So when McLuhan addressed himself to this cultural transformation, I knew he was talking to me. In fact, at the small faculty seminar at MIT, where I first met McLuhan, the faculty became enraged at his metaphoric and aphoristic mode of thinking, but I was absolutely enchanted. In his final work, McLuhan pointed out that when one technology is obsolesced, a previously obsolesced technology is culturally retrieved. If New York and Boston were rational and sensible, L.A. was not, and the occult and mystical were everywhere to be found. But for the Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany and re-establishing themselves as the new intelligentsia of New York, the occult was Hitler and the mystical Bruderbund of the S.S. If there is one thing that is not allowed in academic circles it is to be interested in the mystical. But what the Jewish intelligentsia of New York did not realize about the new American reality of growing up in L.A. was that mysticism was being retrieved in the new electronic meltdown of print and what Jean Gebser called perspectival consciousness. But even within the world of print, as a high school kid in the fifties, I read Emerson and Whitman, and this American mystical and transcendental tradition was democratic, safely middle class, and as far away from fascism as L.A. is from Nürnberg. Since my uncle had died on the beach of Normandy, I did not grow up enamored with fascism, and my favourite philosopher in high school was Whitehead, not Heidegger. I went from lectures at one occult society to another, and hung out in the occult and esoteric section of Pickwick Books up on Hollywood and Vine, and so when it came time to read Yeats’s A Vision at Pomona College, I had already encountered those cosmologies that so befuddled my professors. In graduate school at Cornell, in Meyer Abrams seminar, I soon learned that you were not to take A Vision seriously. George Orwell called it “that tomfoolery of wheels and gyres,” and W. H. Auden dismissed it as “the Southern California side of Willie Yeats.” Well, having grown up in Southern California, Yeats’s mysticism did not seem so dark to me, but when in my first book I took it, and the ideas of A.E. seriously, I got mightily slammed down in The New York Review of Books.⁴ To be accepted as an intellectual in the US you have to be Marxist, or at least neo-Marxist, and always anti-mystical. When I wrote At the Edge of History and appeared to be only a detached observer, Christopher Lehman-Haupt raved twice about the book in a single week in The New York Times, but when I actually went to spiritual communities like Findhorn in Scotland and Auroville in India, and wrote sympathetically about them in my next book, Passages About Earth, Lehman-Haupt refused to review the book. It was as if I had fallen off the edge of history and become a Scientologist or member of some other crazy cult.⁵ So the new historicism that I was articulating in 1967 would have no effect on English departments, and when the New Historicism finally came into attention in the 1990s, it would be another expression of Marxist materialism as led by Professor Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard. Greenblatt’s work fits nicely into the academic fashion of deconstructing the canon of what used to be called “Greats” at Oxford – the old lineage of dead white males of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Eliot – for in the New Historicism one takes an obscure and quotidian work of the chosen period and reads “the lesser” in the light of “the greater” only to ?nd the greater work to be lesser.⁶ For the new location of culture by Homi Bhabha at Harvard and Gayatri Spivak at Columbia, subaltern studies are the approved means of showing that a proposed “work of genius” is merely a work of cultural oppression in a discourse of domination. A masterpiece is a cultural erection, a logophallocentric projection in a constructed discourse within a patriarchal system of capitalist oppression. But in my new historicism way back in 1967, I had shown how history was a weapon, and how the English had erased Irish history to write their own as an apology for empire. Unfortunately, however, I had shown how important the role of imagination was in the creation of identity for the rebels, and I talked about how important the mysticism of A.E. was in formulating an alternative to the industrial materialism of England. I did not just talk about the Great Strike and Lock-out of 1913. And I did not talk about ideologies as expressions of the means of production or myth as the false consciousness of the oppressed.