Peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot.com y Las Prensas Editoras de Huautla se complacen en presentar la colección de cuentos:

Alice

The Eighty Year Old Mexican Peasant Woman Who Went To Oxford 

And Other Stories 

by Philip Conover Lazo

Biographical Sketches

Petite Biographie d’un ancien Soixante-hiutaire

Philip Conover Lazo is an Anglo-Mexican poet, novelist and writer of philosophical essays on historical, psychohistorical, theological and entheogenic themes.

Philip Conover Lazo was born in Mexico City, October 4, 1947. He is the grandson of the Reverend James Potter Conover who introduced Ice Hockey from Canada to Saint Paul’s School, Concord New Hampshire, and built the first Squash Court in America there. Max Perkings, Samuel Elliot Morison and Admiral Thomas Wilkinson were some of his pupils. His father was Capt. James Potter Conover Jr. USN, who was United States Naval Attaché in Mexico from 1941 to 1944, a descendant of William Alexander, Lord Stirling, Colonel John Cox, Colonel John Stevens, Robert Livingston and Commodore Thomas Anderson Conover. His mother was María de la Luz Lazo Barreiro, daughter of architect and teacher Carlos Lazo del Pino, a friend of Gerardo Murillo, Dr Atl, who had him draw pictures with a charcoal pencil when he was three years old. Dr Atl had told his friend that his grandson ‘had a compass in his eyes’. His mother Luz Lazo, was a sister of Architect Carlos Lazo Barreiro who directed the project and construction of the National University of Mexico, UNAM. His parents married in December 1943. Philip Conover Lazo married Consuelo Blancas Vazquez in December 1980. They have three children: Carlos, Marisol and Ana Constanza.

Philip Conover studied with the Marist Brothers of Mexico City (1954-1959) and later at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire (1960-1963), where his Great-grand Father, Dr. Henry Augustus Coit had been the founding rector, 1854-1895, his daughter, Mary Coit was his grand- mother. There, under the influence of his History professor, Don José Ordoñez y Montalvo (who was later invited to teach at Eaton College), was inspired to write his final examination dissertation in History (1963), on the economic and social policies of Emperor Diocletian; The rise of the Colonni and the immobilization of social classes, which served as a point of departure for his lifelong interest in History.

While at Saint Paul’s School, Conover came under the influence of Existentialist literature and Philosophy. He read L’Étranger of Albert Camus for his French Literature class and The Rebel (L’Homme Révolté), also by Camus on his own. He also read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment on his own for which he wrote an essay that was read in English class. He then started reading Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald with a view of becoming a writer. Among his classmates at Saint Paul’s were Thomas Lanahan, grandson of Scott Fitzgerald; another, Alex Shoumatoff, the writer and journalist, associate Editor of Vanity Fair, and Andrew Wylie, the New York literary agent. Other Schoolmates during his time there were John Kerry and Robert Muller. He was invited on a tour of the School to meet The Secretary General of The Organization of American States and two time President of Colombia, Alberto Lleras Camargo who gave a lecture at The School. One of his teachers, and friends there, was The Rev. John Walker, the first black Bishop of the Episcopal Church, who later became Rector of The National Cathedral in Washington D.C. He also met his American cousin, singer-composer Tom Rush, son of his aunt Molly Conover and Richard Rush, who was his Mathematics teacher there.

On his return to Mexico in 1963, after his stay in New Hampshire, Philip Conover Lazo started writing poetry inspired by a recording produced by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, of the Poetry of the Spanish poet León Felipe read by the poet himself. It was during those years, 1964-1968, that he met and befriended the writer Barbara Jacobs, the painter Mariano Rivera Velazquez, the son of composer Consuelo Velasquez (Bésame Mucho), and Toribio Esquivel Obregón, an aesthete of remarkable erudition and literary culture. He also befriended, through his parents, Eleanor Lincoln, a British-American expatriate who was an anthropologist who had worked with her archeologist husband, Jack Lincoln, at Tikal in Guatemala and been a friend of Margaret Mead and Robert Oppenheimer. She became an inspiration and encouraged Mr. Conover’s poetical efforts.

In June 1968, Philip Conover went to Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, where he experienced transcendental visions after eating The Sacred Entheogen, psylocibe mexicana, with the Mazatec Indians, an experience that greatly influenced his later work and research. A few days later following his journey to Oaxaca, he travelled to Paris, France, in June 1968 where after a short experience as an actor he went to the theater festival of Avignon with the actor director, Mario Garcia González, Daniel Inclán Malacara, a lifelong friend, and Warren George Niesluchowski, then leader of the American deserters of the Viet Nam War living in France.

During the Festival, on the courtyard of Le Palais des Papes and on the old medieval streets of the town thousands of young people had gathered from all over Europe to see the Ballet-theatre of Maurice Bejart dramatize at night, on the courtyard of The Palais, in torch light, the magnificent Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca which became a revelation; as Maurice Bejart, dancing himself with his troupe, extended the frontiers of Art, of Ballet and of Poetry.

The next day, sur le Pont D’Avignon, at mid day, Julian Beck and Judith Malina with the Troupe of The Living Theater of New York, became a great mass on Naked Humanity tumbling and embracing in a great ball of loving, naked corpses surrounded by thousands of spectators who groaned in disapproval or sat on the ground ecstatic transfixed by what they regarded as one of the more important statements in resent Theater History, given in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, Garden of Delights.

After a brief trip to England in August of that year where he was admitted to study Philosophy at Kings College, London University, he decided to go back to France instead and enroll at the Sorbonne in the faculty of Philosophy and Letters where the young German philologist, Maurice Wissman, was one of his teachers. He also attended lectures at the College de France in Prehistory with André Leroi-Gourham; La Gnose Essenienne a la lumiere des manuscripts de La mer Morte with André Dupont-Sommer; Social Anthropology with Claude Levi-Strauss, and The literature of Edgar Allen Poe with Lucien Goldman. It was at this time that he started writing on his cahiers, the same that years later, he used as the basis for his literary works. He also joined Mario Garcia Gonzalez and Isabel Garma at L’atelier de Theatre de COPAR ( the Student Union of The University of Paris), where Philippe Petit, then fifteen years old, who latter walked across a high wire between the Tween Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City, was one of the company.

That same year, Philip Conover joined the Theater School of Maitre Jacques Le Coq, a teacher of Comedia Dell’Arte who had directed the Piccolo Teatro de Milan. Conover also attended lectures and rehearsals at The Université International de Theatre of La Cité Universitaire directed by Maitre Perinetti, who had once been head of the Alliance Francais in Mexico City.

In January 1969, Philip Conover participated in a congress at the Salle de la Mutualité organized by UNEF ( Union national des étudiants de France ), presided by Jaques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit of le Mouvement du 22 mars from Nanterre. The speaker was Jean-Paul Sartre who critizised La loi Faure on Education at which the whole auditorium chanted: ‘Oui, Papá!!!’.

At Le Grand Anphi, the oval amphitheater of the Old Sorbonne, the author attended tumultuous meetings to discuss an answer to the violation of the University grounds by the storm troops of the CRS. It was resolved by the assembly to block the rues Saint Jacques and Gay-lussac with busses to deny access to the CRS. On the courtyard of the Old Sorbonne the great Spanish singer-composer, Paco Ibañez, gave a free concert while outside on the streets of the Quartier the battle raged. The author was captured by plain-clothed police as he was helping to block the Rue Saint Jacques.

The Author remembers days when The Quartier was full of revolutionaries, especially around La Plece de la Contrescarpe at the Café called Ia Choppe and at Chatellet at the Rue Jean Calvin where most of the Boursieres, the Latin American graduate Students at the University of Paris, met for lunch or to do some administrative academic ‘diligence’ concerning their bourse, or to buy tickets for the Opera, or L’Odeón, where the great Theater Companies performed. Some were Argentine Montoneros, others belonged to the Chilean MIR and were later killed during the so called ‘Guerra Sucia’ or during the military coup that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende. The Author would meet there with people like Daniel Inclan Malacara, his friend from high school days in Monterrey and Mexico City, the Polish-American Count Zbigniew Wolkonski who was a professor of Chemistry at La Faculté de Science and who later taught at the University of Havana, had introduced him to the works of Richard Evans Schultes; or Ramon Lameda a theater director-student from Venezuela, or Alain Krivine, who would put in an appearance now and then, who like Babeuf and Lenin became a great organizer and promoter of revolutionaries prior to the May Events, was Editor of Rouge, the Troskist Review; to name a few of the habitués at La Rue Jan Calvin. Later in London, at The Chelsea Drugstore on King’s Road, in 1971, he would meet and become a friend of César Bunster and his beautiful wife, the son of Salvador Allende’s Ambassador to England, who years later, it turned out, was a member of The Chilean FPMR who organized an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1986.

Earlier In march of that year,1969, Conover went with his friend Jacques Bechon, whom he had met at the commissariat du 5eme arrondissement were they had been detained after a ´manif´ in The Quartier, to a meeting of the Internationale Situationniste in Montmatre. From there they travelled in Le Midi and La Cote D’Azur in the company of two girl friends.

Following this, in the month of April of 1969, Philip Conover went to Barcelona to see the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. In Madrid, over a period of two weeks, he studied the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado Museum, and was struck by the similarity of El Bosco’s images with his own visions in Huautla; and these paintings became a lifelong source of inspiration since he saw in them one of the purest expressions of Libertarian Principles in harmony with a vision of Unity of great Esthetical and spiritual content; and this vision was precursor in his studies of Tolstoi and Gandhi.

Back in Paris he was a frequent visitor at Warren George Niesluchowski's studio in the rue Serpent in the Quartier, a gathering place for many artists and adventurers. He was also a patron of the café-bar, Polly Magoo at the Ile de la Cité, where he met actor Dennis Hopper and the Colombian mystic and traveler Fernando Matta who later became a revered Sikh teacher. Some years later in his hotel room at the center of old Tenochtitlan Fernando honored a group of friends with the exposition of a remarkable vision that he termed: “Dreams of Brahma”.

In December 1969 Philip Conover transferred himself to England. In London he stayed with friends in South Kensington and Knotting Hill where he met the great Brazilian singers Caetano Velozo, Maria Bethania and Gilberto Gil, who were at the time political refugees; before settling at The World´s End, Chelsea, at No. 8 Stadium Street, not far from the house boats on the Thames embankment.

He began the study of Pre-History at the British Museum and the History of Religion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He also continued to write poetry and study the works of Carl Gustav Jung. It was at No. 8, Stadium Street that he began experimenting with the analysis of his own dreams following Jung´s experiences as described in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflexions.

At The Institute of Contemporary Arts in The Mall, Philip Conover was on the point of meeting Jorge Luis Borges but decided not to, to respect the magic of the secrecy of Borge’s physical presence; nonetheless he did meet The Poet-President Léopold Sédar Sendhor of Senegal one of the early promoters, with Aimé Césaire, of the concept of ‘négritude’. He was a friend of Margot Oliver, who later became a well-known Australian novelist, with her he went to Queen Elisabeth Hall to a Poetry Reading given by Wystan Hugh Auden, Margaret Bishop, Octavio Paz and Pier Paulo Passolini. After the recital Margot urged him to meet Octavio Paz which he did since he already knew his wife, the novelist Elena Garro and their daughter Helenita in Mexico City. At the time Mr. Conover did not know that Octavio Paz had abandoned his wife, Elena Garro, at her hour of need when she was hounded from Mexico by certain ‘left wing’ intellectuals, accused of being one of the intellectual instigators of the 1968 student uprising in Mexico City, and had to exile herself in France for twenty years.

It was to England that Mr. Conover had flown to be with Liliane Bezjian, a Lebanese he had met at The Cité Universitaire in Paris in September 1969. Liliane had studied English Literature at the American University of Beirut and was twenty one years old, the same as our author; they went together to visit Cambridge and afterwards she remained one of the strongest influences in his life.

In March 1971 Philip Conover met Margaret Dawson, 16, at the vestibule of The Victoria and Albert Museum and fell in love at first sight. He was a frequent visitor at the Dawson Cottage in Tweeksbury near Gloucester. Margaret accompanied him to Oxford where Dr. David Alexander, the Head of the department of Physiology, had invited him to study Medicine. While talking to Dr. Alexander in the Court of All Souls College he latter remembered three young Americans sitting on the grass nearby, one of them, years later, he recognized as Bill Clinton, then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

It was during one of his trips to Oxford that Mr. Conover fell asleep on the train and awoke in Wales; in New Port, Wales at the end of the line. He had been making an experiment in Jungean Analysis and took this accident as a message from the unconscious. As he walked around the harbor at Newport he had a profound feeling that he had been there before. The faces of the young men of Wales reminded him of his own. He had gone back to his origins, his Coit ancestors had been Welch and immigrated to Connecticut in the XVII Century. This completed the circle of his identity, he realized that he was Welch-Mazatec because he had come to Wales while dreaming and he had been born again in Huautla, The capital of the Mazatec country, while in the state of The Temosich, El Sueño Florido.

An unfortunate series of incidents beyond the author’s control forced him to return to Mexico in August 1971. In Mexico he studied Medicine for one year, (1972-1973), after which he started writing his novel, “Teonanacatl”, and editing his Poetry. He collaborated briefly with the sculptress, Helen Escobedo, the sister of his brother-in-law, while she was the director of The Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. Around this time he became friends with the painter Alberto Gironella and his wife, Sanda Racotta, who lived in his home in San Ángel for several years in an apartment he had helped design. He also helped his parents in their real estate business. He built and furnished a series of apartments over the years making furniture with old beams and doors. About this time, (1978-1985) he built himself a Catamaran and a Caravan and travelled extensively over South East Mexico with his wife and children.

Mr. Conover finished his novel, Teo Naná Acatl, in the City of Campeche during the spring of 1987. He edited this work with the help of some friends and founded the Editorial House, The Huautla Press-Prensas Editoras de Huautla to print and publish “Teonanácatl” in 1994. He then started work on his Theological-philosophical essay, “El Sueño Florido”, which became the basis for his latter Essays, “La Huerta del Macehual”, edited by his friend Marta Lamas Encabó, (2009-2011). About this time he became friends with the poet Elsa Cross with whom he shares a vision of Gangadevi, and has translated some of her poetry.This was followed by “The Method of Psychohistory”, (2012- ), a continuing project which he maintains in his blog: www.peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot.com. Where he has also published his novel TEONANACATL along with a Spanish translation of this same work. He also published three collections of Poetry in the same blog: COLLECTED POEMS 1970-1980, MOON OF UXMAL 1980-1990 and EL JAGUAR Y LA PALOMA 1985-1995. He is preparing for publication two more Collections of Poetry that cover the periods: 1963-1970 and 1995 to the present. He is also editing a collection of Short Stories that he has written over the years.

CONTENT OF PHILIP CONOVER LAZO’S LITERARY WORK

Philip Conover Lazo claims that The Phenomena of Illumination is a real event that can take place within the psyche of any human being when He or She connects with the mnemonic visions and entelechies implicit in the Logique and Unity of the internal structure of the Cosmos, as they emerge from the Unconscious, with great emotional impact, while in The Plane of The Divine, ( Milieu Divine ). This can also be understood as an event of great synaptic connectivity in the cerebral cortex. And that this connection can take place under three different circumstances, if they coincide with the nature of our personal Karma or state of Spiritual Grace; that is: during Entheogenic Experience in a ritual with one of The Sacred Plants; as the result of Yogic practices, Meditation and religious studies and at the moment of Death while in Transference along The Psychic Continuum as described in The Tibetan Book of The Dead. This fundamental discovery, which is a Universal Heritage, Mr. Conover, has tried to express through the media of literature, in The Net and in private conversations. It is the result of his investigations during and after his experience with The Sacred Mushrooms of Huautla, which he describes in his Novel-Essay, TEONANACATL.

In his collection of Essays, LA HUERTA DEL MACEHUAL, ( the Macehuallii were corn planting agriculturalists, milperos, of pre-Colombian times ), the Author has tried to describe Libertarian principles, self-government, E-Democracy and the consequent social organization that can be derived from a critique of the established General Theory of the State as proposed by Hans Kelsen, (General Theory of The State), and others. In the Essay, LA TARJETA INTELIGENTE, the Author formally proposes the creation of an all-purpose Identity Card that could be used in any system of public administration controlled by the general body of citizenry independently of any bureaucracy or political party in any Community; to perform, for an hourly wage, any function within a given system of public administration. The Intelligent Card, IC, could also serve as a regular credit card cum curriculum vitae plus tabulated income from work-hours earned at any center of public administration entered in the memory chip of the card to be read by the central computer of the system at any automatic public terminal located in any building dedicated to public administration. This could be a form of e-democracy in the future along the lines of The Swiss Federation of Cantons that preserve the oldest form of Direct or Horizontal Democracy in Modern Times.

In the Essay titled, El MOVIMIENTO MACEHUAL, the Author proposes the form that could take the evolution of religious thought in the future from the perspective of individual spiritual experience or Entheogenic Experience, Le Milieu Divine, The Divinity that Dwells Within Us. The Author also wishes to investigate the transmission of religious ideas in Central Asia as Verticils of Psychohistory along the axis of Siberia to India and from China to the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic Age to determine, among other things, the origin of Christianity. This theme is treated in The Ninth Delivery of his Method of Psychohistory in his continuing essay, The Method of Psychohistory, on his blog: www.peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot.com.

Mr. Conover wants to convey the need to clarify the political and historical processes in their phenomenological perspective as they emerge through an analysis of their anthropological and psycho-analytical components seen in the light of Ethics and Philosophy. This he believes could inspire politicians, social scientists and the general public in the study of Civics and Ethics, along the paths suggested by Tolstoi and Gandhi in the spiritualization of politics, within a continuous search for justice in the right forms of public administration, government and the practice of inclusive, participatory democracy by all elements of society including children and the aged; for he believes a ten year old child can help clean a public park and senior citizens could help in the administration of public libraries among many other forms of socially useful work.

Mr. Conover has chosen to be a private person, has never belonged to any literary group, has never sought or received any literary price. He has never belonged to any political party or worked for any governmental or cultural organization for he considers writing a form of Bakhti Yoga in memory of his experience in Huautla. He did associate with members of The Anarchist Situationist International while he lived in France in 1968-1969.

LITERARY WORKS BY PHILIP CONOVER LAZO

• SELECTED POEMS 1976

• MOON OF UXMAL 1989.

• TEONANACATL 1994.

• TEONANACATL, Spanish Translation by the Author 1998.

• LA HUERTA DEL MACEHUAL 2009.

• THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY 2013-ongoing project

• EL JAGUAR Y LA PALOMA 2015.

IN PREPARATION:

• TWO COLLECTIONS OF POETRY: 1963-1968 AND 1995 TO THE PRESENT

• A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES

• NINTH AND TENTH DELIVERIES IN THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY

La Huerta del Macehual

https://issuu.com/cocohyperbox/docs/la_espiritualizacion_de_la_politica-1._version_ult

Octava entrega: Los Hellenistai, el Rey Milinda y los amantes de Wadi an-natuf

El Jaguar y la Paloma

Les presentamos la séptima entrega

The Method of Psychohistory: Sixth Delivery

We present our sixth delivery in the ongoing project: The Method of Psychohistory.

This 'cosmological commentary' includes reflexions on issues such as: When the gods had no names; the prehistory of religion; an inquiry into the experience of Illumination; to recover our historical and prehistorical memory; the process of hominization and the sacred entheogens; entheogenic phenomena in the pleistocene; the dawn of religious experience; the future of religion; and the convergence of religion and science.