Marcus Boon: What is lacking in the raga worldview, in terms of envisioning your own music and what you want to do with it?  What did you most want to add or incorporate?

Jon Hassell: A kind of earthiness, an urban quality that you find in the African American approach to things - that synthesis of high and low, that was brought to things by Miles, among others.  That was the part that I had grown up on.  The things you're impressed by when you're in your formative years are going to stay there forever.  So it wasn't likely that I was going to don a white cloth and go off into the mountains and deny whatever it was that made me thrilled when I heard a magic chord progression or some beautiful Brazilian song.  Even though raga is definitely sensual.  I always talk about the realization that all the other so called classical musics in the world are sensual as well as structural.  In Western music it's often been reduced to something simply structural and the sensual part is often underdeveloped.  It's that combination of structure with sexiness, to use the word that's lurking behind this talk.  Think of Indian classical art with it's refined sensuality, in which there is no difference between spiritual and sensual.  Speaking of it from a Western point of view we always say, well you take a little of this and you add a little of that, but the real story is that sensuality/spirituality is a completely organic thing, there is no separation.  In fact, one of the ragas that Pran Nath told me about, the lyric, maybe Lalit, was about girls holding hands, dancing in fields of flowers, they're like garlands of flowers themselves.  This was of course related to the love of God.  But that whole ecstasy, from high to low, and the beauty of the girls, the deep spirituality of it, is all clustered together in one concept.  The language is not made for speaking about these things.  You have to be very careful, otherwise you fall into a trap like wrapping up a sentence with "a concept" - that's not where it is!  It's pre- and post- "concept" ...

M: Which is what allows it to fuse at many levels, right?  Is it hard for you to think of Pran Nath's singing as sensual?

JH: No, not at all.  If you think about the curves, the motion of his hands in the air, he could be describing a Marilyn Monroe shape. 

M: Did he talk much about that?

JH: No.  I just knew it was there.  He certainly appreciated women and had a healthy libido.  Everyone will agree.  He had a twinkle in his eye.  I always felt that was one of the sine qua nons of music ...

M: That it had that sensuous, incarnate quality ...

JH: Yes.  And without that it becomes dry and intellectual.  In fact I've been collecting notes for a book, the title of which is The North and South of You, as in the Cole Porter song.  It's basically about this Western dysfunction between the North and the South, not only globally speaking, but bodily speaking.  The equator is the belt line ...

M: It's a fine idea.  Although in the last 30 years, maybe there's been a kind of global warming that has changed some of this?

JH: Not really.  It's on everybody's mind of course.  The tensions that arise from this imbalance are expressed every place.  The public manifestations of the consciousness of it is much greater than before.  But it's still operative.  The worldview of Northern people who don't have a great relationship to the Southern parts of their body is still the one that prevails, and that's the one that's causing all the trouble.  There's not proper respect for the "gifts of the South", shall we say. 
.....
Jon Hasell: It must have been '73, '74 that I actually moved to New York, and started playing with La Monte - that's when I came into this sphere, being around him and playing in the Dream House, listening to those overtones and intervals magically connecting, often on some hashish cocktail.

Marcus Boon: Just from seeing a video of Pran Nath, I got a strong smoker's vibe ...

JH: Not him.  The Indian thing is ... bhang grows alongside the road there.  When you're studying and living in the forest, and it's music music music all day, the first thing you touch when you wake up in the morning is the chillum.  Those things you see in those classical Indian paintings ... ladu, little balls of bhang and almond paste ... To write a history of music without that concept of ecstasy, of intoxication, is to write a history of the world without noting that it didn't take place in the glare of electric light.

Mind Body Spirit
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Healing Science
Therapists Meet Physicists in a Quantum World
April 16 - 22, 2003

The secret of dreaming was sent into the world with the spirit of Barramundi," said physicist Fred Alan Wolf, relating an Aboriginal tale to a crowd at "Science and Spirituality: The Transformative Connection," a three-day conference in Manhattan last month. 
    The fish Barramundi, swimming in the ocean's depths, dreamed of waves—and sand, a place it struggled to comprehend. So it passed this dream along to the turtle Currikee, who happily carried it to shore. Then Currikee, suddenly dreaming of sunbaked rocks, gave these strange, discomforting images to the lizard Bogai. And so this relay continued, with each creature reaching the edge of its cozy habitat, yielding a vision to the creature next in line. Bogai yielded to eagle Bunjil, Bunjil to possum Coonerang, Coonerang to Kangaroo, who, dreaming of music, song, and laughter, offered this treasure to humans. Here we are, at the apparent end of the line, on sacred ground, charged with the care of all creation. 
      As Bush prepared his Iraq invasion, hundreds of mental health and medical professionals, scientists, and laypersons gathered at Fordham University (Lincoln Center) to ask if we have discarded the dream entrusted to us, or if its challenge—that we move past our comfort zone—has frightened us into paralysis. The conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy, aimed to mend an estrangement dating back to Descartes. Maverick scientists such as Wolf, fellow physicist F. David Peat, biophysicist Candace Pert, and numerous healers such as Martha Crampton, John Bolling, Shulamit, and psychic psychotherapist Ruth Rosenbaum contemplated how spiritual unity pervades all matter, informs human affairs, and affects health and well-being. 
    The conference underscored how science has caught up to (and neatly relabeled) our ancestors' beliefs and practices. Wolf, whose lengthy classroom presentation on quantum physics was marred by his irritating glut of audiovisual bells and whistles, introduced his theory that the future shapes our present. Just like shamans of old, therapists and other modern healers need practical tools. Wolf's thesis of a compelling call or imprint from the future may turn out to be "only a story," a kind of scientific folklore—but what if this fiction helps liberate therapy clients stuck in past trauma and feelings of powerlessness? Native American elders have long used a version of this same medicine, counseling the community that no decision should be made or action taken without considering how it will affect the coming seven generations. Contemporary physics appears to support the venerable teaching that all beings are one, a condition that implies our responsibility for one another. 
      Peat's pre-conference intensive located healing within the context of space and community, asserting that true healing cannot exist in isolation. He detailed how 13th-century innovations, such as more accurate maps and the invention of the compass, altered the way we view our universe, making it appear increasingly mechanistic, quantifiable, predictable, and controllable. He contrasted Indo-European languages, where subjects (e.g., the healer) act upon starkly discrete objects (e.g., the healed), with more holistic Native American languages in which verbs and processes are paramount. Rather than classifying a particular tree, an Algonquin or Blackfoot might refer to that tree by a word for the sound the wind makes as it rushes through its leaves.
    We've traded away what the !Kung of the Kalahari know, Peat said: that a community must care for its healers, cleansing them of excess energy to prevent what Americans call burnout. We've forgotten what early Kabbalists and alchemists knew: that darkness and chaos are necessary precursors to the deep, complex process of restoring balanced wholeness. In our hubris and greed, we externalize and commodify change, "buying dreamcatchers and going on vision quests." We allow no room for mystery, no acknowledgment of what Haitian-born physician Reginald Crosley—using physics to explain the healing nature of voudon's communal rituals—knows as the 86 percent of all matter called "dark." The unknown and our state of unknowing fill us with dread. Just ask any New Yorker what it felt like after 9-11, before the Sunday Times started running ads for little evening bags with Old Glory encrusted in red, white, and blue rhinestones. 
      The title of John Bolling's insightful workshop "Voices from Amenta" references the ancient Egyptian word for the unconscious, and his clinical work is largely informed by African and Afro-Atlantic symbols, concepts, and traditions. "We're living in the millennium of the return of the Shadow and the Dark Mother," said the Harlem-based child psychologist. He sees the eruption of this repressed, unintegrated psychic energy in the crises striking the Catholic church, the corporate world, and the stock market. Like Wolf, he believes that the future, not only our ancestral past, calls us to renewal and evolution. "There is a beloved community," Bolling asserts, "an energy feeding back from the future, as opposed to the demonic fascism of the New World Order." 

------------------------------------------------------

Further Exploration 

John Horgan, science journalist and author of the new Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirit (Houghton Mifflin) and Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, discussed mysticism and its relationship to mainstream science and religion on April 14. See johnhorgan.org and http://literati.net/Thurman. 

Dancer-singer Naaz Hosseini, a veteran of the Meredith Monk and Laura Dean troupes, offers SoundPath workshops, on the healing power of voice and movement, at various sites around the metropolitan area, including Patchogue on May 3, Dobbs Ferry on May 7, Woodstock on May 9, and a health fair at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on May 25. Visit soundshifter.com or e-mail
SoundShifter@aol.com for complete details. 

Peter Russell's From Science to God: A Physicist's Journey Into the Mystery of Consciousness will be published this spring by New World Library. An avid student of Eastern philosophy and meditation, Russell breaks no new ground in this brief survey of centuries of paradigm shifts, but shares how he came to correlate the wisdom teachings of the ages with the discoveries of quantum physics. Visit peterrussell.com or newworldlibrary.com. 

The Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy offers a curriculum in psychospiritual modalities such as hypnotherapy, psychosynthesis, meditation, dreamwork, and Jungian shadow integration. Upcoming continuing education workshops include "Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy" with Barry Magid, M.D. (May 17), and "The Kabbalah: Doorway to the Mind" with Edward Hoffman (June 8). For a complete schedule, see psychospiritualtherapy.org. 

The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, hosts a gathering of wisdom keepers, master teachers, and shamans from the Hopi, Inuit, African American, Siberian, Incan, and Quechuan traditions, October 3 through 10, for a round of ceremonies, healing, instruction, and discussion of earth changes and prophecies. See eomega.org. 

A conference on "Breakthroughs in Energy Psychology" will be held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 30 through November 1. For schedule information, including pre- and post-conference workshops, call 416-221-5639 or see meridianpsych.com. 

Audiotapes from the "Science and Spirituality" conference can be ordered at ConferenceRecording.com or 510-527-3600.
 

"'The readings presented here can best be regarded as radio-signals sent out from a satellite tracking station to the explorers floating freely through space. The instructions can be attended to or ignored but at least they provide a kind of basic signal around which the voyager can orient his explorations. We dedicate this recording to the the many men and women whose accounts and reports of their explorations in the interior universe have helped us prepare these maps.' -- Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner. 
The Psychedelic Experience is a rare, early document of the emergent hippie era issued in 1966 on Moe Asch's Broadside records. Join the legendary father of LSD with Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert (aka Ram Das) as they indulge in the fruits of their 'research'. Two extended tracks of spoken meditations accompanied by occasional Tibetan Bell: 'Going Out' and 'Coming Back' naturally line this journey. Features archival photos, 12 pages of original notes and remastered sound." $14.00

"Shall I say something so obvious that you just won't even put it in the article?" [David Foster] Wallace said. "A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking about.... Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again ... hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does."

A theory of world history based on our desire to network 

The Human Web. A Bird's-Eye View of World History
J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill; W.W. Norton: 350 pp., $27.95

By Merle Rubin, Special to The Times

The much-touted World Wide Web of cyberspace is not the first web to link people all over the world, certainly not in the eyes of father-and-son historians William and J.R. McNeill. Indeed, the first web may have been language itself, enabling human beings to assign names to objects, construct a world of agreed-upon meanings and thus communicate with greater precision than before. 
     In their wide-ranging, knowledgeable book, "The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History," the McNeills invite us to look at human history from the first tentative steps of our "apelike ancestors" onto the African savanna some 4 million years ago to the complex global web of communication, commerce and conflict that we inhabit today. Agriculture, religion, trade and conquest are just a few of the many web-building forces that the McNeills examine. 
     The senior member of this authorial team, William H. McNeill, is emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago and author of such works as "The Rise of the West" and "Plagues and Peoples." His son, J.R. McNeill, author of "Something New Under the Sun," is an environmental historian at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Their joint venture gamely attempts to provide an overview of the whole of human history in a mere 350 pages. Environmental history, social history, military history, economic history, the histories of technology, religion, disease, transportation and communication all come into the mix. 
      But although the subject is complicated, the book's thesis is relatively simple. The authors maintain (and it's hard to deny) that there is an overriding tendency in human history to form ever larger and more complex structures of interconnectedness. Despite occasional setbacks, these large, complex structures tend to prevail over smaller, more isolated ones because they foster greater wealth and innovation. 
      Eschewing metaphysical or religious speculation, the authors focus on the pragmatic and tangible manifestations of the process. Their down-to-earth approach makes for a useful, informative and in many ways irresistibly readable work of popular history, replete with colorful material about everything from the conquests of Genghis Khan to the more menacing problem of global warming. 
     How did a species that got its start in Africa manage to adapt to such an amazing variety of climates and terrains? Why would free-roaming bands of hunter-gatherers opt to settle down and labor in fields to grow millet, sorghum, wheat or rice? To questions such as these, the McNeills provide plausible answers: The invention of tools, the taming of fire and the development of language aided adaptation in the first case, and the ability to generate far more food proved irresistible in the second. 
     The authors discuss everything from animism, polytheism and the spread of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism to irrigation, epidemics, nomadic steppe tribes and the exchange of plant species between Old World and New, as American potatoes took root in Europe and European wheat flourished in America. But in addition to offering a wealth of material, this book provides a strong sense of perspective, enabling the reader to grasp something of the big picture in contemplating the infinitely complicated story of human history.
    The big picture is not always a pretty one. This bird's-eye view of history does not take note of men like Shakespeare, Goethe or Beethoven, while Michelangelo and Leonardo are mentioned only as designers of military fortifications. For history, as seen here, is a story not only of ever-expanding webs of communication, commerce and civil institutions but also of ever more lethal military technology. 
     Indeed, as the authors repeatedly point out, these two forms of "progress" are often linked. Human history, they contend, is a product of our ability to cooperate but also of our penchant for competition, including the ultimate form of hostile competition that is war. "Power of course comes from moral authority, charisma, wealth, and other sources," the McNeills observe. "But often, in the end, it comes down to force and the threat of force." 
     Sometimes, it may seem to the reader that the authors simply take it for granted that greater social inequality is a natural consequence of progress. This seems to have been the case in prehistoric times, when the small bands of hunter-gatherers were far more egalitarian than cultures in which peasants labored under the control of priests and emperors. But the McNeills also show us counter-tendencies, such as the development of the polis in ancient Greece. As cities, trade and population grew and the gap between rich and poor widened, the authors tell us, the "polarity between a governing elite and poverty-stricken tax and rent payers seemed about to emerge. But instead the Greeks invented a new master institution for themselves — the polis — by combining old ideas about justice with new ways of defending themselves from outside attack." Elected magistrates replaced priests and emperors. Citizens (adult males only) participated in their government. 
    "Transformed into a collective hero, the polis, at least in Sparta and Athens, attracted overriding loyalties among the citizens. Kin groups, religious groups, economic activities — all were subordinated to it." Similarly, a major factor in the rise of urban self-government in Renaissance Europe was the weakness of family ties compared, say, with Muslim and Chinese societies, in which most enterprises were managed by families, making "it difficult or impossible to trust outsiders." What made it easier for Europeans to trust fellow citizens and not family members? The McNeills come up with an explanation rather more recherché than the Greek polis: The widespread use of heavier plows in northwestern Europe led to cooperative effort among families: "[P]eople in those parts of Europe where cooperative moldboard plowing once prevailed still obey rules, form queues, and in general trust one another more than do the inhabitants of lands where separate families cultivated their fields independently and often distrusted their neighbors" 
        This, certainly, ought to set some readers who value one current buzzword — "civil society" — to thinking about the limitations of another — "family values." For if the family or tribe is a building block of society, the inability to see beyond its boundaries has often been an impediment to joining in the larger human web. Agree or disagree with its premises, this book certainly provides food for thought.

LEAF MOTIF With an eye toward the Republican convention in New York in 2004, Dana Beal is fighting to turn his home on Bleecker Street into a Yippie museum. 

Mr. Beal working on Yipster Times in 1973. 

May 1, 2003 New York Times

Yippies' Answer to Smoke-Filled Rooms
By JOHN LELAND

In a crisp spring morning in the East Village, Dana Beal could envision a future for the Yippies, and it involved coffee and real estate. Mr. Beal, 56, has long white hair and a thick white mustache that give him the look of a character from a Civil War movie. A younger woman who gave her name as War Cry listened as he spoke. Real estate has been his continuing irritation; coffee, he hoped, might be his relief.
     Since 1973 he has lived in a three-story brick building at 9 Bleecker Street that has functioned as an informal headquarters for some veterans of the Yippie movement, which now continues as a campaign to ease drug policies. But like many remnants of the neighborhood's scruffier past, Mr. Beal found himself on the short end of the real estate boom. Last May he lost his final legal motion to prevent his landlord from selling the building. What he would like, he said, is to set up a foundation to buy the building — priced at about $1.5 million — and turn it into a Yippie museum, supported in large part by a coffee bar and a bookstore. "The Yippies are supposed to come back to New York in 2004," Mr. Beal said. "And this building might not be there for them."
      Though it is not the original Yippie outpost in New York — that was on Union Square, where in the Vietnam era Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others combined outrageous humor, theater and political protest — Mr. Beal's building has a history. Yipster Times was published on the third floor. Aron Kay, known as Pieman for his preferred manner of greeting political figures, used to live in the basement.
     From his prodigiously messy digs, Mr. Beal organizes a network of annual pot parades, successors to the Yippie smoke-ins. This year's parades, which are scheduled for Saturday, will include demonstrations in more than 200 cities around the world, he said.
     On this morning the building was a hive of activity, as various people of college age weaved in and out among boxes of papers. There was a sparsely furnished lounge area on the ground floor and Mr. Beal's apartment and work space on the second. A man stirred groggily from a sleeping area known as the leopard skin loft above the lounge area. The third floor, where another longtime Yippie named Alice Torbush lives, was off limits. If the décor had a unifying motif, it was the marijuana leaf.
    But on this weekday morning there was other business afoot. Encouraged by the turnouts at antiwar demonstrations earlier this year and provoked by the prospect of a Republican National Convention in New York next summer, a handful of Yippies and fellow travelers have lurched back toward the public rostrum, not as pranksters this time but as creatures of the college lecture circuit. Nine have formed a Yippie! Speakers Bureau, including Mr. Beal; Paul Krassner, the satirist and stand-up comedian; and Grace Slick, the singer in Jefferson Airplane. They are now soliciting dates for next fall, at fees ranging from several thousand dollars for those not so well known to $15,000 or more for Ms. Slick.
    "This is the antiwar equivalent of a veterans' group," said Mr. Krassner, 70, speaking from his home in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. "And we don't get good health care either."
     Mr. Krassner, who coined the term Yippie, for Youth International Party, in 1967 and who founded the alternative magazine The Realist, added: "It's strange to be 70 and still identify with a youth movement. But I'd rather identify with evolution than stagnation."
      At Mr. Beal's home, Michael Forman, who is organizing the bureau's Steal This Speaking Tour, described how the playing field for the Yippies' brand of mischief had changed.
     "If we dropped dollar bills at the stock exchange now," he said, "it would be perceived as a terrorist act."
    Mr. Forman, 61, said he met Abbie Hoffman, one of the founding Yippies, on a freedom ride in the South in 1961, and remained in contact until Mr. Hoffman's death in 1989. He and Mr. Beal display a cantankerous comic rapport. "I'm sorry the place is such a mess," Mr. Beal said, as if suddenly noticing that it was the maid's day off.
     "Oh, that's the funniest line in the interview," Mr. Forman said.
     He stressed that the speakers would now have to present themselves as wise elders, even if their wisdom mainly concerned matters of youth culture.
     "We can't tell people to kill their parents," he said, beginning a recitation of the Yippies' greatest hits. "That was a mistake. We can't threaten to put acid in the reservoir. That was a mistake.
     "We have to stay within the laws. America's got a different consciousness now."
    If this seems uncharacteristically conciliatory, coming from a group that once claimed to have levitated the Pentagon and ran a pig for president, consider another recent Yippie sighting. The giant reinsurance company Swiss Re has recently run ads, including one in this newspaper, built around a quotation from Jerry Rubin, who died in 1994. Once vilified by the corporate establishment, Yippie musings have now been turned into copy for the reinsurance business.
    When he saw this bit of co-optation, Gustin L. Reichbach, 56, a former Yippie who is now a New York State Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn — and a member of the Yippie! Speakers Bureau — saw the turnabout not as a violation of Yippie principles but as a sign of victory.
     "Imagine my astonishment," Justice Reichbach wrote in an e-mail message, citing the ad as confirmation that the counterculture of the 1960's had shifted the boundaries of what is now considered mainstream. "Changing the boundaries indeed!"
     The Yippie! Speakers Bureau is itself a reprise of an idea Abbie Hoffman had for a Movement Speakers Bureau. For Ms. Slick, speaking from her home in Southern California, the tour is an idea that was best delayed. Now, she said, the speakers might know what they're talking about.
      In her younger days, Ms. Slick once tried to take Mr. Hoffman as her date to a White House tea party, at which they planned to put LSD in Richard Nixon's tea. Though she had been invited to the event — she attended the same small women's college as Patricia Nixon — she and Mr. Hoffman were intercepted at the door.
     Speaking of her own generation in its younger years, Ms. Slick said: "Young people should be seen and not heard, because they're good-looking but not too bright. We're pretty bright now, but we're ugly." She said she had no fixed expectations of the college circuit. "I don't think we're trying to bring anything back," she said. "But you don't often get a chance to find out what 18-year-olds think. I think it'll be fascinating."
      It remains to be seen whether college campuses will embrace the graying veterans — and by the same token, whether museumgoers will wish to linger over espresso in the epicenter of the smoke-in movement. Jack Hoffman, Abbie's younger brother, has his doubts. "You've got to get some young celebrities," said Mr. Hoffman, 63, who is a member of the speakers' bureau. "To get the oldie-but-goodies out there is O.K., but we've got to appeal to the young people."
       Patrick Kroupa, 34, a former computer hacker who is also in the speakers' bureau, said students were closer to Yippie ideas than people thought. "The counterculture didn't drop dead," said Mr. Kroupa, who said he participated in various computer activities organized by the Yippies in the early 1980's. "It just went online."
     This history, like much involving the Yippies, can be grounds for argument. During their lifetimes, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Rubin argued vehemently with each other and with other Yippies, including Mr. Beal, who at one point helped lead a splinter group called the Zippies. Even now, Jack Hoffman says he has run afoul of Yippie faithful for talking about his brother's bouts with manic depression.
      The building at 9 Bleecker Street, too, has a contested claim to historical significance. Some original Yippies argue that the group's important years, bracketed by the national conventions in 1968 and 1972, took place before Mr. Beal moved into the building.
     Mr. Beal sees this argument as an attempt to preserve a limited version of counterculture history that denies the importance of later events. "There's all this fighting about who controls the legacy of the name `Yippie,' " Mr. Beal said. "It's like people in the black community fighting over the legacy of Martin Luther King."
     Mr. Beal said he has raised $110,000 toward purchase of the building, but has not yet formed the limited liability corporation that would actually buy it and lease it for use as a Yippie museum. Though his plans are vague, he perked up at the possibilities.
     "We could bring out the Yipster Times again," he said. "We still have the equipment. All we need is an ad rep."
    Mr. Forman waited a beat. "Stop looking at me," he said.

A two-dimensional passageway for metaphysical travel: Adolf Wölfli's drawing The St. Adolf Ring of Oberburg (1918) (photo: Robin Holland) 

Adolf Wölfli 
American Folk Art Museum 
45 West 53rd Street
Through May 18 

Primal Time
by Jerry Saltz
April 25th, 2003 3:30 PM
Village Voice

It is said that through some sort of mystic cabalistic jujitsu, when all 666 names of God are spoken, the world will end. Over the millennia, artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians have revealed some of these names. Certainly, the mighty Swiss "outsider artist" Adolf Wölfli enunciated a handful of them in his fulminating, mandala-like illuminations, drawings, and collages—105 of which are on view in the American Folk Art Museum's enthralling survey, "St. Adolf-Giant-Creation: The Art of Adolf Wölfli." These powerhouses of energy are as magical as they are aesthetic. Two-dimensional passageways for metaphysical travel, they are visual magic carpets capable of transporting viewers to varied psychic dimensions. The best of them are ecstatic shamanic devices. Perhaps sensing this, surrealist potentate André Breton grouped Wölfli with Picasso and Gurdjieff as among the era's most inspirational figures, pronouncing him "one of the three or four most important artists of the 20th century." As with most things Breton, the claims are overblown. But not by much. And springing Wölfli from the outsider ghetto was prescient. 
    Still, no doubt about it, Wölfli was deranged. Born in 1864 in Bern, he was abandoned by his alcoholic father at five. Three years later, his mother died and Adolf became a hireling. In 1882, in a heartbreaking incident that "haunted him for the rest of his life" (according to Elka Spoerri, the late, great Wölfli scholar who co-curated this show), 18-year-old Adolf fell in love with a farm girl whose parents forbade her ever to see him for "social reasons." In his autobiography, he lamented, "I became downcast, even melancholy, and was at my wit's end. That same evening I rolled in the snow and wept for the happiness so cruelly snatched from me . . . my heart had suffered too much." Then he unraveled. 
       In 1890, Wölfli was convicted of attempting to molest a seven-year-old girl and sentenced to two years in prison. Five years later, he was arrested before he could molest a three-year-old girl, and was sent to an asylum in Bern, where, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, he spent the remainder of his life, dying there in 1930. The decisive moment in Wölfli's artistic life occurred in 1899, when, after four years of "extreme agitation," he started drawing. 
     He never stopped. By the time he died, he had produced a massively fantastical body of work consisting of 25,000 pages of richly illustrated text, 1,620 graphite and colored-pencil drawings (many of himself and his lost love), and 1,640 collages. All were preserved by his extraordinary doctor and biographer, Walter Morgenthaler. Stacked in a pile, this Blakean, biblical ur-work towers 10 feet high. 
     Wölfli's masterpiece is divided into five books. Every page is carefully numbered; drawings are folded, tipped in, and can be as large as four-by-four feet. The narrative brims with cataclysm, pandemonium, and redemption (not unlike Henry Darger's "Vivian Girls" epic). The first book is titled From the Cradle to the Grave, and is Wölfli's imaginary, grandiose autobiography. Many of his basic forms and motifs are already in place: masked faces, bells, birds, buildings, snakes, snails, and musical notation; curlicues, cross-hatching, dots, and spirals. In the next volume, Geographic and Algebraic Books, he takes off into the realm of myth, recounting his travels through the universe, and his own transmutation into what he dubbed the St. Adolf-Giant-Creation. In this book, Wölfli calculates his vast accumulating wealth in cascading columns of numbers. He then celebrates his almighty status in drawings, songs, polkas, and marches in the next three books, including the 16-part, 8,404-page Funeral March. 
    Wölfli is often compared to Darger. But Wölfli is a more dogged and abstract artist than Darger. He's more primal, less pictorial, less winsome. Early on, Morgenthaler noted the horror vacui, or fear of open space, in Wölfli's work. Indeed, there are no panoramas or large-scale figures in his art. There's also almost no space, light, or graspable narrative—only undulating, churning surfaces, which are often so jam-packed they can be difficult to look at. Everything is stylized, divided, and small; images oscillate and seem unstable. Yet in many of these drawings, everything whirls together in a rapturous, madly lyrical visual fever dream. 
    Wölfli has long been a favorite of the art world. Starting in 1921, he's had museum retrospectives in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S., and is often referred to as "one of the greatest outsider artists." If forced to judge him by this designation, I'd place Wölfli behind only Martin Ramirez and Bill Traylor, and just ahead of Darger. But it's time to get rid of this term, along with whatever labels we use to keep certain artists in their place. Regardless of his mental condition, Wölfli's art is universal. By now, almost everyone would agree that the work of Agnes Martin or Donald Judd is no more "inside" than Wölfli's or Darger's. In fact, painting grids or making boxes for a lifetime is as out-there as drawing the cosmos.