“British rock, particularly British progressive rock (whatever "progressive" may mean or not mean), is like a club or select society: more you find out about it, more you realize that practically everybody in club has played in practically everyone else's group at one time or another...

It would be silly to say that Fripp, or anyone other single person, was at "the" center of this tangled mass of perpetually mutating strands of double-helical do-re-mi. Yet Crimson King was inarguably one of ribosomal focal points of creative synthesis, touching, in his eccentric way, all musicians he worked with, and leaving his decisive stamp on history of rock in early 1970s and beyond.

Of classic heavyweight progressive rockers, who had laid down a more convincing legacy than King Crimson? By 1974 Yes had lost themselves in grandiosity beyond all reasonable bounds (though continuing to play to huge popular acclaim); Emerson, Lake and Palmer were grandstanding with thirty-six tons of equipment and labored flashes of lasers and psychedelic music-hall brilliance; Procol Harum were drifting into repetition and stagnation with Exotic Birds and Fruit, less than a mere shadow of their one-time life and soul. Faced with such examples of dinosaur burnout, and listening to records of all these groups today, I come away with a feeling that King Crimson's music of period sounds infinitely less dated... He was clearly in it for music... But then, one of marks of superior creative talent is precisely knowing when to quit, when to seek out a new vision.

As hinted at in previous chapter, particularly grating to Fripp was commercial/music-industry aspect of whole progressive rock spectacle. In October 1974 Melody Maker interview where he explained his reasons for disbanding King Crimson, Fripp said that successful rock bands often "originally start out to service a need but you now have a situation where, being creative, they have to create needs in order that they may continue to exist. In other words, they've become vampiric {This is proper word to use and readers of many of my books that address Dragons or Pendragons and work of Sir Laurence Gardner will see this is true.}.’ On subject of music itself, in 1987 Fripp dismissed early progressive/art-rock music as ‘a badly cobbled pastiche of a number of badly digested and ill-understood music forms.’

A sense of no new worlds left to conquer, of exhaustion of a particular set of possibilities. For an artist, to stay in same place is to go backwards, to stop growing is to die.

As for Robert Fripp - who disbanded King Crimson in face of what seemed to him insurmountable cosmic, business, and personal obstacles, and who effectively erased himself from musical scene - for moment, late 1974, he was indeed gone, top of head blown off, wandering around without a sense of ego. The Faustian pact was over, just like Lennon's dream. Music itself had stymied him, presentation of meaningful music no longer seemed a real possibility.

Fripp wanted to wrap up his unfinished business, however, and did so in a number of projects, among them putting together The Young Person's Guide to King Crimson, a double-album "greatest hits" package which pointedly omitted "Schizoid Man." The album included a detailed chronology of King Crimson I-III compiled by Fripp from record and concert reviews, conversations with musicians, and Fripp's own journal entries...

On break-up of King Crimson III, Fripp calculated that he had enough money to pay his bills for three years. And indeed, even in his disoriented frame of mind, he was hatching a personal three-year plan consisting of preparation, withdrawal, and recovery. His activities of first year - winding up his affairs - would prepare him for a decisive withdrawal from music industry - and effectively from outside world - at J.G. Bennett's International Society for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, following which he would survey inner and outer landscapes and decide what to do next.

It is quite possible that Fripp's transformational experience at Sherborne - which is, if obliquely, subject of this chapter - cannot be understood by anyone who has not undergone something similar. It is just possible, however, that some inkling of what was involved may be got by reviewing historical backdrop of his experience. Since Fripp's subsequent music and public posture was deeply affected by his encounter with Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, and since only most superficial information on that tradition was dispensed by music press in course of reviewing Fripp's work, I offer here a somewhat more substantial summary for interested reader.

In recent years Fripp has publicly distanced himself from Gurdjieff/Bennett tradition, preferring to claim only that he speaks for his own school, Guitar Craft. It was not so long ago, however, that he was splicing Bennett tapes into his albums and quoting Gurdjieff in his articles. It may in part have been rock press's open hostility and ridicule of Fripp's apparent conversion to a "mystical cult" - though as far as I can make out, Gurdjieff work is neither mystical nor a cult - that led him to his present position of reserve. Gurdjieff

Hands, Head, and Heart. With many variations and complications over years, Gurdjieff's theoretical picture of human organism boils down to a tripartite model consisting of three "centers": moving, emotional, and thinking. Becoming a genuine person involves coordinating three centers and becoming capable of conscious labor and intentional suffering.

Abstract Symbolism. Gurdjieff was fond of elaborate theorizing - construction of intricate symbolic systems embodying or representing relationships between phenomena at all levels of existence from atom to universe. Ouspensky devotes pages and pages to Gurdjieff's concept of "octaves" {Thus one must study Pythagorean connection with Abaris Druid.}- musical scale do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do taken as a sort of universal yardstick for determining measurements and proportions of all of nature's parts. (The theory of octaves had a tremendous impact on pianist Keith Jarrett, who read about them in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff's longest, most allegorical, and most difficult book.) Some Gurdjieff students and groups gloss over octaves or dispense with them entirely. My own feeling is that theory of octaves has a lot in common with medieval Western musical theorists' preoccupation with theo-numerological speculation based on interval integer ratios and their symbolic significance. In point of fact, Gurdjieff had studied medieval alchemists and on occasion was prone to speak of human organism as a sort of alchemical factory for transformation of various material and psychic substances.

It seems that where there is music, and where there are people who philosophize about it, there will be some form of numerology and arcane quasi-mathematics. Since both musical pitch and musical rhythm are readily represented in numerical forms, urge to find primal mathematical significance in music is almost impossible to resist. A contemporary example of this perennially seductive train of thought is Peter Michael Hamel's book Through Music to Self.

Another symbolic thought-form Gurdjieff worked with was enneagram, a circle with nine points around its circumference. Said Gurdjieff, ‘The enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in enneagram and with help of enneagram it can be interpreted ... A man may be quite alone in desert and he can trace enneagram in sand and in it read eternal laws of universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before.’ {The fabulously successful book The Celestine Prophecy uses knowledge of Enneagram and takes people to point of Enlightenment which can include dematerialization.}

Through elaboration of law of octaves and meaning of enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative means of conceptualizing world and their place in it. When I say "alternative," I am suggesting that Gurdjieff sought alternatives to rational, linear, language-oriented exposition and rhetoric (though he was by all accounts also a spellbinding speaker). In other words, Gurdjieff's ideas could be only partially expounded in ordinary words and sentences; to go beyond language he drew on music (he played several instruments and Bennett tells of him improvising unearthly melodies on a small organ late at night), dance, and visual symbols such as enneagram.