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Your hosts\' exploration of mysticism and vision in pop music continues with two powerful pieces of popular music: Radiohead\'s "Pyramid Song" from the 2001 album Amnesiac, and Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf\'s "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," from the 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set. Synchronicity rears its head as the dialogue reveals how these two gems, selected by JF and Phil with no expectation that they might form a set, begin to glow when placed side by side, amplifying and focussing each other\'s eldritch light. This episode touches on Neoplatonic myths of spiritual ascent, African-American spirituals, Plato\'s realm of Forms, Gnosticism, dream visitations by the dearly departed, the travails of the Beat generation, the objectivity of hope, the implosion of America, and that particularly modern condition of the soul which Phil calls the "Philosopher\'s Blues."

REFERENCES

Radiohead, "Pyramid Song"
\\nFran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men"

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum"
\\nCharles Mingus, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
\\nPlato, Phaedrus
\\nPlato, Republic
\\nPlato\'s Unwritten Doctrines
\\nThe Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, episode 69: "Plutarch\'s Myths of Cosmic Ascent"
\\nWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
\\nPierre Hadot, French philosopher
\\nAlgis Uzdavynis, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism
\\nCharles Taylor, Canadian philosopher
\\nPhil Ford, "The Philosopher\\u2019s Blues" (Weird Studies Patreon exclusive)
\\nPeter Sloterdijk, German philosopher
\\nFerdinand de Saussure, French linguist
\\nJF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
\\nJF Martel, "Stay With Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the Truth of Extinction" in Canadian Notes & Queries, issue 106: Winter 2020, edited by Sharon English and Patricia Robertson
\\nRay Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
\\nJay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker, The Nervous Set, musical
\\nPhil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
\\nJay Landesman, American publisher and writer
\\nMarshall McLuhan, "The Psychopathology of \'Time & Life\'"
\\nMarshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
\\nWilliam Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
\\nJoel and Ethan Coen, No Country For Old Men
\\nMike Duncan (Twitter)
\\nJeff Chang, Can\\u2019t Stop Won\\u2019t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
\\nKarl Marx, Capital: Volume I