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES. THE ANATOMY CLASS was a healing ritual performed in Southwark's Old Operating Theatre. THE GOOSE IS LOOSE was first performed in The Drome and later at the Southwark Playhouse.
I perform along with the SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES company - aka THE LIBERTY CREW aka JOHN CROW'S MERRY BAND. Many talented actors, poets and musicians have played with the group over the past five years. Actors Di Sherlock and Michelle Watson have both played the role of The Goose. The line-up has variously included the poet-musician Niall McDevitt and his brother the actor Roddy McDevitt, accordion virtuosos Dean Broderick and Tom Baker, violinists Shona Holborow and Jane Wild. Production and stage-management is by Kate E Kaos.
I regularly conduct drama workshops and SHAMANIC PLAYHOUSE workshops fusing theatre games with shamanic techniques, focusing on the creative power of "play". I also conduct THE MYSTERIES PILGRIMAGE, a guided tour of The Borough, Bankside and the ancient Liberty of the Clink.
I often perform solo as a performance poet, singer, and creator of "truth-is-stranger-than-fiction" dramas, or happenings, that seek to shift the audience's perception of "Reality". The sequel to I WAS AN ALIEN SEX GOD, a solo show entitled RAINGODS BECOME ME, was performed at Bettersea Arts Centre in summer 2002. It charts my time in Bali in winter 1996-97, about a month after I got The Goose, when I spent most nights lucid dreaming. It was an extraordinary experience, being fully conscious and able to operate in the Dream World, to study its psychic architecture, to analyse my dreams even as I was dreaming them. But there was a price to pay - I returned to England mentally and physically exhausted, feeling burnt-out and in need of some medicine to get me back in my body. Fortunately, the Way led to Ayahuasca...
A: So Do you have had ever other format ayahuasca experiences except Santo Daime ?
With shaman or Any other Healerz ?
J: I began drinking Ayahuasca in 1998. For the first couple of years, I drank at night, in ceremonies conducted by a Western healer who’d trained with an Ecuadorian shaman. He sang icaros (spirit songs), sprayed us with cleansing fragrances and practised his version of shamanic healing on us. I found these night sessions very energising, although I experienced only fleeting visions.
A: Ayahuasca could show us one of the deepest complexity of human brain, I guess, you are participating in santo daime ritual every month, al right? John.
How bout your hardest & deepest trip ? And how your life Changed after that?
J: In 2000, friends introduced me to the Santo Daime church. Despite some initial resistance to the Christian aspects of the ceremony, I was impressed by the fact that, in the Daime tradition, everyone is actively engaged in the work, rather than leaving it all to a shaman. Over the next couple of years, I gained some understanding of the ways of the Daime. How it helped sort out emotional and psychological problems. On one occasion I came to a work still carrying a lot of anger from an incident in my working life. Although I’d sorted out the situation in my mind, the anger felt like it had got locked into the molecules of my body. Under the influence of the Daime, every molecule seemed to shake and vibrate, burning off the raw, hot energy. By the end of the session, I’d not only got rid of my present anger; I felt more calm, relaxed and at peace than I could remember.
I felt the healing qualities of the Daime working on my body and mind - moving the energy, shifting blocks. I was strongly aware of its moral character - how often in the work it would show me the consequences of wrong thoughts or actions. Above all, it taught me that it’s best to do nothing – just get out of the way and let it do its stuff. For example, if I noticed that I was playing, say, a neat drum-riff, I’d quickly make a hash of it; whereas when I just immersed myself in the sound of the whole, the beat seemed to take care of itself.
During my first two years with the Daime group, I saw how some people seemed transported to other realities. I personally experienced only mild hallucinations, though the Daime offered powerful insights. I generally felt "loved-up", a bit like on MDMA - only more discriminating and rooted. I enjoyed taking on a fiscal role - keeping it together, keeping an eye out for others. I admit I probably took pride in being one of the "hard-core" left standing, still singing, dancing and banging my drum, when others were keeling over, being sick or howling their way through private nightmares. I’d trained my body to behave like a sponge, soaking up the Daime as soon as it entered me, so I rarely vomited, or even felt sick.
Then, in autumn 2002, just when I felt I had the measure of the Daime, it completely knocked me off my perch. Sometime after the second dose, just as I was beginning to enjoy the iridescent light-show, I was taken violently ill. I seemed to go into toxic shock. A fiscal got me to lie down, covered me with a blanket. I could see by his expression that something wasn’t right. Evidently, the colour had completely drained from my face. I could feel, could see my temperature plummeting. My heartbeat became slow and weak. Next thing I knew, I was out-of-body, on the Astral, over on the other side. I was in the presence of a number of spirits – some, like The Goose, familiar to me from my shamanic work – and they were telling me that it was time for me to go with them. I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t be coming back. I was trying to get back into body, but my physical form felt like a lizard, immobile on a cold rock at dawn, unable to move until the sun had warmed its blood. I was lying face down, looking for ways to warm and wake my body, to stimulate that little spark of life within me. I thought of Kate, my lover, of making love with her, places we’d been – of my friends, of my work, of flowers and full moons, and of how I still love life, for all its pain and disappointments. I managed to get onto my hands and knees, in a shaman’s submission posture, appealing to "Minha Mae" to let me live a little longer, to finish the work we still had to do. A friend came and massaged my body, and the very laying on of hands seemed to get the energy moving again. I opened my eyes, turned my head and saw the white-socked feet of the dancing women. I thought: "There’s another good reason to stay alive!"
Within an hour, I was back, fighting fit - dancing, drumming and grinning ear-to-ear. I drank another dose - on the basis that if you fall off a bicycle, you get straight back on again. I can’t remember feeling more alive than ever - partly relief at having somehow survived my own death, but more than that. It was an extreme instance of what you might call "The Daime Bounce". During the work, we often experience intense psychological or physical pain and anguish. Afterwards, we feel purified, healed, revived, restored, reborn. It’s as if the Daime takes hold of us, takes us to bits and puts us back together in a slightly different order, making us more "whole" than we were when we set out on our journey. In my case, during the work, I looked in the washroom mirror and saw the ashen husk of a sick, old man. Later, when I looked again – the blood had poured back into my cheeks and lips; my eyes were shining and smiling; I looked and felt much younger than my fifty years.Especialy,
A: Does it's influenced your art works ?
J: I think it's too early to say what influence Daime has had or will have on my writing. LSD has certainly influenced my work - some of which, including parts of THE SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES, was written under its influence. I prefer writing, and sometimes performing, on acid, because the effects of specific dosages its relatively predictable and I've learned how to operate in its realm. I rarely write much (and certainly wouldn't want to "perform") on Ayahuasca, San Pedro or other Plant Teachers, though I have received a number of Daime Hymns (in English).
A: I feel often, when I see your play, you have Shamanic-Power. As an Entertainer, All art perforamnce could be Shamanic too. What is your secret to connect the concsiousness of audiences ?
J: It was only when I dedicated my life and work to serving The Goose, performing the channelled verses of THE SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES, that I found my voice became imbued with a new authority and energy. It's as if, when I speak as John Constable, I can draw on my own limited personal experiences but, when I'm John Crow channelling The Goose, I can access a much deeper source of wisdom, energy and visionary power. I feel connected to something so compassionate and transforming, so "Real", that I don't really have to "perform" - just get out of the way and let it all stream through me. Like I said, I sometimes perform on psychoactive sacraments, but even when I don't, the very act of delivering the verses reconnects me with the visions and voices and the walking rhythms from which they came, naturally releasing the chemicals that shift me into the shaman's world. (Something similar seems to happen when we sing the Daime songs - as if by repeating the things we do when we're high on the Daime, we somehow trick the mind into thinking we've drunk Daime, and actually get high. It seems to me that this is the basis of much sympathetic magic.) It occurs to me that the rhymes and rhythms of the Goose poems may affect the consciousness of the audience as much as their actual content.
A: Can you talk about any other event that you are participating in,,, like Glastonbury fes ?
J: At the moment, I'm working with lots of different musicians, with the aim of recording some of poems and songs. I recently performed at the Synergy Parties (In SEOne club) - rapping with ambient composer Steve Radford, and with Kakatsitsi a group of Master Drummers from Ghana. I'm contributing texts for mixes by various composers on a SOLAR FESTIVALS album, relating to the eight native pagan festivals that mark the turning of the wheel of the year.
I've put together a new line-up to play my "shamanic folk" songs - JOHN CROW'S MERRY BAND, featuring Dean Broderick(accordion and drum), Jane Wild (violin), Kate E Kaos (percussion), Michael Loew (cello) and Tanya Dawson (backing vocals) - with Crow on lead vocals, guitar and bodhran. We play our first gigs at the Glastonbury Festival, appearing in the Green Futures Field - SMALL WORLD TENT on Friday 27th June (7.30-9pm) and in the TADPOLE TENT on Sunday 29th (6pm-7.30).
I'm booked to conduct SHAMANIC PLAYHOUSE workshops at the Gaunts House Summer Retreat (7-11th August) and to perform at the Spirit Horse (Song, Drum, Story, Dance) festival (21-25th August). I'll be doing some other smaller performances, though the priority is to record CDs of my poems, songs and raps.
A: Thank you very much John, let's bottom up Our Mothagoohasca !!!
< John's playing GIG at Glastonbury Festival 2002 >
