Sex: Ancient Ideas About Semen

Sperm is one of the Main Players and is at the epicenter of the socio-sexual metaphorical circuit in the nervous system: sex is so heavily regulated, discussed, made taboo, theorized, politicized, fantasized about, used to sell products that have nothing to do with it, and is so central to our everyday life, is so omnipresent that at times we can’t “see” it it’s so…in our face. Because what happens when sperm meets egg is so profound we get worked-up into a lather about it all the time. Making more humans: not a small socio-political matter. It means everything to us and society. It’s none of your business. It’s everyone’s business. It’s private. It’s everywhere you look. And, thus, there have been some colorful ideas about semen, sperm, jizz, baby batter, cream, bullets. My battered copy of Richard Spears’s Slang and Euphemism (euphejism?) shows: semen virile, crud, gene cream, money-shots, man-oil, come (of course!), mettle-of-generation, filament, spendings, white honey, hot milk, and jazz, among scads of other terms.

At some point, maybe around 3000 years ago, some dude realized if he just refrained from masturbating for a few days it seemed to have interesting effects upon his overall, let us say, mood. Eventually other men said they knew all about this, too. And it became theorized as to what was going on. Taoists and Tantrists were the big shooters in this area. So to speak.

(I wanna ask this lady: have you tried it? Yab-yum, that is?)

The heir to a steel fortune and honcho of the massively influential New Directions publishing house, James Laughlin, did more to resurrect Ezra Pound’s work and reputation than anyone.1 Laughlin wrote:

I remember the afternoon when E.P. explained the mysteries to me. We were walking up the salita to join Buttercup & Bismuth (the Drummonds). He said that the epopte2 was the orgasm, and that the sperm went up to his brain, which was what made him so smart. And Plutarch has some good notes on what went on in that cellar.3

So, Plutarch is involved? Oh yea, he was a later-comer, though. This sperm-brain mysticism goes way further back. But first, more on what Pound made of this jazz.

EzP saw retention of semen as central to his politics and economics, but you really have to squint and decipher to see it. Here’s Pound scholar Maria Luisa Ardizzone:

Pound sees a continuity between a natural religion present in the Greek world and a natural religion in the here-and-now. But it is only a matter of evaluating the centrality of natural religion insofar as living practices speak of rites of rebirth through the preservation of the seed.4

Further, EzP inserts coded mystical terms in his poetry that hints at all this. In Canto #36 there’s a term: “Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu” - “sacred, the illumination in fucking” is my gloss - and Ez explained in Selected Prose, 1909-1965: “Paganism included a certain attitude toward; a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium.”5 “Inluminatio coitu” also shows up in Canto 74, the first Pisan one, written just after he got busted and confined to a panther cage. Gods and goddesses of regeneration were heavily implicated, to be sure. But what of this idea of sperm doing all that crucial heavy lifting?

Ancient Chinese: huanjing bunao: “returning the essence-semen to the brain,” is one gloss. The ancient Chinese (at least 2000 years ago) thought the kidney-organ system was the reservoir for bodily fluids that were essential: bone marrow, brain matter, and semen. When a man retains his jin, it rises through the spine and bathes the brain with its essence, and it’s a happy entheogen, enhancing well-being. The ancient Taoist texts indicate that during sex, this jin is all riled, but there are techniques of conserving - not ejaculating - that stuff, via breathing techniques, visualization, application of pressure to glans or perineum; the jin transforms to vital energy chi, and the really good stuff occurs. Today we have the Latin “coitus reservatus” as a term for this.

So, we’ve learned some slightly more objective facts about physiology in the past 2000 years; one is that, when these techniques are used and semen is not ejaculated, it makes a retrograde traverse and ends up in the bladder, and this is no health concern. It doesn’t travel up the spine turnpike, transmuting into chi inside the brain…but this doesn’t matter at all if you believe something extraordinary is going on. Maybe it’s all a metaphor. Hey, metaphors work.

Most modern medications men are prescribed for enlarged prostates6 have as a side-effect retrograde ejaculation: sperm is not “spent” outwardly, but goes inward, back into the bladder, and it’s no big deal or danger. And, I say, if you want to see it travel up the spine to the brain, why not. But there are techniques besides drugs: the aforementioned pulling out and pinching the glans, application of pressure to the perineum/”taint,” breathing techniques, and visualization, all well-known to committed practitioners of left-handed (“California”) Tantric sex.

We’re only at the tip here; this stuff goes way deeper. The Troubadours knew. Some of the Freemasons knew. The Bavarian Illuminati? Probably? Robert Anton Wilson showed that Renaissance poet Thomas Vaughan, the magus Giordano Bruno, and tantrists all over the Orient knew this stuff.7 Paracelus definitely knew. Magickal adepts certainly were clued in, and Austin Osman Spare influenced Genesis P-Orridge about the mystical powers of semen. Nikola Tesla, some think, was celibate because he believed it drained his creative vitality if he wasn’t.8 Nonetheless, the body will have its way at some point, usually when you’re asleep and can’t help it. Here’s what Fred Nietzsche thought:

The reabsorption of semen by the blood is the strongest nourishment and, perhaps more than any other factor, it prompts the stimulus of power, the unrest of all forces toward the overcoming of resistances, the thirst for contradiction and resistance. The feeling of power has so far mounted highest in abstinent priests and hermits (for example, among the Brahmins).9

These techniques have been applied to what’s now known as “premature ejaculation,” a rationalized, industrial-world’s term for a “problem” that can be remedied by scientific knowledge.10 I saw late night public-access TV “sex therapists” discuss these techniques in the 1970s, as an inquiring child.11 Masters and Johnson taught a legion of sex-therapists to deal with PE using these ancient tantric techniques, but it seems the historical knowledge was omitted for those undergoing therapy. It was just scientific techne, what the Greeks called “practical knowledge.”

Timothy Leary had asked Aldous Huxley about Tantra, and Aldous spilled in a letter to Leary, February, 1962. By the time Leary had married Uma Thurman’s mom, the fashion model Nena von Schlebrügge, and honeymooned in the Himalayas in 1964, Leary was a full-on tantric enthusiast, and probably a virtuoso, by dint of all the practice available to him.12

The Shakers and Oneida Community knew of these techniques and their use was female-centered. The fifth woman to become a doctor in the US, Alice Bunker Stockham (1833-1912), was a gynecologist13 and friends with Havelock Ellis and Tolstoy. Stockham taught birth control, gender equality, and sexual fulfillment as path to lasting marriage. The tantric techniques she taught were simply part of her modern medical practice. She borrowed from the Italian word caress, karezza, and showed how male “continence” was the primrose path to a happy couple. Now we have “edging” as a much-talked-about sex technique, and male chastity devices available by the score via online merchants. Who sez there ain’t no progress?

I wonder and ask the Reader: what’s lost, if anything, by framing this practice as “modern” and not Eastern-ancient? The American right wing has recently admonished young male followers to “no fap,” an onomatopoeic if ever there was one. But what’s to be gained there, besides more incels and their backed-up semen? Is it not a sort of Golden Lie we might want to put forth: that coitus reservatus focuses more on women’s pleasure14, and that this tends to make everything better? That saving seed could push your creativity up to another level, as Pound and the Chinese thought? I am not anti-masturbation here. In fact, I love it.15 But there seems to be more interesting ways to frame this activity than some buzz-cut admonishing a young man: “Yer spillin’ yer precious man-juice son! Have more control and get out there and walk up to some little filly ‘n ask her for a date! Now scat!”

We choose our metaphors, or someone else chooses them for us.16

Food: The Occult Influence of the American Military

I was a 20 year old Chomsky acolyte. I had many questions, but Noam answered a lot of ‘em; I’d say most of ‘em held up, as long as they weren’t about Linguistics. EX: I’d seen Seymour Melman’s book The Permanent War Economy, which, cracked, daunted. Ask Noam. Why does the Pentagon get nearly a trillion dollars of our tax money every year, both Democrats and Republicans vote for it, no citizen has a say, etc? This seemed like it needed answering. Here was Noam’s answer, from memory of reading a large number of his texts, circa 1982: In American history, capitalism repeatedly failed: The Great Panic of Pick a Year. They got worse as time went on: Boom!…then, for, uh, reasons…Bust! Finally, 1929’s Bust led to the Great Depression. What got us out of it in the US? Not FDR’s programs, but Pearl Harbor and everyone goes to work for the war effort, even Rosie, and you were asked to keep the faith with Meatless Tuesdays in an effort to help our boys fightin’ the Huns and Japs, etc. After the way to save Democracy (in this semantic sense: “Capitalism”), it was decided in the Senate, circa 1946-1948, that we must now be on a permanent wartime economy. The economist Keynes had shown you can do this sort of thing that way, but there was another way: you could employ everyone and spend like mad to continually rebuild the infrastucture: roads, hospitals, national parks, universities, housing, etc. Apparently if you checked the Congressional Record you will find coded language about why we chose Permanent War over Permanent Sanity: this latter way of propping up capitalism makes people feel like what they do matters; we don’t want the enemy territory (another term Noam found in a memo referring to the populace: US citizens) to feel like they have a say in the direction the country is moving in. We want them to shut up and do as they’re told. We need now to police the rest of the world in a “Cold War” and scare the bejeezus out of the populace: Commie gonna hide unner yo bed, gitch yo mama! Some “red” might stare you directly in the eyes and suddenly, you’re a commie-zombie like them! You hate America! Etc.

Noam pointed out: how come all your electronic gizmos - your TVs and stereos - have…Japanese names on them? Didn’t we drop atomic weapons on them for being intransigent? Chomsky explained we needed a strong ally in the Far East, so after the war, we went in and re-wrote their Constitution - no standing armies for you! - and then dumped a ginormous amount of money into rebuilding and restructuring the Japanese economy: what happened was this: the latest scientific breakthroughs in physics, materials science, chemistry, etc: were shared openly with allies. The Japanese used Western knowledge to build better TVs and sold them back to America consumers. So: our taxes propped them up, then they sold us back products that came out of basic Research and Development that was based in Cold War ideology.

I found this compelling. I realized so much of the world I’d grown up in was influenced by the Cold War and the military, but it was sold to everyone as Americanism, “better living through chemistry,”17 etc. So: the trillion dollars were basically handed to hi-tech industry to build better laser-guided beam weapons, satellite technology, anything that gave us a leg up over the Rooskies and other Commies behind the Iron Curtain. What happened was the basic research and development (R&D) in trying to do these grand things eventually spun out - sorta accidentally-incidentally it’s a long story products like GPS, Internet, hi-def this ‘n that. This was how “capitalism” worked: socialism for the already well-off, “free enterprise” for everyone else. Good luck with that. It seemed just a tad ironic.

One of the things that spun out of Doin’ War Better was this: military officials knew they needed GI Joe to get unspoiled, even tasty food on the battlefield. And…’cuz my Chomsky-derived explanation about how the Permanent Wartime Economy worked took too much space, let us just say that boxed, frozen dinners were another taxpayer-funded basic research thing that the Pentagon realized massive food companies could churn out better, so they just gave them the tech and said have at it, and get rich. So yea: your frozen pizza and burrito, nuked in the microwave oven (another spinoff of the R&D permanent wartime economy) had its genesis in the Pentagon. Think of the frozen food aisle. What does a body really need to function as a healthy killing machine? Ah: the rise of scientific nutrition!

Surely this crap has reached an endpoint, you think. And you think wrong, my dudes and dudettes. It’s still all about not voting to subsidize $1 trillion to hi tech companies while the gap between the rich and everyone else has reached escape velocity, etc. We’re strung out out on this basic economic model. Imagine taking one year out of the Pentagon budget and instead paying for higher education, food and housing for the poor, etc. Naw. That’s liberal-talk. Which means socialist, which means communist, which means I hate America. Right now I really ought to be taken out and shot for even thinking we should spend less than 50% of every tax dollar on war. I keep forgetting.18

I will get to the neoliberal mind’s mania for constant “optimization” of everything, and some guy’s idea about optimizing food, called Soylent, some other day. Right now, I need to get in something on Death.

Taphophobia: The Fear of Being Buried Alive

When I was a kid, one day my dad came home with a funny book titled World’s Wackiest Inventions, by Brown and Jeffcott, Jr, first published in 1932. These were merely page after page of items found in the US Patent Office, with a line diagram and a short paragraph about the Hydraulic Alarm Clock, Vermin Electrocutor, Jury Protector, Bed-Wetting Alarm, etc. Among these inventions was something called a “Safety Coffin.”

It’s an “improved burial-case” dating from August 25, 1868. The inventor explains in the patent letter:

The nature of this invention consists in placing on the lid on a coffin, and directly over the face of the body laid therein, a square tube, which extends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave, said tube containing a ladder and a cord, one end of said cord being placed in the hand of the person laid in the coffin, and the other end of said cord being attached to a bell on the top of the square tube, so that, should a person be interred ere life is extinct, he can, on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the coffin and the grave by the ladder; or, if not able to ascend by the ladder, ring the bell, thereby giving an alarm, and thus save himself from premature burial and death; and if, on inspection, life is extinct, the tube is withdrawn, the sliding door closed, and the tube used for a similar purpose…19

I remember my mom thinking this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen and I don’t think she thought it was on the up-and-up and was more like something my beloved writers of Mad magazine would come up with. It’s certainly Rube Goldbergian, eh? I think I had a dire fear for awhile: they missed this guy not being dead and buried him anyway, but if “ere extinct” he (sexism! in 1868 death culture!) he might have died of…fright? Then, for some reason, the bell went off - rigor mortis? - and they pull this guy up, there’s an “inspection” and life was indeed “extinct”, so now he’s out of options. What a way to go, etc. I was maybe ten.

It turns out the fear of being buried alive not only has a -phobia name, but it’s as old as tantric sex. We all know about Egyptian royalty being buried with their gold and jewels, famous pets, and even their unwilling, favorite Jeeves, but the Romans built “libation tubes” into caskets so the dead could continue to party on in the afterlife. I guess they were pretty sure grandma was dead though. The opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was deathly afraid of being buried alive, but then so were many of the living in 19th century US and Europe. There were over 200 books published in the 19th century on how to avoid premature burial.20

In the past 20 years there’s been a vibrant discussion of what constitutes death: is it merely an absent pulse? What about lack of brain activity? What if they’re MAGA: how can you know? Zombies have arisen as cultural stars, with plenty of roles in movies and TV. Some in the death industry can cut corners and get a tad hasty these days: hey people are busy; mistakes will be made.21 I know what you’re thinking, reader of the OG: it happened to Tim Finnegan22, it can happen to you. I hear ya, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Your time will come, and everything will be just fine. Take a deep breath. Another. Feel better? Just reeeee-lax. You’ll probably actually be dead when they declare you dead. These two realities are separate…but not by much. At any rate, if they bury you alive, it’s highly likely that no one will know…unless you came prepared with a Safety Coffin!

Or, just go out in style, like when the family of their 99 year old Grandma died: she wanted a gigantic cock and balls monument at her gravesite. They granted her wish.23

A Final Thought: how do you wanna go out? Have you thought about it? When I bring this up among friends the stock answer is you wanna just go to sleepy dream-time and never come back. Ya never saw it comin.’ I totally get that, man. But it seems a little…if ya know a thing or two about Death…it seems a bit Idealistic. Maybe have a fall-back position. Woody Allen was asked about achieving immorality through his works, and he said that was not a good way to achieve immortality; he’d rather do it through…”not dying.” But we just don’t have the Tech yet, it seems. (Or: have you heard something? Do tell!).

The great 20th century evolutionary biologist William Rowan Hamilton had given it some thought: he wanted to be carried to the forests of Brazil, to be eaten from the inside by a Coprophanaeus beetle, which would nurture its young on dead Hamilton man-meat - this guy knew his Biology! - and then the beetle would sprout wings - they do! - and fly off to do beetle things. Hamilton added, “So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.”24

The professor George Carlin, who taught me more than anyone else, wanted rhythm and blues music played at his memorial, no religion but private spirituality was fine, lots of laughing should be heard. He died at age 71 of heart failure, but his preference to was “explode in someone’s living room.”25

25

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, by Paul Krassner, later edition, pp.383-384.

“What does it matter what you say about people?” - Marlene Dietrich, as “Tana,” at the end of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958)

Around a month ago I was checking out guitars in a local shop. The kid who worked there thought I was somebody, but I assured him I wasn’t. He got around to asking me who my influences were and I mentioned a bunch of guys, and said that, as a very young person who knew nothing, I liked Ted Nugent. He didn’t know who that was. I told him about how I had no idea as a kid about Nugent’s personality because there just wasn’t enough media that covered this stuff when I was copying licks off vinyl records.1 Now there’s too much. I realized the kid still didn’t know who Nugent was, other than some guy who influenced me. Why had I danced around the answer? Now that there’s an open fireplug of information 24/7, we can find out quite a lot about our influences. I found out too much. “Ehhh…I found out Nugent’s politics were about 180 from mine.”

“Ohh.”

“Yea.”

Later I realized I’d also mentioned being influenced by Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore, and Dave Mustaine. All these guys have track records uniquely personal to them that make me a tad squeamish. For example, if one wishes to - and I seem to have sort of “accidentally” found out about it because of Internet - one can make the argument that Clapton’s entire career was done in racist blackface.2 Blackmore just seems to have been a right winger, not a big deal. I have a bunch of stories about him being a really callous jerk, but I still love his playing. His unpleasantness hangs around his playing nonetheless. I can’t forget or “un-know” things. Mustaine seems really arrogant and confused to me, but I love him more for the other guys he hired to play in his band.

Why do I care about all this? I’d like to not care, but I think this is a part of being a consumer of media where too much information has been revealed, and we have developed our own ideas about how people ought to be treated, including ourselves and our aspirations to be a better person. Is ignorance bliss? Naw. That’s no way to deal with it. You have to face your artistic heroes and their fuck-ups, and maybe it comes down to A.) What they’ve done is unforgivable; I will no longer engage with their art, painful as this decision is; or B.) They’re human just like I am. They screwed-up royally, or have something wrong with their personality, but I still love their art.

Is there a C?

(Botticelli’s Aphrodite, Pound’s favorite goddess)

Within the last two weeks I was reading some very old notecards I’d made from readings on certain topics. I found some notes from Richard Kostelanetz, a lifelong New York writer who wrote some wonderfully critical stuff about the “New York Intellectuals”, calling them a “Mob” among other things. In this Kostelanetz agrees with Robert Anton Wilson, but Kostelanetz is himself Jewish and never left New York and has the “receipts” for this thesis. In his Political Essays, Kostelanetz has a six pager after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and he defends Thomas against Hill.3 To me, this is just a flat bad take, but only given the subsequent history of Thomas on the SCOTUS. Hell, I’m wrong like this quite often, but Thomas seems so egregious to me in 2026 I was saying to myself, “Richard…how could you have been so wrong?” In 1992, I think I believed Hill, but probably for the wrong reasons. It was roughly similar to Blasey-Ford and Beer Kavanaugh’s regrettable rise to the SCOTUS.

Not long after that, I’m studying a very heady topic that I still don’t feel like I understand: Time. What is it, and how does the brain make sense of it? I had a note from someone talking about the neural correlates that underpin the perceptual mechanisms for our understanding of temporality. One of the people who thought we would understand this: Jeffrey Epstein.4 I had zero idea of who this guy was when I made the note; Epstein, it turns out, was a very close friend of the editor-agent of a slew of books that sought to make scientific ideas “hot” for the general lay intellectual public, John Brockman. And Brockman himself was of course caught up with Epstein.

Right after this, I’m reading notes on what I think of as the Ezra Pound Problem (which I will explain shortly), and one note was on the necessity of overcoming in-group vs. out-group behavior as seen in chimps, other primates, and, of course, the homo sapiens. Here’s the note I scrawled: “Can we transcend our monkey-hood and talk about both the bad aspects of someone's behavior and our aesthetic reasons for concentrating on the WORK, rather than this fungibility problem? Is it only an aesthetic stance; are we declaring ourselves as not part of in-group/out-group primate behavior?” Still grappling with this one - hence this entire article - and this note was from reading The Folly of Fools, by Robert Trivers, who died recently.5 The Einstein of evolutionary biology, an inveterate pot smoker and onetime best friends with Huey Newton. Trivers, a white guy, rode shotgun overnight with the Panthers in Oakland as they sought to prevent police violence being inflicted upon the black population there. Trivers is an endlessly fascinating thinker and character for me: an anti-authoritarian who was always a bit mentally ill, but clearly a genius.

Aaaand…it was relatively recently - last eight months? - when I found out Trivers was another friend of Epstein’s. Mein GOTT!

The “Ezra Pound Problem”

I’d been looking for a name for this issue, in a desultory way, for a long time. Recently my colleague in Robert Anton Wilson fandom, Tom Jackson, argued that Wilson seems a bit contradictory in that he was a great acolyte of Ezra Pound despite his unfathomably vile antisemitism, while Wilson dismissed the prolific classic science fiction writer Poul Anderson for Anderson’s pro-Vietnam, pro-cops at the 1968 Democratic National Convention stance. Jackson, not pro-Vietnam or police riot, defends Anderson because fellow critics have held up Anderson as a great science fiction writer, and for other reasons.

Tom writes, “Applying the ‘Ezra Pound’ rule, it seems that Poul Anderson may be a valuable writer.”6

The “Ezra Pound Rule” sounded like it might be the term I’d been looking for, but yesterday in the shower I realized the “Ezra Pound Problem” seems even better, because…it really does seem like a problem. As Wilson wrote of Pound in 1960:

Two statements which I am arrogant enough to call “facts” must be placed on record in any intelligent discussion of Pound: 1.) He is a great poet and a great thinker; 2.) He has deliberately and consistently supported fascism, anti-Semitism and other vicious systems and attitudes for 30 years now, and continues to do so.

You can almost divide the contemporary intelligentsia into two parts: those who refuse, obstinately, to recognize the first of those facts, and those who, with equal obstinacy, try to avoid recognizing the second of those facts. This is only human, and quite forgivable. Placed together, those facts make a paradox which is both tragic and highly alarming. Most of us prefer not to face that paradox, and we reduce Pound to one part of it and ignore the other part.7

The Ezra Pound Problem in General: that conundrum faced by any of us when confronted by a favorite artist’s bad behavior, whatever it was. We make ongoing negotiations with this.

The Ezra Pound Problem in Particular: What any of us who like Ezra Pound’s work does with his ugliness. I’m mostly interested in what other poets and writers have thought about this, and some critics who seem compellingly informed.

“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II

This volume, edited by Leonard W. Doob, contains transcripts of the radio broadcasts Pound made in Italy, directed at US troops. I shelve my copy of Rants and Incendiary Tracts8 next to it. It’s overwhelmingly informative about Pound’s…Disease?9 Stupidity? Hatefulness? Massive mistake? At the end of his life he called it ignorance. A massive mistake he got carried away with. He asked forgiveness. I think of all of it as something like when a great poet makes a mistake, it’s bound to be an unfathomably bad one. It is.

In an appendix, Doob writes:

It is difficult to be objective about these broadcasts, but they can be considered a demotic expression of what Pound has been saying for years. The subject remains the same. The opinions are the old opinions. Pound sees old-fashioned “Yankee” independence and craftsmanship everywhere on the wane…Certain specific references, however, are new, those to “the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers,” to “Franklin Finklestein Roosevelt,” to “kikes,” “sheenies,” and “the oily people.” Also new are Pound’s commendation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the most notorious of contemporary tracts purportedly revealing a Jewish or Zionist plot against the foundations of Western civilization) and his remarks that history is “keenly analyzed” in Mein Kampf.10

These speeches got Pound busted, apprehended, accused of treason, and locked in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, DC, for 13 years. As I write this it’s May 4, so lemme see if Ez made a radio dealio on that date…ah! Yep: 1942, May 4: speech titled “Universality.” It literally begins:

The Bolshevik anti-morale comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever codified. The Talmud is the one and only begetter of the Bolshevik system.11

Kept locked by the Allies in a cage with an open ceiling, Pound wrote on scraps of paper, and had some sort of breakdown.12 These writings are known as The Pisan Cantos and fellow poets awarded him the first Bollingen Prize - sort of a Nobel of poetry - for it. Wha? All I can say, if you’re piqued: read these poems. They’re numbers 74 to 84. Who awarded the treasonous Pound this major award in 1948? Poets with names such as Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, WH Auden, and TS Eliot. Why? The critic Richard Elman (not the Joyce biographer) said, “Because he represented the ultimate in the mandarin culture they were trying to preserve and promote.”13 The Bollingen jury explained further: “To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest.”14 Aye: these poems must be pretty damned good to overcome telling the American troops about to face death and dismemberment that they’re fighting for “Stinky Roosenstein.”

The Racist Who Touts His “Good Black Friend”

We all know this thing. Making things extra difficult is Pound going out of his way to help anti-fascists and Jews whose Art he thought was important: he helped Louis Zukofsky. He sought money and support and patronage for Hemingway, Joyce, cummings, Frost, William Carlos Williams, on and on. One the most mind-blowing aspects of this weird story: back in Italy, in the late 1960s, Pound had slowly realized how egregious his fuck-up was, and he turned silent. He wouldn’t speak. Allen Ginsberg visited him and told Pound, basically, so what? You fucked up! You changed poetry forever and we’re all in debt to you. And he danced around in his Hari Krishna clothes, played Pound recordings of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, told him about mind-expanding drugs.15 I don’t think Pound’s conviviality is any garden-variety of “my good black friend” that racists pull; I suspect it’s weirder and far more nuanced than this, and space and your attention are already being taxed.

RAW and Pound

To address Tom Jackson’s bit about Wilson’s lifelong love of Pound, while fully acknowledging the profound ugliness, Wilson was very clear that not only did he love Pound’s reinvention of Modernist poetry with the ideogrammic method Pound developed from a creative misreading of Ernest Fenollosa’s fecund (mis?)interpretation of Chinese writing, but Wilson thought Pound was onto something important with his questioning of the foundations of value, money, economics. And Wilson was voluminous in his writing about these topics.

Wilson, I think, had an emotional relationship with his reading of Pound, since he was 16 years old. He continued to read Pound throughout his life.16 This emotional relationship with the massive corpus of Pound’s gives at times, let us say, an inconsistency of appraisals over the years. It seems to me the nature of emotional commitment and the human nervous system, and while I seem to be trying a “gotcha” I’m doing anything but that. I merely find the case of surpassing interest, and it addresses something, I think, about us and our human nature, and Wilson admits this in his clear-headed response to the Problem, below.

In the aforementioned essay from 1960, Wilson gives his answer to his own Ezra Pound Problem, and I don’t quite understand why he didn’t reiterate it after that; I think it’s his best thinking on the Problem:

The simple fact is that most of us dare not look at the paradox of Ezra Pound too closely, because it is the paradox of human nature - our own nature. To see Pound as he is - a man of genius and goodwill, of love and integrity and hatred and dishonesty - is to admit such contradictions can exist in the human personality. That is not a comfortable thought - it is especially uncomfortable to those of us who are, like Pound, idealists intent on changing the world - so we prefer to brush it aside and go on playing our life-myth that the universe is one big Western Movie where the “good guys” (us) are fighting the “bad guys” (our enemies).17

Let us take this as the definitive answer Wilson gave on the Ezra Pound Problem, or his own version of it, which he asks us to consider for ourselves, what with having a human nature and all. But it’s more complex than that. Near the end of his life, Wilson taught courses on Pound and related topics in his online MaybeLogic Academy. In one class’s notes he downplays Pound’s actions (this is over 40 years after the above quote, from 1960) as comparable to Jane Fonda visiting North Vietnam. Here I am, having obtained class notes as sent to me by Academy students like Mike Gathers and Eric Wagner - Wilson scholars, both - and telling the rest of the world what might have been privileged, intimate communication between Teacher and small band of Students. Wilson defended Pound’s broadcasts as “free speech radio.” Without appropriate context - such as the 1960 piece quoted in two places above - this seem dubious, notwithstanding Canto 74 and recently arrested Pound’s line “free speech without free radio speech is as zero.”18 Another student and wonderful Wilson reader ad comic book artist extraordinaire, Bob Campbell, had not known much about Pound when he took a MaybeLogic class, and apparently he was told by RAW that Pound wasn’t an antisemite. Eric Wagner pointed to examples that challenged RAW on this. Our emotional commitments to our aesthetic loves can muddle things quite a bit, eh?

[Re: The statement “Ezra Pound was an antisemite,” contains the copula form of “be”: was. In the structure of Indo-European language these “being” words seem to hypnotize us in very subtle but strong ways. It’s as if that’s what we should remember Pound for: his identity as an antisemite. Further, this verb seems to have the potential to work neurosemantically as “Ezra Pound was an antisemite every second of his life.” Does it not? He wasn’t an antisemite every waking minute. He wrote and uttered antisemitic things from roughly 1930-1962 or so. His life was 1885-1972.]

With this in mind: can we internalize this truth about the human condition? Or are we addicted to being in the “Western Movie”? As I read Substack Notes, almost everyone agrees with me about the state of the world. The algorithm feeds me what it thinks I want to read. But it’s all so overwhelmingly Western Movie stuff. I have a tough time handling it.

In the era of #MeToo and its larger extensions in the world in the mid-2020s, how do we deal with the Ezra Pound Problem in General?

A short bit:

1. What’s the nature of the egregious behavior and to what degree is it a slam-dunk, what degrees of alleged? A fine, recent book on this, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer will of course have problems at points. She loves Woody Allen as I do. But she too-easily lumps him in with Bill Cosby. Allen’s alleged crimes were investigated: twice. And they found nothing. While Cosby?…

2. Historicity of bad action: time and place. Sorry, but as morally perfect as you think you are, in 200 years someone can look at what you took for granted to be okay and be appalled. I assert we must nuance this. Yes, Washington and Jefferson had slaves, and this is completely horrid. Nevertheless, I do think we ought to activate our baseline conservative impulses and look at their work in context. What did they do that was of value to us? This is a huge topic. Of course!

3. Not sure how pertinent this one is, but it keeps recurring for me: the counterfactual: how many bad actions have not yet been caught or will never be caught? From statistics, I come up with the answer: a shit-ton. How does this alter the landscape?

4. Ought we hold artists and writers to the same standard as those with power in management positions? In my personal metaphysics, what Trump is and has done is worse than all bad actions taken by all artists, for all-time. This, too, is a big, hairy, difficult question, though.

5. Again: Why do we excuse some artists and thinkers but not others? This is the heart of the Ezra Pound Problem in general, as I posit it.

I’ll be tackling other poets and writers and the Ezra Pound Problem from that angle in the future. Thanks for reading!

18

A few lines before that: “Fear god and the stupidity of the populace.”

This is more me unburdening myself, trying to fire off a plaintive rant. Of course it’s subjective. But so is “masculinity” itself. Put simply: you’re born with a penis: we call that human being male. And he is supposed to “be” something called “masculine” when he reaches the age of who knows when…

It’s right around here that I part ways with a heaping pile of my Murrrkin culture as it glares blaring, stacked and stupid, in the incredibly insipid 2020s.

Before Internet got going there were always men - commonly called “assholes” and marginalized and appropriately ignored - who sought to show us all what “real manhood” was. Mostly it had to do with being a loud, muscular, shallow, menacing, potentially violent anti-intellectual. Now these twerps are everywhere. Why?

I ask why but I don’t know. I do think that boys and young men who fall prey to these loudmouths are confused. And when you have someone confused - ask any conman - you have ‘em in your back pocket. But why are boys and young men so confused? I suspect: bad self-esteem. Which may be linked to countries with accelerating inequalities, or a basic economics that encourages depression and anxiety, anomie. But now I’m heading toward the ionosphere with this. I don’t know. Not learning about yourself and instead looking around desperately to see who to copy as a masculine model would certainly bring us back down out of the clouds. And that model - bet yer ass - is supremely dumb. And phony. Because it’s so transactional. These jerks are telling you how to act like an obnoxious buffoon because it’s your “true nature.” And they’re making money doing it.

Commercial Break: At this point I’d like to plug an old book in case there’s some young male out there who might be reading this and feels an anxiety about whether their masculinity is good enough: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts, published 60 years ago. It’s not about masculinity, but something deeper that encompasses it. It’s right in the title.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

In the 1980s, I had a kick-ass Social Psychology class in college. The professor was a large, friendly, inspiring black man named Manly Johnson, who grew up in the American South. I loved how he’d explain concepts and then break into something like, “In this situation, why…you’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea!” Anyway, my story has nothing to do with him or his first name.

There was some study done: three male volunteers were asked to sit in a room and figure out a solution to a problem, talking out loud. They were paid for their attempt, and they thought the problem was what the Situation was about. There were two doors on opposite sides of the room. A microphone picked up what the three young men said. When an attractive female walked into the room, made a photocopy, then walked out the other door, their voices dropped about an octave lower than before while she was in the room. Later they were told this and said they weren’t aware they’d lowered the pitch of their voices. That was what the study was about: their voices and the presence of a female, not the solution to some mundane problem. This study was replicated, but what with the revealed replication crisis in social sciences starting the 21st century, who knows. But I remember being impressed with two interpretations of this: 1.) we know from Evolutionary Psychology that lowered voice means sexual chances, attractiveness, reproduction. But at this point, Ev-Psych hadn’t infiltrated this Social Psych class. Ev Psych was still called Sociobiology at that point: belonged in another building entirely. For this class, the social influence was emphasized, not the evolutionary biology aspect. 2.) I thought society and the “tacit dimension” - what Robert Anton Wilson called “the semantic unconscious” - also influenced this, and what that implied was that society had conditioned my body, and I wasn’t aware of it, just as the young men in the study said they weren’t aware their voices had lowered in the presence of a female. I took this as a constant reminder that I can be more aware of things. Not everything. But more aware. And I was not impressed enough with Society - especially its leaders - to be happy to let it tacitly influence (or “armor”, as Wilhelm Reich called it) my body. Hell, I never had a deep voice anyway, even when I was trying to imitate some lower voiced-dude. I’m a tall, thin guy with a relatively high voice. Running in rock music social circles - which allows for a looser expression of masculinity - helped me also. The very idea that the dominant culture had developed ways to alter my muscularity, my body: repulsed me. Anyway...

The very idea there’s a “real” masculinity and any other performances of “it” that aren’t the “real” ones and are “weak”, or “beta”, too “woke,” etc: this is the Loudmouth’s Game. You’re either a real man or a beta. Simpleminded black-white. Stupid. Resist it. The world is not black/white. It’s a vast continuum of colors. Whatever shade you are is good. Be good at your unique masculinity. I think different masculinities are good for a society, overall. In what way is my opinion here threatening to certain people? And why? No, seriously, I implore you: tell me why.

If you’re born with a penis and grow up to have some feelings about yourself, your body, and your body in this world, you’ll have some ideas about masculinity. Boys do this; girls do that. Some adults are telling you you ought not do this or be like that: that’s for girls. At some point you have to put your foot down and say, fuck it: I like wearing my pink sweater. I like my hair long. I dig Taylor Swift. (Or in my case: Joni Mitchell, Jacqueline du Pré, Diane Keaton.) Whatever.

Perhaps you feel like you were born in a male’s body and some mistake was made. You feel like a girl. Perhaps you transition. If so, we wish you the best of luck in your new body and marvel at the sociology of scientific knowledge that allowed us to get so good at doing that series of procedures.

Everyone else with a penis is masculine. And guess what? It’s good enough. End of story. You’re good enough the way you are. Maybe you’re gay and have a lisp and most of your friends are female: you’re as masculine as George Clooney, only your embodiment, your expression of masculinity expresses itself differently than Clooney’s. You’re on the continuum of masculinity. Effeminacy is just a way to nuance the description of your masculinity. Not every man is meant to be Tom Brady; that’s asinine. And it should be your description of yourself that matters. Take or leave others. You’re as masculine as that sorrowful POS Andrew Tate, who’s working OT to give masculinity a Very Bad Name.

I really think it’s correct that your default masculinity (aside from the inevitable influence of culture) is good enough. But if you want to be a better man, draw from any inspiration, not some jackass who’s touting he has the One True Way To Be A Man. But you already knew that. Hey: maybe it’s better not to even think about improving with your masculinity and try to just be a better person, whatever that means to you.

What gets me about Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, Pete Hegseth, much of the incel army and what’s now identified as the Manosphere: it’s overly performative. When I was growing up we’d call it “gay” because it always looked so forced - like such an act - that we thought these assholes were desperately anxious someone would find out they were gay. (As if there’s anything wrong with that. There is not.) “Look at me, everyone! I’m a straight Christian man!” (So what you’re saying is…you’re gay? I wish you were as okay with that as we are. Now get the fuck outta here, you boring drama queen.)

Okay: these jagoffs, loud and imbecilic and seemingly proud of all that, have rope-a-doped and Big-Conned much - lemme say too many - of the male cohort of Millennials/Gen Y, much of Gen X, Gen Z, and they’re coming for the Gen Alphas.1 And sorry, but Internet allowed these performative assholes too much mind-space-colonization. Apparently having them on your laptop or iPhone overrode something that previously allowed us to easily ignore these dummies, these side-show bums.

I have the nagging suspicion - and it’s only a suspicion - that the knee-jerk “contrarian” public positions taken by Tech Bro fascists like Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, et al - are contrarian simply because they can’t stand democracy and the social creation, over time, of norms, protective laws, ideas about equality, feminism, a general fear that MLK was right: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. They don’t like those ideas. Because they’re lucky business criminals who have billions and they only want MORE. Best to get at the deep source code of Justice and reverse the values: being a greedy fascist and racist, or a thoughtless jagoff is the correct way. The contrarian way. You’ll be more “productive” - kinda like some soul-less and very slow AI. Of course they think that’s what’s good for you.

There are far better ways to be a contrarian, and you know it.

There were always “red-pilled” morons who tried to convince you it’s all super simple, man: you were deceived…by women! Or “the liberals.” Or gawd help us the level of moronicity in this one is off the charts: “the deep state.” (Or jews, blacks, gays, the Illuminati, or any other faceless group fascists see as threatening because those groups are smarter, more creative, and more sexually free than they are.) Yea, just in the past 15 years Steve Bannon read in some book that we dudes all got rooked by the Scam: go ahead and act like an obnoxious prick and fight the brainwashing. (Hint: whenever someone is “smarter” than you by telling you they figured out how to not be “brainwashed” and here’s what to do: you’re being manipulated.) The feminist takeover has you acting like a wuss!2 They really wanna be raped, man. Go do it. Be dominant and unreflective about it. Chicks dig it. They like it when you slap ‘em around…it’s their nature. Take my word for it, eat a steak, drive a truck with big tires, act like an asshole: that’s your birthright as a Man!3

No. That makes women shun if not hate you, rightfully so.4 They will never dig you if you act like that, dude. Listen to women. It’s a really good way to learn about your own variety of masculinity. That’s a great way to be a man. You lose nothing with this, and only gain. The manosphere jagoffs give the implicit message: Not everyone is worthy of basic respect. That’s an ugly way to be. Don’t. If anything, do the opposite: Protect women and children and the needy. I think of that as very manly, but that’s merely my opinion, however well it’s cashed out over the years. Notice I say “a” way. Because there is no right way to express your own masculinity. Don’t overthink it. The manosphere bums have presented a duality about masculinity: Real or Woke. That’s an idiot’s game. Don’t buy it. It’s way more complex than that, like being a human is. Acting like a fucking asshole is not the way to be happy. And you do want to be happy. And these performative manosphere d-bags are trying to argue it’s so easy. It’s not. You have to make your own way, somehow. You have to make decisions and be wrong a lot of the time. The realization of your own masculinity is a constant project, maybe lifelong. I don’t think I had a really good, adequate map of my own masculine land until I was 40. Just be yourself. You’re masculine enough. All this is a lifelong learning experience, not some $99 cheeseball course you take at Alpha School Inc., taught by a bunch of obnoxious chuds out to capitalize on your insecurity, an insecurity they themselves helped to create. (“Find a need and fill it,” goes the old American con, fer crissakes and from here to eternity. These manosphere walking testosterone supplement ads create a need and fill it.)

It seems abundantly clear to me that we express our masculinity is so many different ways because, while we’re all men, we’re all different, genetically. Being a Man was not much theorized for 99.999% of our time as hominids. It’s completely absurd that we just found out the Answer, just as mass electronic communciations became a thing, and suddenly it was Teddy Roosevelt, Lindbergh, Mickey Mantle, John Wayne, and Vin Diesel?5

I had a young guitar student who was into Metallica, Slayer, etc. He was a nice kid. I teach in a room towering with stuffed bookshelves, piles upon piles everywhere. At one point he asked me if I’d read all these. I said no; no one who has books like this has read them all, we just are addicted to books and some of them function as part of a private research library. Then he asked me what’s the most important idea of the past 200 years, and I told him that’s an easy one: feminism. He looked aghast, because all he’d heard about it was negative. I said for 3000 years women have been treated like second class citizens. For no good reason. None at all. Furthermore, we are now faced with existential threats. We need to solve our problems if we want to be a success in the universe: me quietly quoting Buckminster Fuller. We need the best minds, women are 51% of the minds, there are women who are brilliant, and none of them should face extra hurdles just because they were born female. Are there females who have given feminism a bad name in some circles? I said I think so, yea, but they’re the exception, not the rule. Nothing about our sense of ego or masculinity should feel threatened by ability, or creativity, or genius, no matter where it comes from. I said I was a feminist for these reasons, and I think my opinion here should be so boring and common as to bring on yawns. The fact it’s now provocative for a man to give this opinion seemed like a symptom of the grave challenges we face as a species, the heating of the planet being at the top of the list in my estimation. I half thought this kid would quit guitar lessons with this old male weirdo-feminist, but he didn’t.

The only masculinity crisis is that we believe or think we have one. It’s unnecessary. It’s more like some devious ad campaign. They got boys and men to overthink it. (Or, paradoxically, for reasons I point our above, under-think it.) And yet: we gotta dig our way out of this morass of shit-for-brains masculinity, and my only advice here is: turn away from the manosphere. Fer crissakes! There’s an infinitude of other places to go, within. And they’re richer and more fulfilling and lead to true individualism and growth, and possibly, contentment and more felicity. Read poetry and novels, a very safe bet.

To longtime readers: I apologize for this rant, and it was one. But writing this was something I had to do at some point. Like a pebble in my shoe. Whether it will influence one person, in the slightest way, I have grave doubts. Sometimes you just have to state your case and then move on. Like a purgative. “Sound your barbaric yawp!,” was what Allen Ginsberg advised. I did. Thanx for indulging me?

To the Hardcore RAWphiles: this I consider to be a piece of writing (ahem!) from the 5th circuit, and writing and its logos so on the 3rd circuit, about the 4th circuit (socio-sexual), and how some extreme 2nd circuit types have been trying to influence the 4th circuit.

5

As I grew up I had ideas about masculinity: sports stars, guys like Paul Newman. And inevitably, you grow up and follow their stories and find they had varieties of difficulties of all sorts. And then you develop improved versions of what’s a good way to be. There were a panoply of models for me and I learned to see that very often they had public and private sides. It’s really difficult. Hence my strong take of Be Yourself. Models of masculinity have become more fraught. It’s gotten ever more so since ‘07, has it not?

This reminded me, while at the library, to check out Gennady Barabtarlo’s book, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments With Time (2018), in which Nabokov’s experiments with Dunne’s idea of precognitive dreams is discussed at length, based on Nabokov’s notebooks. I had perused it when it came out and here I was, doing that again. A curious note I either missed the first time or just forgot: after an eye operation, James Joyce’s friend Eugene Jolas read Dunne’s Experiment With Time to Joyce, which Joyce “regarded highly.”2

HG Wells encouraged Dunne to write about his time-hypothesis, or theory. Dunne had read and seemed highly influenced by Bergson’s and Einstein’s and Freud’s ideas about time, but CH Hinton’s What Is the Fourth Dimension? (1887) might have been the most influential. That book has a pedigree of influencing weird thought that’s longer than your arm. It’s one of the all-time weirdo books. Read it if you get the chance!

Now my daisy-chain-ridden mind recalled how Hinton (1853-1907) and Edwin Abbott (Flatland) knew each other at Oxford. Hinton married George Boole’s daughter, and another of Boole’s daughters, Ethel, a musician, novelist and radical, married rare book collector Wilfred Voynich, he of the unheimlich Voynich Manuscript.

Now, I admit: in my mind there’s the massive nexus of eccentric British geniuses here: from George Boole and Boolean algebra and modern computing, to Lewis Carroll/C. Dodgson to CH Hinton and Dunne and…their thought had a major influence on 20th century culture, especially in its imagination: Hinton’s idea of higher dimensions via “tesseracts” influenced Heinlein and many science fiction writers, the early British film pioneer Robert W. Paul3, Lovecraft, Borges, L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, Aleister Crowley, and even the pragmatist John Dewey. Higher dimensions feed much of the 20th century non-mainstream religious imaginary, no doubt. Dunne’s work was influential on not only Nabokov and Joyce, but TS Eliot, David Bohm, JB Priestley, Arthur Eddington, Aldous Huxley, Borges (of course!), and most recently, Dean Radin.

RAW and Math

As far as I know, an exegesis of Wilson and his education in mathematics hasn’t been done, and the following will not qualify, as the subject is too unwieldy for one 20 minute article. I want to only make some observations.

Wilson went to the most prestigious high school in the US, Brooklyn Polytechnic, and it’s probably not hyperbolic to assert that a kid in the late 1940s, studying math and engineering there matriculated with knowledge of Mathematics that graduate students at university are experiencing today, and I think this because at the time: 1948-1950 and TV was in its infancy; there was only radio and books. No Internet, nothing “social” in media. Wilson earned a degree in Engineering from the linked Brooklyn College, worked in civil engineering, and then decided his mind was less “practical” and more imaginative. He then embarked on other major areas of study, but he retained an avid interest in Math for a lifetime.

I’m interested here in not only his readings from JW Dunne and the Oxford crowd (including Lewis Carroll, whose work was a huge influence), but math and quantum mechanics, Leibniz and calculus and the I Ching and computers, the roots of synchronicity and the work of Pauli and Jung in a-causality, number symbolism, numerology, what Wilson scholar Eric Wagner calls “number poetry”, and archetypal thinking and numbers. RAW was the guy who turned me on to non-Aristotelian logics, especially logical systems that have more than two values of True and False. He alerted me to the history of non-Euclidean geometries, in which one of more axioms are tweaked and you get an entirely different way to map space/time. Wilson was, of course, as a trippy writer, ensconced in the endless ideas and uses of “infinity” and I learned about “Nicholas Bourbaki” from him. I think RAW’s ethusiasm for G. Spencer Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form is a perfect example of his particular fascination with certain mathematical ideation.

Very soon after my duck-dream and remembering much of the train of thought conveyed above, I wondered: what was Robert Anton Wilson’s philosophy of mathematics, really? I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to get a line on this, and here are some preliminary thoughts.

Alfred Korzybski

Around age 18, Wilson happened upon a 1933 book on a library shelf: Science and Sanity, by Korzybski. He took it home and read it in a weekend, which taxes the imagination, if you’ve held this book and paged through it. RAW continually re-read it for decades and I’m sufficiently convinced it’s his major influence in mathematical thinking. So what was Korzybski’s (1879-1950) Philosophy of Mathematics? I thought if I could discern Korzybski’s ideas about the “foundation” in math, I could get a better line on RAW’s.

Korzybski had a good friend who was a mathematician, Cassius J. Keyser (1862-1947), who thought math was a science of the forms of thought. Keyser was a professor of Mathematics at Columbia from 1904-1927. He was completely fascinated with the foundation-question of math, and he read, wrote about and discussed the ideas of Dedekind and Cantor, Giuseppe Peano (whose arithmetic influenced Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem of 1931), David Hilbert, Henri Poincaré, and of course Whitehead and Russell. Korzybski came from a Polish nobility and a culture that was deeply involved with math and logic. He was very much influenced by his friend Keyser, who was 17 years older than him. The question about math and the philosophy of its foundations seems to boil down to three different orientations4:

1. Platonism: numbers exist, hidden, in the real world, we just need to discover them. Mathematical objects not only exist in the world, but were here before we were. There are infinite sets, uncountable geometric manifolds, and imaginary numbers that actually work in practical equations. If we have a meaningful question about an aspect of mathematics, there is a definite answer, whether we can figure it out or not. Kurt Gödel was a Platonist, and many other of our greatest mathematicians are, too. It seems RAW’s mentor Buckminster Fuller was a Platonist, too.

2. Formalism: there are no mathematical objects, only axioms, definitions, and theorems. We use rules to distinguish one mathematical form from another and when we derive a formula, it’s not about anything. It’s just a string of symbols. When we apply these formulae to the actual world, only then does it acquire a meaning.5 As in: true or false? But the truth or falsity has to do only with its physical manifestation in the world. Formalists are very impressed that we can alter the axiom system - which Wilson calls “game rules” - and come up with radically different forms. There is no “reality” to, say, the number line. When we tweaked things and some Engineer applied that form to some real-world problem, did it work? It did? Cool! If it didn’t work when some Scientist or Engineer tried to solve a problem, well at least it’s formally self-coherent and interesting, if not “beautiful.”

3. Constructivism: The only real objects in math are derived from a finite construction, so, say, the set of real numbers or an infinite set is poppycock. There are many variations of Constructivist math, and most of it is over my head, frankly. Let us note that one of the founders of Russian Constructivist mathematics was AA Markov, of the Markov Chain, which is a stochastic system that describes a series of possible events based in probability in which each event is attained by the previous events…it’s where Wilson derived one of his most memorable characters who runs through Illuminatus! and the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy: Markoff Chaney.6

I soon found out there were Intuitionists (realize: I have no background in Mathematics, but merely a Big Fan), who are thought of as a subset of Constructivists.

After all this, and another re-reading of Korzybski, I caught this, on p.752 of Science and Sanity:

The study of mathematics as a form of human behaviour, appears necessary prior to the possibility of formulating any laws of semantics. My problems of mathematical foundations do not belong to mathematics but to psycho-logics which would not disregard anthropology, and would not be vitiated by our persistence in the use of structurally inappropriate (elementalist) “psychologies,” “logics” and an innocence of mathematics. The “intuitionist” and the “intuitional” formalist schools of mathematics must be considered as a legitimate, yet not properly formulated, protest against the older elementalism.

It’s as if Korzybski wants to join the Intuitionist-Constructivists, but maybe they are only “protesting” against the Old Guard. He seems to me super-enthusiastic about our invention of the calculus, and gung-ho about naturalizing how calculus might work in all our everyday thinking, but he doesn’t seem convinced by the Formalists or the Platonists. He seems some sort of Constructivist to me.7

Korzybski does not seem to be pinned down here but I currently think of him as some sort of Constructivist, because this entire fat crazy book of his seeks to bring the calculus to social thought in daily life. Why? Because math - especially calculus - is the closest “language” to the structure of our minds. His entire sprawling morass of brilliance and weirdness here invents usable devices to make our thinking less prone to error. His logic, rather than three, four, five, or six values, is a logic of probabilities, and is an open system.

It strikes me that rarely if ever does a mathematician just write something like, “By the way: I’m a Formalist, and don’t ever think I have anything do with the Constructivists! The Platonists I get along with just fine, but they are mistaken in thinking integers exist out there in the real world..” No: they just have some sort of predisposition, and go from there. Not that I’ve read all mathematicians. This is simply an observation based on a limited number of delvings.

That RAW was not a Platonist but closer to Korzybski’s Intuitionism: “In daily life, the software of most readers of this book consists of Indo-European language categories and Indo-European grammar. In advanced science, the software included both of these and also the categories and structures of mathematics. […]Math, like language, functions as a code which imposes its own structures on the data it describes.”8

“The nervous system is concrete, tangible, definite and scientifically analyzable. It is, beyond all doubt, the medium through which we know everything we know, probably including much that we don’t know that we know. All of our knowledge is neurological; all of our evaluations are neuro-semantic; all our reactions are neuro-muscular, neuroglandular, or neuro-endocrine. As Korzybski says in Science and Sanity, even mathematics (as known to us) is human mathematics, having the structure of the nervous system. […] Our binary notation is based on the off-on (digital) of the neuron; our decimal system is based on our ten fingers, etc. More basically, mathematics is a set of dodges for translating our dynamic (sensory) lower nervous-system process-observations into static (abstract) higher-nervous system formulas (Languages, symbol systems).”9

In discussing Niels Bohr, who is also a huge influence on Wilson’s ideas about math as a human invention, Wilson mentions how Bohr “added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrödinger, and his model of the atom - the Bohr model, it’s called - has been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr had invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn’t believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else - the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another - Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works.”10

“However you look at it, whether we derived math from logic or from game-rules or from ‘intuition’ or from the concept of class or set, both the actual history of math and the debates about ‘the foundations of mathematics’ that have raged for over one hundred years now lead to the same conclusion: humans somehow invented math, just as mysteriously as they somehow invented language. We don’t understand how we did it, but it allows us to understand our hallucinations better. In short — as Einstein once said — the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”11

Wilson and The Laws of Form

Bertrand Russell thought very highly of G. Spencer Brown’s thinking and helped him get academic gigs. In 1969 a slim volume appeared in England, the Laws of Form. My paperback edition has a blurb from Russell on the cover: “One of the most unique and celebrated philosophical studies of our time…’Reveals a new calculus of great power.’” The Whole Earth Catalog is also blurbed on the cover: “Should be in the hands of all young people - no lower age limit required.” As I started reading it, I immediately was reminded of the newborn’s undifferentiated wholeness of perception, which soon gives way from “this is not that…these two things are separate.” Indeed, Brown takes off from this: your skin as a boundary and separation from what’s inside your body to the environment of that body…and builds it up to what Robert Anton Wilson thought was the building of the human mind from the infant’s “formless and void” reality: when the baby realizes its first imprint on the oral-bio-survival circuit, it acquires structure, and in a sense becomes that structure:

“The entire process is analyzed in G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form; and Brown was writing about the foundations of mathematics and logic. But every sensitive reader knows that Brown is also talking about a process we have all passed through in creating, out of an infinite ocean of signals, those particular constructs we call ‘myself’ and ‘my world.’ Not surprisingly, many acid-heads have said that Brown’s math is the best description ever written of an acid trip.”12

This is what all the Lewis Carroll, serialist precognitive dream, 4th dimension British eccentric genius was leading up to, I take it. Of course I take it: I was the one who abstracted all that earlier in order to illustrated something later. Or I’m just dreaming I did.

In discussing the mystical metaprogramming circuit, in which the artist paints himself standing in the field, painting, and all the “paradoxes” we can think of, such as a mirror that can reflect anything, but not retain the image unless the perceiver consciously decides to retain it; we can always reflect anything by changing the angle of the mirror:

“This is analyzed mathematically in G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form; an analog, using not Brown’s math but Gödel’s, and employing illustrations from the music of Bach and the paintings of Escher, is Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach.”13 Later in Prometheus Rising: “ ‘The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself,’ Spencer Brown once noted.14

One of Wilson’s favorite characters, Simon Moon, appears as a hacker in his novel The Trick Top Hat, smoking hashish and, “He exhaled a fog of cannabis molecules and returned his attention to his favorite bedtime reading, Brown’s Laws of Form.” The hashish and Brown’s book seem to teleport him, and he has an “out-of book” experience in which his idea: “that all that exists is information: everything else is mammalian sense-impression and thus hallucinatory” takes hold, and then: He suddenly sees the entire contents of a novel, a “miracle of microminiaturization in the frontal lobes…” and it’s the previous novel in the trilogy, The Universe Next Door, which was based on the interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave equation that everything is inevitable and pre-determined. But Simon, stoned out of his gourd and tripped-out on Laws of Form, saw the other novel’s controlling idea as emanating from Brown’s key line: “to cross again is not to cross.” Once we’ve made a distinction between inside and out, or this and that, we can’t go back again. If you’re feeling a bit weird by now, and you like this feeling, then Robert Anton Wilson’s novels are probably for you.15

One of the main developers of Chaos Theory, the mathematician Ralph Abraham, was at UC Santa Cruz for a long time, and knew RAW, Terence McKenna and that whole crowd. Abraham: “In the 1960s a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the communities of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics you have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness.”16

What was this article all about? To sum up: there is a very common notion that some mathematicians are Platonists, and they seek to develop self-consistent and elegant mathematic systems that are interesting and beautiful, and they don’t care if they apply in the real world. Then there are scientists using the language of mathematics to solve problems in the real world. But there are also intellectuals like Robert Anton Wilson who see the entire general field and want to turn us all on to the wonderful, trippy weirdness of mathematical experience, and the potent ideas found therein. It’s the aesthetics of mathematics. Further, mathematics is but one device among very many that Wilson used within his overall rhetoric of inspiration and wonder.

Finally, since mass education and literacy really got going in the 19th century, certain eccentric, genius types of minds with mathematical bends to them have sought to turn on the general public to the astonishing possibilities of math. RAW is but one. Who else do you like along these lines?

16

Found on p.14 of The Disinformation Book of Lists, by Russ Kick. Just up the highway from Santa Cruz, the Berkeley physicists, who had PhDs but couldn’t get jobs because of government cutbacks and who are described in MIT science historian David Kaiser’s How The Hippies Saved Physics, were also some of those who used psychedelics to think about math and physics in new ways. In 1973, Alan Watts and John Lilly organized the AUM Conference at Esalen in honor of G. Spencer Brown. John Brockman decided then and there to be a literary agent for all those countercultural intellectuals. Brockman began the Reality Club in the mid-1980s, that he hosted, semi-formally, with Heinz Pagels, a brilliant physicist who died very young, accidentally on a mountaineering expedition. His wife was the religious scholar Elaine Pagels. Often Elaine was the only woman at the Reality Club meetings, of the only one allowed in. Soon the Reality Club and all its scientist-intellectuals intertwined with TED Talks, then Wired magazine, then Brockman’s “Digerati” in the 1980s. Now, John Brockman is widely known as a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. How things change!, eh?

1.) There’s a commonly held idea that much of the diarrhea-mind of the current administration was fueled by a co-optation of Berkeley English professor Peter Dale Scott’s term “Deep Politics.” Remember in 2015-2017, when these business criminals kept saying they were gonna get rid of the “deep state”? Not only was it what arch-Trumpie Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with shit,” but it was the exact opposite of getting rid of the “deep state,” or how do you have ICE, Palantir founder Thiel sitting in the White House with the 34-time convicted felon and rapist, who, most recently as I write this, threatened to “end a civilization”…for what reason? (It’s still in the balance as I write, and if your area of the globe didn’t get hit by nukes from…Pakistan? North Korea? Drones from Iranian nationalists? Whatever…hey: you got lucky!) What was this all about in the first place? Ach! I’ve drifted off already. Back to it.

2.) Peter Dale Scott: “My notion of deep politics…posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with equanimity.”2 I’ve found Scott’s poetry books to be most insightful regarding this general notion, but most folks link “deep politics” to his nonfiction book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Some of us get to these “facts” while doing research for something else, some actively dig for these facts. I think in my case it was a bit of both, and I distinctly recall a period in my early 20s (id est, the 1980s), when after doing some summer reading to “catch up” on what I thought the Kool Kidz had read, I devoured 1984, Brave New World, then Fahrenheit 451, which led me to read Chomsky, Richard Hofstadter, The Power Elite, Michael Parenti, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, The Search For the “Manchurian Candidate”, Friendly Fascism by Bertram Gross, among many others, all of which seems to have led to Philip K. Dick and then, finally, by what still seems an accident, Robert Anton Wilson.

I had gotten myself into a vivid noir universe. I now “knew” but at what price? RAW, being always very many steps ahead of me, not only knew about these states of mind, but had ways to get out of them if they got too unwieldy and terrifying.

And there was that period in which I realized what I had done to myself by using a library card and buying tattered used copies of these sacred tomes: I had gone through the looking glass, now a trite metaphor for this sort of thing. Trite as it was, it did lead me to Chapel Perilous and I found I now had to learn to psychologically deal with all this “marginalized”3 information: now you’re alienated in a significant way from most of your peers who suck up corporate media and do not read books like this. Further and solid Chapel Perilous stuff: you (yea: you…and me) wondered why you felt so driven to know all this in the first place? You can’t put that genie back. Something seems to have compelled you. You were only playing some baseball in the neighborhood, totally innocent, fouled off a pitch into that mean old man’s garage door window, and you can’t un-break that glass. Now what?

You asked for it and ya got it: the world suddenly has many many more visible hues, and a lot of them dark, murky and seemingly fine-tuned to a baleful frequency. The heart of darkness of human nature has countless tendrils linked to facts and you never saw any of this coming in your endless summer consumerist sunshine and swimming pools lower-middle class/quasi-respectable white trash adolescence in white suburbia. (Talkin’ ‘bout me, here, not you.) We (meaning you and me) had initiated ourselves. What the hell do you do with this stuff? Because now when you talk about it with your peers they don’t understand a goddamned thing you’re saying. This might be one reason I “involuntarily suppressed” facts, as Peter Dale Scott says. “The social and psychological costs of not doing so.” Or: go out and nab a nice batch of highly erudite new friends, which wasn’t going to happen for me, not in my situation.

3.) One major track all that reading in my 20s set me on, never to come back, still learning, aún aprendo, was class and class interests, class consciousness, class hatred, class warfare, etc. Like most idiot Americans, I didn’t know a damned thing about “class”, unlike my British friends. Americans have been trained to not only not know anything about class, but to not even think about class in any appreciable way. Rather, Pavlovianly, we all were taught to think of ourselves as “middle class.” At night all cows are black. Some people are really damned rich; others are dirt poor. I must be somewhere in the middle, so okay…now I don’t need to think about this any more. Everyone I know is “middle class”! Primate status and ethology shows us we have a need to know where we stand in the greater group. How do you know? You look around. Some people dress better. Some people live in dilapidated houses in neighborhoods prone to violence. Some live in houses behind high walls, with a front yard that’s bigger than three football fields. Some people talk a certain way and go to prep schools and talk about where they will “summer” or “winter” this year. Some of your friends have a brother and a sister from different dads, another from a different mom, and when you go over to their house there’s five old cars parked on the lawn and a lot of screaming and throwing things, etc.

I soon realized class was a “thing” indeed, and eventually, felt a perverse confirmation when watching The Good Shepherd, a 2006 movie about the CIA and James Jesus Angleton, and this particular scene. “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”4 This was how I had learned, felt and internalized who the “Yankee” ruling class were after reading such books as Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and the Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas to Watergate. And the Cowboys were worse. Currently I see the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaires as Cowboys, basically. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

4.) Once you’ve taken your own peculiar path and suddenly found yourself in a similar Chapel Perilous, what did you do to get out?5 Once you’ve done this to yourself (I still think of it like this, ever more so since the rise of Internet and the collapse of deep reading of actual books), you’re initiated, you’re part of some brethren that includes women. Maybe a dead-eyed cynicism toward everything is your personal jihad. It was mine. You probably didn’t bargain for this. And the very wealthy and powerful see you as a threat, implicitly.6 Commonly, you can say or write anything, as long as it doesn’t make a difference. Once in Chapel Perilous, to use RAW’s complex metaphor, it’s odorless, weightless, tasteless and not detected by any instruments. Nevertheless it’s Real AF. Wilson tells us the way out is to arm yourself: “with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor…”7 Before I had found Wilson, I think I got out by giving myself over to the universe and que sera sera: my agency was limited, and besides, I was a vast nobody to Them.

5.) Gabriel floats out the idea of having a look at Elite Theory at a moment when the Dear Leader plays with all our lives (for “ratings? to distract us from the idea that he may have raped a young girl?) and it might be a good idea if you haven’t gone There already. If you’re maybe one of these people (then how did you find yourself here?), forewarned is forearmed, okay? And what a “There” it seems! What is Elite Theory? Just asking opens you up to charges of being a “conspiracy theorist.” Ah! The irony!

Gabriel Kennedy mentions Ferdinand Lundberg and his study of the wealthiest families in America. The idea being that, like the Angleton character played by Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd, these families and their wealth have…interests. They want to keep what they have. They want more. Nothing is ever enough.8They don’t want YOU around, snooping. What do they want of you? Let us posit They don’t think of You in particular, but You as an element in a set of undesirables, although some of You do actual work to make them more money, which means more power.

Whatever. Let us get on with our work, armed with the sword of reason, wand of intuition, pentacle of valor and cup of sympathy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald9, an outsider who grew up with the rich and powerful, famously said, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think they are better than we are. They are different.”10 And sociological theories of this class, like C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Thorstein Veblen’s A Theory of the Leisure Class, and G. Wiliam Domhoff’s Who Rules America? show a lot about how They think, how they were schooled, what their parents told them about reality, who they are allowed to marry, what privilege is, etc. After reading these and other books I understood the stark reality of Fitzgerald’s “different than us.” I was never going to be rich (far from it: always in fear of homelessness: a long story): in what ways do you see “reality” differently when you are very rich?11

6.) Regarding Ferdinand Lundberg: his work in the finance mavens and that ilk was a big influence on Ralph Nader, whose work was singled out (as sorta evil) by soon-to-be-appointed to SCOTUS Lewis Powell, in his famous Memorandum. (Google “Powell Memo” to get your foot into Elite Theory Studies if you need some place to start!) If you’re not rich, the Powell Memo (1971) has affected your life, slam dunk. Don’t you want to know what it was?

7.) One of the things Powell advised, when approached by the US Chamber of Commerce, whining that the top kids graduating from the best universities no longer wanted to go into Business, but wanted to do something meaningful with their lives (all that Grateful Dead, Beatles, cannabis, psychedelics, seeing your friend’s brother come home from Vietnam casketed, etc): one of the things Powell advised was to flood the zone with shit: endow right wing pro-business, anti-labor, anti-creeping socialist, anti-environmental protection “think tanks.” Like the Heritage Foundation, who came up with Project 2025.

8.) Are you a member of a think tank? No? Thought so. Let us try an idea from Wilson, that Gabriel Kennedy addresses: rather than define the Power Elite as some almost unseen, amorphous group of rich greedy assholes who have bought off Congress, try and see you and your friends as the Power Elite. Your cohort:including some people you know of but maybe haven’t met but who you’re sure align with your ideals and values: think about it for awhile. Does access to the corridors of power elude you at the moment? It probably does. Does unfathomable wealth not figure in your group? Probably. Then what do you have? Ideas, techniques, humor, and values that probably harmonize with over half the population. That’s not nothing. What do you do?

I don’t know, but I will advise you what not to do, which is #9:

9.) In my reading of the long story of working class people fighting for scraps, the one thing that shows up over and over is the very wealthy and powerful class playing Divide and Conquer. And my adult life has witnessed Divide and Conquer as the major theme: with mass telecommunications: 80% of the population are a threat to the wealthy, so their think tanks come up with ideas about how the wealthy are not the problem: it’s the gays, the blacks, the Jews, the poor, the immigrants, the feminists, the “Hollywood Elite”, the liberals, the university professors, uppity people of all stripes, brown people, ISIS, al-Qaeda, popular culture figures who slip up and say something true in public, etc. That’s the function of Rupert Murdoch’s12 Fox “News” from the get-go: divide and conquer. Did it work? Don’t answer that.

The one group I listed above that actually has some salience for me is the university professors. The American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was there, said the Vietnam war made far too many professors give up on the US, thinking it was no longer redemption-worthy: built on slavery and genocide, now policing the world against falling dominoes: best to do nothing but teach European-style critique, and thus we got Niche Studies. And the Labor Class was forgotten. Eventually the Democratic Party abandoned Labor, starting around 1973. Neoliberal thought fed this. Powell’s right wing think tanks and university endowed chairs fed this. Professors taught the US was not worth saving. Tear it down. Shit’s irredeemable. They didn’t put it so baldly, but together with a generation brought up on Internet, students now enter universities barely able to read. And when they can read, it’s for explaining why other groups (not the wealthy) are Bad. All too often, when I read educated women, I find out that some men behave very badly; therefore all “men” are bad. They know there are some men who aren’t rapists, but to write “some” makes their argument sound weaker, so just tar all men as rapacious thugs. Divide and conquer. The perennial winner for the economic elite, from here to eternity. Solidarity can go sit with the kids in the infantilized woke-triggered safe space and listen to what they have to say about the harm done to them by…words? Ideas? Opinions they had never heard about in their petty asinine precious little 19 year old lives?

Certain libertarian economists had already pointed out that most sheepskin from elite universities were always about “signaling” anyway. What’s the point any more? It’s a damned shame, because universities were probably the only institution to combat stupidity and inequality and racism.

Rather: save your $90K/year tuition and use your library card and get together with your Power Elite friends and build large (metaphorical) wooden horses - you know the kind - and chisel away at the Bullshit little by little, with the Picture always in the back of your minds of a future of meaningful work, equality of the sexes, living the reality of Race is not based in Science, mutual aid, and a planet healing from carbon dioxide OD. Don’t hold your breath for the Democrats to become sane, etc. Why? Citizens United, friends: money is speech. Just buy off Congress. It lo! It has been done. Stay in touch with your vision. You know: your values. Because, while this may all sound like sky-pie, it’s also true that just about no one wants the world as it’s currently constituted, April 2026. You and your friends number in the hundreds of millions. Is human civilization worth saving and making better? Am I naive? What choices are left?

Learning about social theories of class and class warfare is for grownups. Are you in? What will you teach me?

11

Quick shout-out to Edward St. Aubyn and his Patrick Melrose novels! Novels will always do more for me in understanding “how they think” and their assumptions about social reality than non-fiction sources, but candor and reliably accurate insight in fiction about the ultra-wealthy and powerful seems tricky. An Anthropology professor I loved told me this was one of the tribes in the world that are the most difficult to write about from an ethnography standpoint, because their wealth functions like the cuttlefish’s ink: when you approach, they make everything murky, cloudy, and well nigh impossible to see. This is especially true with the many-generations rich. Often, gangsters and the people like the current POTUS seem to want everyone to know how rich they are, and I will never fully understand the American underclass’s admiration of these PsOS.

“My view of history and politics is that we need more than one model there, too. Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking. If you don’t stop thinking you will finally face the Chaos that every one of my heroes and heroines eventually confronts.”1

What about consensus reality?

“I regard all maps and models as fiction; Darwin, Genesis, Einstein, Joyce all seem good fiction. Of course, some models seem more useful for a time than others. But I doubt that anybody, not even me, is clever enough to have created a model that will prove useful at all times and in all circumstances, never needing revision. I call people who think they have such a model model-theists, and regard them as custard-heads. Consensus reality — or conventional wisdom — especially needs this kind of skepticism because nobody even usually thinks of challenging it.”2

Why is my - or anyone else’s - reality not the correct, accurate, or “one true” reality?

“Our words are not the sense impressions they denote (the word ‘water’ will not make you wet).

“Our sense impressions are not the events in space-time which trigger these impressions. (When a rock hurts you, the hurt is not ‘in’ the rock but in the interaction of the rock with your senses).

“Our scientific or philosophic or religious models (orchestrations of words and other symbols) are not the non-verbal universe they seek to describe or explain;

“The menu does not taste like the meal or have the same nutrients or additives as the meal, etc.

“In short, our mental filing cabinet may serve us well - or serve us very poorly - in classifying and comprehending the world, but even in the best case, where it serves us very well (for a while…) we should never confuse it with the world.”3

Finally - I could literally go on for 20,000 words - Wilson, in an interview with Patrick Huyghe of Omni magazine in 1997: “I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (BS).”4

Why did Wilson make this such a big deal? Why is this repetition of “reality tunnels”5 and language hacking and glosses6, E-Prime7, interpretations, guerrilla ontology8, map/territory distinctions9, uses of multiple egos10 within our “selves”, and, in general “maybe logic”11 such a huge-azzed frikkin’ deal in his work? There are a lot of reasons, but I will cite his personal experience as a working class intellectual who was born in 1932 and saw what the Nazis did, then the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima, then one of his heroes (Einstein)12 saying, “Everything has changed, save for our way of thinking.” Wilson thinks - I argue - that deliberate practice of doubt in all things and a rigorous model agnosticism in general might get us through the bottleneck of History, and he was fond of asserting he was on the side of humanity, and wanted us to be a success in the universe, and not a dead end. He advocates for us to change our “way of thinking” so we don’t go extinct.

Some Precursors to Model Agnosticism

Not knowing is true knowledge.

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick,

Then you can move toward health.

-Lao-Tzu, now commonly referred to as Laozi, Tao Te Ching, (or: Dao De Jing), 4th century before the common era.

Pyrrho (c.365 BCE-275 BCE) wrote nothing substantial that survives, so what we know about him and his skepticism is derived from reports by others, some of which seem muddled. He seems to have accompanied Alexander on his campaign to India, where he encountered naked wise men, and Diogenes Laertius says Pyrrho copped his philosophy from them, but this seems doubtful. I fantasize that Diogenes was right, and those gymnosophists in India were sadhus: drop-out wise men into cannabis and tantric sex, but that is a fantasy and tells you more about me than Pyrrho. Pyrrho seems to have advocated suspended judgement about all things as a way to attain tranquility. It seems likely he said something like, “Neither our sensations nor our opinions tell the truth or lie.” This would be an early form of Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory.” We know Pyrrho’s general approach was highly influential and led to a school of Pyrrhonic skepticism.13

One source of equilibrium and/or tranquility that might be derived from deliberately making yourself unattached (or far less attached) to some worldview or ideology or religious thinking or set of thought-processes would be from this kind of skepticism. That which you were encouraged to think was very very serious indeed now merely qualifies as something you think is important, but you can laugh at it, too. Because we humans probably made it up. (see the note on Nazis and the bomb above, though, too: these things seem to break through to become existential topics that are “very serious indeed.”)

Montaigne (1533-1592) invented the modern essay form and displays a general skepticism throughout. One of my favorites:

Folly is a scurvy quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself. I enter into conference, and dispute with great liberty and facility, foreasmuch as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and wherein to take any deep root; no propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production of human wit.14

Montaigne likes the most learned discourse about a subject but also fanciful bullshit that someone comes up with; he doesn’t really believe any of it, but he does have strong guesses as to what’s more likely closer to the truth. He wants a “strong and manly familiarity and conversation: a friendship that pleases itself in the sharpness and vigour of its communication…”15 He loves it when his friends call him out and note his contradictions. I like this: “We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining, look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing.” He doesn’t want to make a determination so much as hear an interesting view of it.

Montaigne seems to have had quite an influence on Francis Bacon, who wrote, “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” It’s this last part that Model Agnosticism disagrees with: you begin in doubt and stay there, because learning, novelty, discoverability, humor, absurdity, and humility can only increase when we are constantly in doubt, but are working with the best models we have “now.”

Gotta skip through some notable skeptics in this time-march for brevity’s sake…

In the 19th century Nietzsche has many lines about doubt and epistemic humility, but probably my favorite is “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.”16

In an early Canto by Ezra Pound he uses the the term “ex omniformis,” which was (probably) taken from the Neoplatonist Porphyry: What Pound was getting at: every intellect is capable of assuming any shape.17

In the Roaring 20th century, skepticism became a Big-Azzed Deal, but so did mass media, advertising, and mind-manipulation techniques. In 1962’s Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan asserted that the technique of the 20th century is “multiple models of experimental exploration,” also known as “suspended judgment.”18 And we’re back to Pyrrho, but only with radio, TV, Internet, etc.19

Once you practice Model Agnosticism, you will delight in finding allies, everywhere. A memorable character, Perkus Tooth, is described in Jonathan Lethem’s novel Chronic City: “Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. The worst thing was to be sure you knew what you knew, the mistake the New Yorker’s font induced. The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream - below it lay everything that mattered.”20

Okay…there’s that guy wielding the hook standing in the wings, ready to pull me offstage, so I’ll just say…got any Qs? I’ll try to answer them in the comments. Also: I will elaborate on aspects of this epistemology, but probably in future Stack-spews. I consider your comments to be a rich part of the OG dealio; so fire away and thanks for reading!

20

Chronic City, Lethem, p.13

Robert Anton Wilson, as a genius-teenager who’d studied mathematics and engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic High School, grappled with this new interpretation of epistemology. Through his 20s he linked it to not only the physical sciences and their language (math), but the multi-perspectivalism that had exploded in film (especially the use of montage in artists like Eisenstein, Griffith, and Orson Welles), Art (Picasso’s cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, etc), psychoanalysis (after Freud, there was a cascade of competing theories of what’s going on with us in our psyches - “psychological relativism” - and there were many disagreements), the use of language (especially Korzybski and Wittgenstein), relativity in the world’s cultures (the new Cultural Anthropology led by Franz Boas and his students, beginning in the late 1880s/1890s), poetry and literature (especially the Modernist formal-explosions, led by Pound and Joyce), the eye/brain perception psychology of Adelbert Ames and how we physically perceive phenomena, the uncertainty in Mathematics imposed by Gödels’s Incompleteness Theorem of 1931, human’s use of technology - especially media-communication - which alters the entire parameters of culture as it evolves, comparative religions, Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, and Crowley’s anarchist Do It Yourself gimmicks to alter one’s perception of “reality.” (NB: to put the word “reality” in quotes seems the essence of this very radical view of epistemology.)

This litany is merely partial.

Eventually Wilson had taken the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and extended it to our entire perceptual field, in every domain. Everything was relative, and Wilson advocated for an empirical approach to all our perceptions, in which we “model” reality. We ought to be conscious of the realities we build, how they were built, and that those realities will never prove "correct” and be the “end of story” and especially, our models are “muddles” and will never be “certain.” And furthermore, this was exhilarating.

The problem of having evolved our gigantic brains, with language and culture, is that we were never issued an Operating Manual and a massive glitch was the idea of CERTAINTY. Absolute certainty is a huge mistake, and can - and has - led to misery and mass deaths, for no good “reason” once we soberly kick back and analyze the Situation. There is no Platonic Certainty; there are only relative truths that have been found to be more or less helpful, given certain domains, but they are always subject to further knowledge and emendations. Far from being sad and frustrating, this should be seen as the very essence of living and thinking as a free person in the world. It is liberatory!

All of this Wilson labeled “Model Agnosticism.”1 In order to put it into play in your life, you must start regularly dissecting, probing and laughing at your own beliefs while still holding them tentatively, but taking them far less seriously than you had been taking them, because they will eventually be found to have been some illegitimate authority’s dogma that you just drank in and decided it was “right.” Cop to it: we all have this experience.

Now you need to be your own little scientist. In EVERYTHING. Doubt everything. Yes, even that you are sitting there, right now. Hey, maybe you’re sitting there, but it’s not what you think, as Bishop Berkeley argued: you’re in the Mind of God.

So, like Buddha: doubt, and find your own light. Why? Because there’s a very high likelihood what you think is “true” isn’t the full picture. You are now open to new information for the rest of your life, and you must sift this info into an array of categories you know are pragmatic and fictional. You ask yourself, Why do I think this is true? Where did I get this? How can I better question and probe this to yield something bigger and more interesting and funnier? What don’t I know that will make this more interesting and helpful?

Further: you will find there are some Models of phenomena (it’s all phenomena) that you favor over others. The others might be more accurate than your favorite one, but you’ll find out more about this with new data/information/knowledge/cogitation/wisdom, this last term being the most enigmatic by far. You are building a hierarchy of models of phenomena which are subject, like plate tectonics, to shift over time: Is Science the best way to know? If you think, hell to the yea, then consider at least three other models that compete with Science, and take them seriously for awhile, and now you’re playing with ideas, a heady perennial game. hell: you might even be thinking for yourself!, a rare thing indeed. Are there certain bugs built into the structure of our language that lead us astray? Are the differences between Men and Women really what I think they are? In what ways might I be wrong? Is race actually a thing? Take the other side for awhile and see what you learn. Is someone really out to “get me”? How much play does “luck” have in our lives? Is reading online good enough or do you need to log off and actually read real books, slowly and with deliberation? (I’ve tipped my hand on this one.) Is music really just “auditory cheesecake,” as the hyper-Rationalist Steve Pinker has argued?2 Etc, etc, etc.

When you have practiced this new epistemology for a few years, your world and you have changed. Humility is endless. Your world is larger than most other peoples’ worlds, because you’re constantly open. I daresay you will have gotten smarter, because you’re always testing models. Your world is funnier than almost everyone else’s (a sure sign you have the hang of this). You’re generally happier than other people, too, because you’re not constantly brought low because other people won’t conform to your One True Reality that you somehow got super lucky enough to acquire in some podunk backwater by age 15. They are Wrong; I am Right: why is the world so terrible? Why can’t everyone conform to Meeee? The traditional, non Model Agnostic epistemology is a set-up for frustration, anger, sorrow, depression, anxiety, cruelty and violence, etc, because this is not what my daddy said the world is and should be. We see that Naive Realism is childish and ignorant, and if held on into our thirties: fucking stupid indeed.

Wilson said in an interview 13 years before his death that not believing anything and not disbelieving anything is “one of the most important ideas in my books.”3 This Model Agnosticism runs like a source code through all of Wilson’s 40-odd books, both fiction and non-fiction. He even wondered about this separation of “fiction” and non- as reified categories. If we just constantly invent or discover reality, how is this not an aspect of fiction? Why are the holy books shelved in the non-fiction section of the library? Are novels true statements about someone’s world? What is the relation between facts and “reality”?

A major caveat that I must add, after practicing Model Agnosticism for 30 years: there seems to be some foundational aspect to our being that, while probably permeable and fluid to some extent, nevertheless seems mysterious and comparably obdurate compared to the epistemological approach outlined above: our values.

This topic feels an entire wilderness unto itself. In philosophy, it’s called axiology, the study of values. On one hand, I don’t think most people have ever articulated their own values to themselves in any extensive or significant way; that’s just my experience probing the world and listening to people for the last 30-35 years. People like to hear themselves say certain things are their values, but they then seem to go on actually living around 176 degrees from those values, so most casual values-chatter is pretty much bullshit.4 The term “values” has mostly been co-opted by political parties and apparatchik-grunts out to tribally “get” the other guys.5 It’s a thorough debasement of a golden thing: after all our questioning of “reality” via Model Agnosticism, what are some things that we just can’t shake? If our values are also subject to Model Agnosticism, which values seem pretty much non-negotiable? I will mention three of my own values, if only to illustrate how I take this “foundational” thinking, this undergirding of the epistemological stance of Model Agnosticism Writ Large, to work.

1. Cruelty is the worst we can do. In this I have been heavily influenced by Richard Rorty, after many years of studying his texts within the Neo-Pragmatist approach to knowledge. Rorty says this is the core value of liberal thinkers. Whatever we do, we must avoid cruelty. You can see how much my values have taken a beating recently, in the US. It’s not amusing, not funny, not enlightening. It challenges many models of “reality” I’ve had.

2. Actions taken in the world should always have Human Survivability built into them. If actions are taken that threaten the survivability of humans (and yes, I am a chauvinist here) in favor of, say, the demand of shareholders in some specific stock, this I find deeply troubling. Again: lots of body-blows taken, for a long time now. Not funny/amusing. Deeply disturbing.

3. No one is “born better” or superior than anyone else based on geography, skin color, physiognomy, religion, wealth, or family name. Some are born with more advantage.

These are three of my core values. I think about them daily. They reflect and influence pretty much all of my thinking. Where did they come from? This, again, seems mysterious, and all I’ll say now is my own lived experience and biography. And it seems a safe bet that while subject to accidents of birth and other factors I had nothing to do with, these values have a significant influence on my model-making in all domains of “reality.”

I think it incredibly underrated to take months to suss out your own hierarchy of values, write them down, think about them, test them, and live by them. In a political sense, I see this as Jeffersonian.

I will briefly (ha!) remark on the joy of being wrong, because wrongness just reinforces this epistemology: “reality” is always more encompassing than any model we make. In Kathryn Schulz’s terrific book on “wrongology” she writes:

Of all the things we are wrong about, the idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.6

My wrongness: some of the models we consciously build feel a lot like appearing at a crime scene and finding very little evidence to work with. What, then, do we do? We use a certain type of logic, one that’s more basic than induction or deduction. This is the logic of abduction: forming some sort of guess or hypothesis, then seeing if we can gain a toehold from that and work towards a viable knowledge-construct. Thomas Kuhn in his epochal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions thought that all our sciences started like this. Big Q: what is the world made of? Different Pre-Socratics: Water. Or Fire. Or Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Or constant change. Or illusion of change, etc. Eventually, you get a science, like Astronomy, in which, everyone agrees, for over 1000 years, that the sun revolves around the Earth. Etc. Hey, Ptolemy “proved” it in that big book he done got.

I had long built models of “Political Reality”: who is really in charge? Where does the ultimate power reside in my country, the United Snakes? This one’s really hard to figure out. I still don’t have it. I will never have it. For one, I think I must rely a lot on intuition about how the domesticated primate robotically goes about its life, what others think is very valuable in the way of “being.”

I had had models about the very rich who think democracy is a pain in the ass, because they can never have enough, their genes are “better” than others, the proof being their material wealth, and that the non-rich having a say in their own lives is intolerable. I read books and tried to name names. As we do when on such a quest, we will find enormous amounts of data to confirm our latest working model. I found what’s technically called a “shit-ton” of stuff to bolster this model.

Then, very soon after it came out in 2006, I read a 700-page book titled House Of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, by James Carroll. I had had a “Pentagon”7 model below my main “The Rich” model. Carroll, an ex-priest whose father was a general in the US military, convinced me that the Pentagon was behind all the power. One idea I got was that, while the Pentagon received a ginormous amount of our tax money every year, that those within it, despite the CIA spying on its own citizens, etc, still thought the US body politic must be kept strong. I worked with this model until 2017, when it collapsed. Not that it’s “wrong” but it’s not my top model as of today. Why? Oh, certain events allowed me to “test” this…and they kept failing. A day or so after a certain person was inaugurated in 2017, he went to CIA headquarters and boasted about his appearance on magazine covers and the size of the crowd at his inaugural address. He said he supported the intelligence community - in the very room the CIA people call hallowed ground in which there was a wall of stars carved in marble that had the names of 117 agents who had died in their service - and this entity started to whine about how the media was being unfair to him. This in just hours after he took office. I suspected I was right: this can’t go on. Let’s see if he becomes an actual man (not the boy he is to this day) and let’s see if he ever comes to understand how grave his responsibilities are, how he’ll manage. If he doesn’t get with it, if things like this keep happening (they did), somehow, the Pentagon will get rid of him. That, was what I understood was baked into Carroll’s model. This did not happen, and my model had to be revised. It’s now something closer to the one I held before 2006, but it’s more complexified, and more interesting.

Next: More from Wilson on Model Agnosticism and some on its historical precursors that I haven’t mentioned in this article.

What are your values? What models have you been thinking about? What thinking/thinkers/writers/bodies of knowledge have you been swimming in, lately?

Does Robert Anton Wilson’s Model Agnosticism makes sense to you, as I’ve briefly described it? If not, what have you found that’s better?

6

Being Wrong: Adventures In the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz, p.5 (2010).

(artwerk: Bobby Campbell)

I will not give my interpretation.1 But I wonder, if you’ve read this far: is this really fucking boring to read about? Because in our culture and materialist “rationality” it’s commonplace to roll your eyes when someone starts to tell you about their dream. But what if it was your psychedelic trip you had? Is that received with more open-mindedness or general interest? What if I had this experience - and it is an experience, a dream - of a whale, but only in the ensuing hour after sustaining a concussive blow to the head? Would you be more open to this, hearing a fellow human relate this weirdness? If so, why?2

(Dream researcher Michelle Carr)

I’m fascinated by how dreams are used by writers. Some clearly invent dreams and use them as poetic, rhetorical devices. In the serious surrealist religion of Discordianism, Hill and Thornley mimic the fantastic dreams found in the Bible and other holy books. Their revelation in a bowling alley in Whittier in 1959 involved a shared dream in which they were suddenly outside of the space/time continuum, a gorilla appeared and, addressing them as “gentlemen,” asked them about their nipples: if you’re males, why do you have them? Do they give milk? The gorilla also brought up Pickering’s Moon, which supposedly revolved around Saturn in the opposite direction, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Then the gorilla revealed a scroll with the insignia of what would be the Discordian Society: the Taoist yin-yang symbol with a pentagon. Then it exploded, and ordinary space-time resumed.3

It’s fun to speculate when reading such invention (or was it?): was this invented of whole cloth, or was it based on a real dream? I don’t know.

Talking about your dreams in our…type of society, as I wrote, often brings yawns, interruptions about ballgames, a sudden engagement remembered, rolling of the eyes. Freud and his school has depreciated. Dreams, we’ve been told by the reductive scientists, are really nothing but electrical happenings that help us consolidate memory during REM (discovered in the 1950s), and really: little else. Some sort of almost useless appendage of mental life inherited from, I don’t know, the time when we were fishes.

The humorist Robert Benchley captures this attitude toward talking about out dreams. He’s writing about being stuck on a cruise ship, and his friends are talking about the quality of their sleep:

You will be lucky if, in an experience-meeting of this kind, you don’t start someone off telling the dream he had a few nights ago. “It was the damndest thing,” someone will say, as the rest pay no attention but try to think up dreams they themselves have had recently, “It was the damndest thing. I seemed to be in a sort of big hall, only it wasn’t exactly a hall either, it more a rink or schoolhouse. It seemed that Harry was there and all of a sudden instead of Harry it was Lindbergh. Well, so we all were going to a football game or something, and I had on my old gray suit, except that it had wheels on it——”

By this time everybody is engaged in lighting cigarettes or looking at newspapers or even talking to someone else in a low tone of voice, the narrator of the dream has practically no one to listen to him except the unfortunate who happens to be sitting next. But he doesn’t seem to care and goes right on, until he has finished. There is a polite murmur of “What had you been eating?” or “That certainly was a corker,” and then someone else starts.4

Now: I find this hilarious: both the made-up dream and others’ reaction to it. It feels true, and here Benchley is writing in 1930. It’s interesting to me how the historical moment reveals itself in dreams. In my whale dream it felt primal, timeless, except for my joint and the person saying “buddy.” Lindbergh has the 1930s feel here. Actual dreams seem usually weirder than the made-up ones. Ot at least they do to me. Hill’s and Thornley’s seem too cinematic and Groucho-Marxist, but they made their point.

What if we were to become more like the Aborigines and take dreams very seriously? That’s what dream researcher Michelle Carr would like. I recently stood in the New Non-Fiction section of my local library, flipping through her new book Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind, and I’ll get to reading it cover-to-cover in due time. She’s been doing dream research for a couple of decades and thinks certain techniques can be used to heal people of PTSD and recurring nightmares via a sort of lucid dreaming reframing, and when the indication of a dream appears on the REM brainwave screen, she and her colleagues key this to a scent or a sound in order to allow the dreamer to become lucid and deal with the trauma in a way that had been rehearsed. Dream hacking. It sounds a lot like using psychedelics to heal trauma to me. And aren’t dreams the original “weird trips”?

Prof. George Carlin thought sleep in general could be seen as a sort of science fiction idea, and he used an alienation technique to illustrate:

People will say, “I’m going to sleep now,” as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. “For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.”

If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen.

“They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.”

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, “The creature is regenerating itself.”5

Carlin also wondered if film directors had dreams in which credits rolled at the end. Comedian Ben Acker thought there should “be a part between dreams and waking up where your brain has to explain what it was going for.”6 And we all know how to paraphrase MLK: “I had a really weird dream last night.”

In a fascinating essay on dreams, William S. Burroughs points out problems with Freud’s Id/Ego/SuperEgo, and “Though Freud criticized Jung for aspiring to be a philosopher rather than a simple clinician, he is certainly open to the same criticism.”

Burroughs discusses dreams and Buddhism, ESP and sexual taboos, Jose Delgado and the anthropology of the unconscious (“I recall an analyst practicing in Morocco who told me that the super ego seemed to be lacking or at least different in his Arab patients”), and Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind and “hearing voices” of the gods and how it devolved to oracles and divination. In the 1980s Burroughs thought consciousness was like a ruler trying to measure itself, but he located it in the “back brain of the non-dominant hemisphere,” meaning the right hemisphere for right-handed people. I find this an interesting idea, and at one time I thought it was accurate, more or less, but if consciousness isn’t non-local, as I’ve been arguing in these spaces lately, then it must be throughout the entire body, as an abundant amount of research since the 1990s has shown. Burroughs even seems to glimpse this later in the same essay: “Consciousness is that which defines consciousness. Who is aware of what? Korzybski, who formulated General Semantics, describes consciousness as the reaction of the organism as a whole to its total environment. ‘You think as much with your big toe as you do with your brain,’ he told his students, ‘and a lot more effectively.’” Professor Carr heartily agrees in her recent book on dreaming.7

Though Freud has taken a beating since the 1980s and seems now relegated to the Humanities departments, his ideas are too interesting to go away, and will continue to live on. I like this Freud-based joke:

A man comes rushing into his psychiatrist’s office, apologizing for being late because he overslept.

“But I had an incredible breakthrough in my dream,” the man says breathlessly. “I was talking with my mother and she turned into you! That’s when I woke up, got dressed, grabbed a Coke and a donut and rushed to your office.”

The psychiatrist says, “A Coke and a donut? You call that a breakfast?”8

The usage of dreams by literary modernist writers can create effects in which the reader feels the weirdness of dreaming, and often the effects come from intertextuality: Borges discussed Chuang-Tzu’s waking up from a dream that he was a butterfly and wondering if maybe he was a butterfly dreaming of being a man, and placed it within the context of the British empiricism of Berkeley and Hume.9 In Gravity’s Rainbow, we realize fairly early on that Pointsman, when dreaming, becomes other characters in the novel, and then later, other characters do the same thing when they dream. Of course Joyce wrote an entire novel as a dream, and Robert Anton Wilson used elements of that novel in his own work. It’s a reliable trope in 20th century modernism and after. Using the dream as a device, the writer can reveal information about the characters or plot in a way that often requires a limber hermeneutic by the reader. A topic that’s too “big” to address here is these invented dreams by the writer and what they might say about the time and place and the caste of mind the writer worked in.

But this does remind me of English professor at Stanford, Terry Castle, who read Art Pepper’s harrowing junk-memoir, Straight Life, which was more written by his wife “as told to,” but that’s another story. Castle really enjoyed this book, as did I. I remember reading it and listening to my Art Pepper CD on repeat, then I realized Pepper had lived in San Pedro, California, right on the Los Angeles harbor, which was where I was living at the time. I found the address and just stood across the street and stared at the nondescript house, thinking, Wow…Art Pepper lived there 30 yeas ago. What a tone. Anyway…

Castle read jazz writer Ben Ratliff’s review of Straight Life and Ratliff thought a lot of it was…embroidered. Castle writes, “Against such skepticism I can only counterpose, however naive it must sound, my own readerly intuition, the faith, developed over a life of book-worming that even when an autobiographer is prone to distorting or embellishing the facts, it is still possible to locate some core emotional truth in the writing. Why read a memoir otherwise? […] I seem to recall (in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams) that if a patient in an analytic session tries to deceive the analyst by concocting a dream for discussion and interpretation, the false dream will be just as revealing as a real dream. You can’t invent a dream-story, in other words, without drawing in exactly the same repressed material…”10

One idea I glanced upon in Prof Carr’s new book was that there isn’t much difference between daydreaming and dreaming while asleep, and she has technical data about this. To get back to Burroughs, one of the great cannabis users of all time: cannabis is a way of dreaming while awake; rather famously, cannabis users report they don’t dream, and the data on that is interesting. REM sleep and dreams are essential to mental health. Most cannabis addicts are not mentally ill. By many measures they’re doing better than non-users. When we stop getting high, we are flooded with intense, bizarre and jarring dreams, bad dreams, and nightmares, which keeps a lot of users using. Insomnia often accompanies quitting and a lot of cannabis users say Why bother quitting? Not worth it, man! I suspect they do dream but there’s a slight shift between REM time and waking time, and they don’t remember their dreams. When I’m using cannabis - which is very often - I have noticed that reading and thinking about dreams during the day allows me to recall them more often upon waking. The whale dream was after I went to bed high, listened to Edgar Varese in headphones for about 20 minutes in total darkness, then nodded off. So: if Burroughs is right, I’m dreaming all the time. No wonder! That explains a lot.

Finally: there just seems something wrong with a culture that emphasizes seeing sleep as a problem to be hacked. Sleep is a waste of time, but whattya gonna do? This seems a rotten attitude toward biology, evolution, and our bodies. We spend 30% of our lives in bed, sleeping, and dreaming. This alone should qualify it as a major thing to wonder about. I do not see sleep as a disease, and I certainly don’t think it will be “cured” in the near future, but no doubt in this culture it’s seen as a massive waste of time, when you could be awake and doing deals, making even more money.

I encourage us to see sleep as an immense pleasure and a source of never-ending wonder.

10

The Professor, Castle, p.69. Here Freud serves the English professor and helps me explicate the idea, too large, that the invented dreams of our favorite poetic writers say something more, something intimate about the minds of those writers. What is it? That they’re fucking weird? Of course they are, but what of it?

(artwork by Bob Campbell)

Knowing zero English, he learned by watching cartoons on TV and watching movies. Within a year he was fairly fluent in English. His academic career and vision has astonished me ever since I became aware of him and started following his work (and trying to understand it), around three years ago.

In 1986 he was at the World’s Fair in Vancouver, went into a used bookshop and saw orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker’s The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, which had come out a year earlier. This book linked to many older papers written by scientists who had discovered how bio-electricity working between living cells and structures outside those cells communicate information and produce behavior that could be considered intelligent…but these papers had not been cited in his textbooks at school.

I hadn’t planned to write about Levin until I understood him far better, but with my last article here the name of Rupert Sheldrake came up in the comments (thanks for mentioning him!) and I realized I had a few basic things to write about Michael Levin and why I think he’s most definitely worth checking out.

Sheldrake thinks Levin is “one of the most creative biologists working today,”1 and he loves Levin’s “top-down” emphasis on fields and morphogenesis. Perhaps the main difference between the two is Sheldrake’s morphogenetic resonance fields are currently unfalsifiable, while Levin has already demonstrated some mind-blowing effects from his emphasis on bio-electricity inherent in living things.2 We perhaps ought to consider that Sheldrake’s model(s) underly Levin’s on a deeper level. Certainly Levin read Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life - he told Rupert he had - and that Levin’s research might provide a crucial bridge between the RNA-DNA materialistic model and the dogma around it, and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, on which different fields of memory in natural systems nest inside others and interact with each other.

While in school, he had deep questions and hunches and drives, and often they were too weird for his teachers. They didn’t understand him, or thought his ideas were outmoded. In a 2020 oral history interview he was asked about trying to create a new field that his mentors didn’t understand:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I thought about this a lot, because when I was younger, one of things I was really interested in reading about was people on the fringes of mainstream science, both because they were studying something that nobody else was interested in, and the people that were was ahead of the curve. They had seen things that nobody else was willing to take on board at the time. And I read a lot about the history of it, both from their perspective and the history of what the field was doing at the time, in terms of trying to understand how does one make an impact with a novel and kind of unusual approach to things? And I think I learned a couple of things from that and also from my own interaction with people talking about my ideas at an early stage of the game. And what I think I learned is there’s a lot of inertia. And there’s a lot of resistance to new ideas. But it’s not because anybody is trying to hold it back or because there’s some establishment that hates new things. A lot of people on the margins of the mainstream have this adversarial view- that people are trying to actively hold them back. I don’t think any of that is the case; there’s no big conspiracy. Nobody’s trying to hold back new findings.3

Levin just thinks people are really busy with drilling deep down into established parameters of research, what Kuhn called “normal science.” They are being rewarded for research that has already been shown to be successful, and he understands the difficulties he’s faced. But from what I’ve been reading, the worm has turned. Or started to. Or the worm was cut in half and is growing a new head, etc…

Levin thinks intelligence is a fundamental property of all living systems. It’s not simple DNA as software telling RNA to create hardware - proteins - but there is a larger picture, in which bio-electricity helps to reduce errors in morphology.

“Understanding how tissues and organs encode and propagate anatomical information in electrical signals to fix or create very complex, specific structures is a fundamental challenge that we call ‘cracking the bioelectric code,’” said Levin. “It has the potential to advance not only biomedicine but multiple fields including robotics and AI, akin to how insights from neuroscience are being used to drive the development of neural nets and other computational tools, but in a much more general context.”4

When writing on people who are missing most of their brain and getting along in life just fine, I had a ton of notes, and Levin’s work with flatworms (planaria) was something I had to leave out, but let me briefly explain what he did: you create a stimulus with the planaria, which provokes a response. You can cut the worm in half, throw away the head and it will regenerate a new head that “remembers” what it had learned before. How? He’s published some papers on this. Understanding this leads to synthetic biology - he’s generated Xenobots (DARPA-funded), novel living systems, in order to understand how collectives of cells target information to create anatomically homeostatic morphology - which might possibly lead to regeneration of limbs in humans, like how lizards grow back their tail after you cut it off, etc.

He wants his research to tackle cancer. My general impression is that it’s revolutionary, holistic, paradigm-shattering. It harkens back to the early 19th century idea of electricity and LIFE!, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but Levin seems quite sober and fecund. His graduate work at Harvard medical school was on genetic expression in embryos from a quantum perspective.

I’m very much interested in bio-electricity and a semantic sense of the term epigenetics. The narrow view of epigenetics concerns mechanisms that modulate the DNA-RNA synthesis: in general, genes get switched on or off in response to environment, or relatively nudged up or down like a rheostat in response to something else outside the system. A larger semantics of “epigenetic” is anything that influences our bodies that is not strictly genetically based. The advent of writing would be epigenetic in this sense. So would Levin’s research, which accounts for genetic expression, but seems to go much further. This question would seem to apply to Sheldrake, too. Are Levin and/or Sheldrake engaged in work that is epigenetic?

I mentioned Robert O. Becker’s 1985 The Body Electric and its influence on Levin. Becker was preceded by Ray Bradbury’s I Sing The Body Electric, a collection of short stories from 1969, but Bradbury got it from Whitman, who wrote that phrase in 1855 or so, in Leaves of Grass. The earliest printing left that line out, because it was thought American readers didn’t know enough about electricity. It was restored in 1867. Here’s one of my favorite lines from that section of the poem:

The thin red jellies within you, within me — the

bones, and the marrow in the bones,

The exquisite realization of health,

O I say now these are not the parts and poems of

the body only, but of the Soul,

O I say these are the Soul!

There seems a shadow history of bio-electricity that is only now being resurrected, and Levin has had a lot to do with this.5 Harold Saxton Burr was at Yale for decades and worked under a bio-electrical paradigm lost. He co-wrote, in 1935, The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life with the eminent FSC Northrop, whose 1931 book Science and First Principles was an influence on Alfred Korzybski. Northrop was also a huge player in the post-war Macy Conferences, which I will be writing about in the future.

To get a view of how Levin is (ahem!) not exactly a limited thinker, read “Platonic Space: Where Cognitive and Morphological Patterns Come From (Besides Genetics and Environment” from last March, 2025. If you read this, it tells you why I had been holding back in writing about Levin until I understood him better. Physicalism seems hopelessly incomplete to him, some sort of panpsychism would seem to be in order, not to mention mind-matter effects and quantum mechanics. The “Platonic-space” world stuff is what’s blowing my mind, as I had an overall view of Plato that must be overcome in order to understand Levin.

Time will tell how well Levin’s revolutionary visions for Biology cash out. I have picked him because, while I feel I don’t have an adequate purchase on his ideas of Platonic space and consciousness, etc, my intuition has been telling me this is the kind of thing that blows apart the sort of materialist paradigm that was ushered in by Watson, Crick, and Franklin. Their work was utterly revolutionary and has lead to many non-degenerating research programs, but clearly: the anomalies and big-time stumpers have been building up. I think the bio-electricity moment is upon us and it promises quite a lot. Will it solve the origin of life on this planet? Or how a complex molecule like RNA came to be in the first place?

Will it deliver?

Nazi Brains: Fascist Signatures?

I was wondering about the fascist mind. This eventually led to a weird story about a psychiatrist named Douglas M. Kelley, who was able to interview and do some tests on 22 high ranking Nazis at Nuremburg, including Göring and Hess. There seemed to be nothing unusual about them. The banality of evil, as Arendt said. Some Americans thought there might be a tell-tale fascist sign in the brains of these Nazis. One Nazi, Robert Ley, had seemed to Kelley to be particularly non-sane. While in his cell in Nuremburg, Ley managed a suicide using the pipe from his toilet, a zipper from his jacket, and the hem of his towel: Kelley thought he had hit some luck: an autopsy and physical Nazi brain to ponder. His expert friend found the frontal lobe damage that Kelley had predicted. But later, at Langley-Porter hospital in San Francisco, pathologists found nothing abnormal with Ley’s frontal lobes. Kelley was exceedingly bothered that the Nazi personality didn’t leave traces in the brain. In the ten years after the war, he spiraled in fits of anger, alcoholism and over-work. In 1958 he offed himself the same way Göring had: by swallowing a cyanide capsule.1

Einstein’s Brain: Non-Abby-Normal

This reminded me of Einstein’s brain, which, after he died in 1955, had been subject to theft and fetishistic obsession. The brain itself looked like just about anyone else’s. Journalist Steven Levy was given the assignment to hunt down Einstein’s brain in 1976, for New Jersey Monthly. He ended up in Wichita, Kansas, where Einstein’s brain was floating in formaldehyde in a mason jar in a cardboard box labeled Costa Cider. It was in the office of Dr. Thomas Harvey, who didn’t seem much interested in it. But Levy was mesmerized:

I had risen up to look in the jar, but now I was sunk in my chair, speechless. My eyes were fixed upon that jar as I tried to comprehend that these pieces of gunk bubbling up and down had caused a revolution in physics and quite possibly changed the course of civilization. There it was! 2

In 1985 two neuroanatomists lobbied Harvey for some Einstein brain-slices. They wanted just a few pinches, from selected hotspots in Einstein’s frontal lobes, where the abstract thinking magic happened. They suspected there’d be lots of glial cells that support the neurons in the inferior parietal lobe of his left hemisphere: abstraction, calculation, planning, imagery, attention. They found less glial cells in Einstein's brain there. Perhaps this was linked to his late speech as a child? He was thought dumb and didn’t like to use language, but realized he’d better demonstrate decent speech capabilities if he didn’t want to keep being called a dummkopf. He silently rehearsed a full sentence before uttering, but when he did so his nursemaid called him Der Depperte, “the dopey one.”

I thought about how fetishized physical brains had been in the past, even now. Roland Barthes had a chapter on Einstein’s brain in his book on stimulating semiosis, Mythologies.

Alfred Korzybski wanted a colleague to check out his brain after he died, which he did in 1950. Korzybski had worked with Dr. Nolan D.C. Lewis at St. Elizabeth’s (“S’Liz” was the way Ezra Pound referred to it when he was there and supposedly criminally insane, 1946-1958). Dr. Lewis had handled many human brains and both he and Korzybski were totally fascinated by questions of consciousness, behavior and the brain. Here’s what Lewis saw in Korzybski’s brain:

It showed some of the normal shrinkage due to the age of the man, but it had a very rich blood supply which is significant and a complex convolutional arrangement which will be very important to study in detail, as it is the brain of a great scientist.3

“Anyone With Half a Brain…”

Speaking of Korzybski, when he was working at St. Elizabeth’s he noticed a patient who had walked around, said hello, etc. The patient died and they performing an autopsy: this patient had no brain at all! WTactualF?4

A woman aged 24 has CAT scan and is found to have no cerebellum. Instead, it was all cerebrospinal fluid. Well, she had problems walking and talking until age 6-7. But still…I thought the cerebellum was utterly crucial. Guess I’ze wrong, wrong, wrong.5

Another woman read an article about how the brain reacts to music, so she wrote the authors about her own weird brain. They referred her to a cognitive neuroscientists at M.I.T. It was found this woman had no left temporal lobe. She should be having seizures, experts told her; she should have not much vocabulary at all. But she has a graduate degree and speaks a second language, Russian, and has scored in the 98th percentile for vocabulary. It makes no sense. What’s there instead of the temporal lobe? Cerebrospinal fluid.

In 2007 Lancet reported on a 44 year old French civil servant with an IQ of 75, but he was married and had two kids. He was missing 90% of his brain. Or: his hydrocephaly had compressed his brain into one thin layer on the outside, with nothing but fluid below. It was mostly CFS. He was healthy, had had hydrocephalus as a child, they put in a stent, later took it out. It looks like his brain kept eroding, but he was able to do a lot with hardly any brain, or a flattened one. This fuels Dr. Axel Cleeremans’s “radical plasticity“ thesis of consciousness, as you can read about in the link.

Another man had the same thing: hydrocephalus: virtually no brain at all. But his IQ was not 75; it was 126 and he had a degree in Mathematics. This has given rise to an idea that networks of brain tissue can be tightly clustered into highly-interconnected “cliques.” It’s as if this guy’s horrific brain trauma caused by hydrocephalus made him smarter. Biologist and science fiction writer Peter Watts wonders how a guy like this, with the brain “the size of a poodle’s” can do math better than him.

There are very many cases like these. I suspect they play too much havoc with entrenched ideas about intelligence, consciousness, and philosophical ideas that those with possible vested interests, when they read about this, think about it in a similar way when we read about frogs falling from the sky. They banish this knowledge, because it ought not be…or you’ll have to revamp all your assumptions. Which - I get it - would seem like a slog. But a revampin’ we must go, methinks.

When I read about this stuff I begin to think how overrated my brain is, our brains are. It’s almost as if we could get by without any at all. The guy with a degree in math was almost all fluid. Not much brain to speak of and yet: degree in Math. I mean, c’mon. We must be thinking about the subject of intelligence and how it works in some crucially flawed way.

At the very least, we’re thinking about intelligence all wrong. Or mostly wrong. It’s gotta be weirder and much more wild and fascinating than we ever thought.

Pour One Out For Mike

Then there’s Mike the Headless Chicken, who survived for 18 months after being decapitated. Put that in your bucket and eat it, mainstream neurobiologists!6

6

Mike the Headless Chicken Wikipedia page, which has many links. HERE.

(It’s Bobby Campbell’s artwork on this logo)

To realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. - Bertrand Russell

Tom Seaver: Hey, Yogi, What time is it?

Yogi Berra: You mean now?

I’ve always been a dreamy person. I never lost the deep pleasure of daydreaming and I do it all the time. It’s a temporary escape, a brief departure, a micro-vacation, an altered way of thinking and problem solving, a way of clarifying things. I realize that often I’m temporarily “checking out.” At times, it must be an escape from the present situation. Thank goddess it’s free, or my bills would have me out on the street. Phenomenological sociologists like Berger and Luckmann called daydreaming a “finite province of meaning.”1 It’s one of very many ways we depart from the “getting things done” aspect of our everyday lives. We also exercise, get high, watch movies, listen to music, play music, make art, write, have sex, play with children or pets, play games with friends, engage with sports, etc: these are all finite provinces of meaning.

In our interiorities many of us develop rich fantasy worlds, do projections and simulations of possible worlds, light out for some new territory. Why? Because we desire this. We find it interesting and enjoyable. Because we can do these things.

This is an essay on our ancient desire to escape from our concept of time. The topic is absurdly large, I realize - like discourse on “meaning” or some other unwieldy trope - so it’s also a very idiosyncratic attempt on my part to come to grips with something we all “know” but these concepts are too large and too present that we take them for granted and often don’t think about them explicitly. Instead, we (instinctively?) do it: escape from time. I’m interested mostly in those who’ve given it a lot of conscious thought and will discuss some of these people and their ideas.

Preliminary

The idea of time as an “illusion” seems truly ancient. In our 21st century Western world, I bet if you ask the average semi-educated person where this idea began they’d guess “the East” or “Buddha” or Zen. I think those are good guesses, actually. In the 1230s a branch of Zen led by Dogen emphasized the impermanence of things, and that truth was fluid, daily experiences: “The very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest, is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is the Buddha nature, is impermanent. Great Nirvana, because it is the impermanent, is the Buddha nature.”2

A very common type of daydream I engage with is imagining a location 300 years ago: where I currently live it’s a good bet that there were nothing but rolling green hills and oak trees, blackberry brambles, and numerous small fauna. One of those oaks is probably the very same one right outside my window now. The town in which I live did not exist in 1726. I suspect I’m weird for engaging so adamantly with such imaginative forays. I make a “likely” model - mental pictures - of what it looked like then. My research shows that no one lived here, although the Lekatuit speaking Coastal Miwok may have wandered through often, gathering.

Here’s the one that rattles in my brain-pan: Dogen says “He who wants to know Buddhahood may know it by knowing time as it is revealed to us. And as time is something in which we are already immersed, Buddhahood also is not something that is to be sought in the future, but something that is realized where we are.”

I take it as a given, on “faith” that people everywhere, before Dogen, were learning little tricks to tempor-arily escape “reality” before this Zen sophistication was articulated in 13th century Japan. I interpret Dogen as realizing Buddha nature when we take our daily ludic trips away from the desk of everyday paramount reality. These mental forays and little trips within seem to be happening “right now,” so I interpret Dogen on Buddhahood as being inclusive of these as well. What’s strange here seems to be how space-time seems like a larger concept than what Einstein was talking about…or is it?

Many dissenters from within the constructed reality of, say, the Roman Empire, questioned time also. I like to think of them as gnostics.

Kant’s Schtick On Time, On Up To Einstein

I think he was heavily influenced by Christian Woolf, who had in turn been influenced by Leibniz vis a vis space and time were a priori categories of sensibility in the mind. This is what I think of “thinking rationally about time.” And this thread in the space-time discourse can get pretty out there. We will see how. Lots of stuff about all that happened etcetera etcetera, then Einstein showed that space and time are two sides of the same coin. And we’re (mostly) still there, now, in Gregorian-calendrical reckoning 2026. But there are wobbles, and it’s exhilarating. Because of Einstein, whenever we’re talking of space, we’re also talking about time. And vice-versa.

So: when I daydream and describe it as a few ticks outside of time, where did I go in space? Answer: the space is a mental construct. But then so is this sense of “time.” These spaces represent internal worlds and their number seems to approach the infinite.

The Communism of Our Senses

I feel a nagging regret for isolating our sense of time (whatever that is), with not only space, which has been soundly, scientifically demonstrated by physicists to be intertwined inextricably with time, but also our other senses, which seem to run to more than five, but that’s for some other time. Rumi wrote in 13th century Persia that our five bodily senses derive from five faculties of the soul, which all derive from the Universal Spirit: “The five spiritual senses are linked with one another; all the five have grown from one root. The strength of one invigorates the others: each becomes a cupbearer to the rest […] And then those senses will tell their secret to thine, without words and without conveying either literal or metaphorical meaning.”3

This idea of a sensus communis was taken into Europe. I first got it trying to understand the Scholastics, later Marshall McLuhan and Philip K. Dick.

What I guess I feel the need to apologize for is this amputation: we probably bracket off “time” with all our senses. But it’s not possible and only a tendency to give “time” some special status, perhaps because of the nature of our social institutions and an all-consuming emphasis on wanting more time, being too busy, and the acceleration of perceived time due to technology’s effects on our nervous system. So let us simply assume we do this bracketing and yet, so stipulated: Space-Time is true, and it informs all our sensory faculties. It’s perhaps a “sense” itself. And one can activate another in a powerful way. Memory is implicit in the background, omnipresent. All Proust needed was a madeleine dipped in tea to activate cascading effects, to put it absurdly mildly. There are schools that insist our sense of time should be considered as a discrete thing. I tread lightly through all the schools, auditing all, never paying tuition to any.

A Few Words Around Time and Oppression

We know too much about this. Or we intuitively know. The historian EP Thompson wrote in “Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” about how radically different time is experienced after factory-work hours. The Anthropologist James Clifford talked about how different peoples divide time. The Nuer had a “pissing time.”

The critic of American compulsory (mis) education, John Taylor Gatto, wrote about the function of bells in the schools: “Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells would condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering any interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though. they are not.”4 How much more of our adult lives contain no-longer-noticed behaviorist mechanisms? The industrialized world of 24/7 electric lights, interdependent transit schedules, etc: that all happened just a few minutes ago in our species’ history. Do we blot out introspection about these profound effects in our daily lives?

I suspect that if we eschew reflection, or never even think about it in the first place, that this goes hand-in-hand with our subconscious desire to escape the limits of “time” by any means necessary.

We mold time to suit our uses and needs: time is seasonal, diurnal, linked to physical intervals and cycles and ritualized. In the WEIRD5 world we talk about “graveyard”, our commute time, “the 9-to-5”, sabbaticals, long weekends, overtime, a month of Sundays, etc. For a very long time I’ve suspected the un-noted frames around so much of what we conceptualize around time has, on some deeper level, a hemmed-in aspect. We ought to able to break free of these chrono-logical constraints. Is this a gnostic impulse?

Some Writers On Time

In 1956, Aldous Huxley: “The Muses, in Greek mythology, were the daughters of Memory, and every writer is embarked, like Marcel Proust, on a hopeless search for time lost. But a good writer is one who knows how to ‘give the purer meaning to the words of the tribe.’ […] Time lost can never be regained, but in his search for it he may reveal to his readers glimpses of time-less reality.”6

My favorite living poet, Robert Hass, noted how the action-painter (like Pollock), “gets to behave like time,” and then:

Or to render time and stand outside

The horizontal rush of it, for a moment

To have the sensation of standing outside

The greenish rush of it.7

To render the oppressive invisible as green and horizontal: seems like a start. Describe and name the enemy. Know thy enemy. Sun-Tzu.

A line from Pound’s 74th Canto: Time is not, Time is the evil, beloved…inexorably lifted from its context, nevertheless, as Daniel Pearlman argued in his book about the unity of that large set of poems, Pound throughout set up a duality between mechanized time and our escape from that into a mystical timelessness, like Blake’s satori: to see Eternity in a grain of sand. Regarding time in our lives I think of Wordsworth also: We have given our hearts away/A sordid boon!8

Having immersed himself in Pound’s Cantos, Robert Anton Wilson reported an uncanny, seemingly spontaneous mystical experience at age 18, year: 1950. He was walking down the street, when suddenly he had a “mini-satori”: he became unstuck from time: “It seemed to me that both time and space had collapsed or become unreal around me. I had no idea what that might mean until many years later when I read Kant’s argument that both time and space are categories of the human mind, not actual aspects of the universe.”9 A complementary line shows up in a cut-up from Right Where You Are Sitting Now: “Coming un-stuck in time - or in space - so-called out of body experience - is possible only when tape loops are cut, disconnected, and reconnected in new ways.”10

Wilson has very much to say about getting outside of space-time in his larger oeuvre, and I will address that…all in good time.

I have covered, by my calculation, 0.0000000000000017 of what there is to say on this theme. Hey, it ain’t nuthin’.

Until then, I merely suggest we pay attention to our desires to transcend mechanical, calendrical, clock times and schedules. How do you lose yourself and evade the authorities of time, every now and then? Report your results!

10

Right Where You Are Sitting Now, RAW, p.122. This line itself appears within a cut-up, and the metaphor of “tape loops” and cutting and reassembling seems highly influenced by William S. Burroughs. In this metaphor, tape loops are previous learning or conditioning or even imprints taken during critical periods. Under novel and extreme situations: fasting, isolation, psychedelic use, shock: tape loops can be cut and free us from what seemed to be wired in us. Massive new learning takes place. Burroughs and Wilson both thought the quasi-alchemical manipulation of actual texts by cutting them up and reassembling them into new configurations could simulate these radical states that open us up for massive change. From a much wider literature, it appears odd experiences like this happen spontaneously, in anyone, and many times they are not poets, writers, intellectuals. In 1950, for Wilson, he was strongly under the influence of his first readings of Alfred Korzybski, which may have influenced his becoming unstuck in time while walking down the street, but I’m guessing Pound primed his nervous system, too. There would seem to be many other factors in this supposition.

Since journalists and critics and everyday enquirers and dipshits like moi but not moi have been weighing in on Epstein’s reading of Lolita, I gotta get in a few good ones, too. Around last November the files have seen a steady, trick, drip, trickling (kinda like gonorrhea) and Epstein was very very fond of Lolita, and critics now know, finally, when a book has been “misread.” I wonder how many of these critics have, in their university days, argued for a pomo reading of texts: there is a Barthes-ian “death of the author,” there is no “correct” interpretation of the text; and for sure: texts are always Derrideanly deconstructing themselves as we read them? That language is always on parole, meanings of terms and words change over time, and power and hegemony try to force certain readings onto us, while we are free to interpret, using our skills drilled into our hermeneutic minds in grad school, etc? Now, there are countless critics asserting that Epstein read Lolita wrong. The right reading: pedophilia is wrong; reading Lolita for tips on how to score with 13 year old girls (or whatever Epstein was getting out of it, Duck Duck Go “Epstein and Lolita”) while incidentally noticing Nabokov as prose stylist is outta sight, man!..Mere sick jollies, ..and it just seems beyond the pale.

They’re probably right, but then they are reading it “wrong,” too. We make of texts what we need to, and often, just enough so we can get away with it. My interpretation may be off the margins of acceptability: Nabokov knew 13 year olds were hot, man! And here’s a text that kinda feeds that deep urge I done got, though I went to Harvard, so if you don’t like it, come at me…Most of us can find it within ourselves to avoid reading Sade into everything (unless they’re French, but they get a pass). Common “decency,” you know. NOT prudishness! Someone will offer a critique of our bad/absurd/sexist/colonialist take and counter: it’s all the dance. It’s what we want. Especially if there’s so little at stake.

Bet you’d never see the OG stand up for Epstein! I’m not…He was a monster…in so many ways. Let’s be clear. And yet, one post-structural lit-crit line I’ll take here: I want to make it maybe a tad messier than is needed. So here goes…

Older men, land-owning men, aristocratic and political and religious men, were free to smash with young girls (and boys) in the bright pagan world before Christianity made it uncouth and a sin; then they needed to hide it. “God” needed increase of creatures who bow to Him, not wanton anything-goes “sexcapades,” as the tabloids always liked to call it. But a thousand or twelve-hundred years of growing community standards and laws, modern ideas about childhood (shockingly recent) and the psychology of children gradually made it harder to get away with this depravity.1

But now, under the present trashy, stupid, and cruel kakistocratic dispensation, some pretend even harder that Epstein and his very High-Placed buddies didn’t commit unspeakable atrocities against young girls, molestations, etc: everything that violates our sensibilities about how very young people ought to be free from so they can grow up and realize their full, innate potentials. I mean: it really looks like Epstein and his quite large posse - including the POTUS - did do this. At this point I’m reminded of Faye Dunaway as the daughter of “Noah Cross” in Chinatown: “He owns the police!” (Or: enough of Congress, judges and the SCOTUS). We non-rich are supposed to expect some sort of justice for this? Pffffft! This is the United Snakes, folks! If anything: this is all a strong message that we’re in their not-fun and non-consensual S&M world, and we who struggle with groceries and rent are not the Sadists. If anything, we bear the burden of nescience and are symbolically seen as a 14 year old on Rape Island. If some Schutzstaffel/ICE agent confronts you menacingly and asks you to comment of the Epstein files…what are you gonna say? (Tempus loquendi…tempus tacendi…)

At the same time, I never believed the Epstein scandal would bring down the bloviating, empty-suited baby orange man. For a couple years now I’ve been saying they could unearth footage of him boffing a 13 year old, who’s crying. And his tribal followers will react this way: what’s wrong, liberal? You mad, bro? We own you. Deal with it! Or: claim it’s all doctored footage. Probably both: it’s doctored and tough beans, ya socialist: we run this prison now. And make no mistake: they are in a dog-eat-dog anal-territorial primate status game world in which all reality is fascist realpolitick. It’s all S&M for them, while the tribe of Dispensationalist Christians, eager for the Apocalypse, responding and voting en masse for an Authoritarian to put the feminists, brown people and the poors2 in their place, either look the other way at this cabal’s minor “indiscretions,” or deny them all as a liberal plot. In a way, we’ve returned to a new pagan world, just with a weirder pretext about Jesus and Paul, who apparently would have approved ‘cuz it’s all about a Bigger Picture, of Good People getting everything and heaven, and the Bad People paying in an intolerable and eternal sadomasochistic scene from their fevered imaginations. Ya know, what Jesus was all about.

(Nabokov. Nah-boh-kahhhhv)

Look: Epstein gave a very bad reading to Lolita, from what I can tell. It’s not a “wrong” reading. Just a bad, lurid one. Hey, he had his reasons. What I really care about is small d democracy, and that’s gone to shit. I still have my eye on the ball. I do see Epstein as merely one indicator among very, very many. Too many. And it’s a diversion. And that’s what counts as a diversion these days. The Democratic POTUS in the late 1990s was impeached for lying about a blowjob with an adult woman. But one of the two Big Business parties has always been about sexual politics…because…let’s face it…(tee hee!) it’s sooo damned exciting, dem naughty things! And the Bad Ones need to be punished! Which is also terribly exciting to the Christian fascist mind. I remember first time I did it w’ th’ lights on! ‘N besides, the 1990s were 200 years ago, son.

For another reading project, I recently re-read Nabokov’s Strong Opinions. My take on Nabokov: right there with Joyce as a prose stylist and an overall staggeringly great literary genius. Nota bene: I see what I just wrote about Nabokov as a completely different thing from this:

Herbert Gold gives a comment:

Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry — to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing.

And here’s Nabokov’s response:

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert-Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of “little girls” — not simply “young girls.” Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and “sex kittens.” Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his “aging mistress.”3

Remember, we’re being told by people with degrees in English that Epstein read Nabokov all wrong. Haven’t we all heard about or were even one of those ourselves who thought once we picked up Sade we’d be reading simple porn? Maybe there are people who read Sade to get off. Hey, that’s how they interpret the Marquis. It’s us and the text. And “we” can get pretty out-there. Moby Dick is about whales; Hamlet is about dealing with ghosts.

Same book: Nabokov says he doesn’t give a damn about incest, “one way or another,” and that “All bright kids are depraved” and noted that Ada (another Nabokov girl-character) and Lolita lost their virginity at the same age.4 To clarify Nabokov’s moral rectitude, we might ponder this: “I especially loathe vulgar movies — cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males.”5 Shout it, Vlad! I’m with ya, man. That stuff repulses me, too. No, but seriously: This from an author who constantly attacks Freud, says he loathes cruelty, charges others as “Philistines” and relentlessly says nasty things about almost every other writer who has ever lived. I’m thinking of a Freudian concept right now: projection? Yea, projection.

Alden Whitman of the New York Times in April 1969, interviewing Nabokov:

In the United States you are probably more widely known for Lolita than for any other single book or poem. If you had your way, what book or poem or story would you like to be known for in the U.S.?

Vlad:

I am immune to the convulsions or fame; yet, I think that the harmful drudges who define today, in popular dictionaries, the word “nymphet” as “a very young but sexually attractive girl,” without any additional comment or reference, should have their knuckles rapped.6

There is a passage - get thee to the public library if you don’t have Strong Opinions on hand - on pp.173-174, in which there’s an anecdote about Robbe-Grillet and his “pretty wife” who was “a young actress” who dressed up for Nabokov like a little girl - Lolita? Lo-leeee-tah? - and who was Catherine Robbe-Grillet, who published S&M writings under “Jean de Berg” and “Jeanne de Berg.” Why do I recommend reading this? Because I think it further muddies things.7

Nabokov wrote a letter to Time magazine, January 18th, 1971, objecting to their “sermonet on the scruples” of a musical adaptation of Lolita. “When cast in the title role of Kubrick’s neither very sinful nor very immoral picture, Miss Lyon was a well-chaperoned young lady, and I suspect her Broadway successor will be as old as she was at the time. Fourteen is not twelve, 1970 is not 1958, and the sum of $150,000 you mention is not correct.”

He’s right: Fourteen is not twelve.8

Finally - and I probably didn’t have as much fun selecting this subject for “Sex” as you think I did…or the fun you had…or the seething anger? Anyway: see Strong Opinions, pp. 304-307, where Nabokov is livid at some philistine-critic named William Rouse, who finds tons, scads, even, of sexual symbolism in Nabokov’s works. Rouse even had the audacity to write about it in a book, Nabokov’s Deceptive World. There seem to be levels of irony here that are…I’m gonna go with thick.9

Food: OG Realizes He’s Somewhere Between Taster and Non-Taster

Wot the hell? Long story, but there’s a pretty hardcore bio-physiologic reason why you like certain foods and can’t stand other ones. Roughly, it has to do with how closely packed your taste buds are on your tongue, which you had nothing to do with: you’s just born that way. This often comes off as a BS crude joke come-on, or a Just-So story, but it’s really well established science. We’ve got three broad types of buds: fungiform papillae (on the front of our tongue), circumvillae (on the back end of our tongue), and foliate papillae (on the sides). There are also taste receptors in the throat and the roof of the mouth. I found this out around the turn of the century, and have never thought about my or others’ response to food and drink the same way since.

Our taste preferences, while not “hardwired” are still pretty wired. But there’s some good evidence that we can play with and extend our preferences; it’s just that most people are okay with what they like and don’t like, so they don’t push themselves into adventurous tastedom.

In 1931 it was established that there were genetic variations as to whether someone tasted something as very bitter or “meh”: they barely tasted anything. By 1978, Psychologist Linda Bartoshuk established what we now know as the three major types of responses to food and drink: Supertasters, mere Tasters, and Non-Tasters. In the broad population, about 25% are Supertasters, in which black coffee, IPA beers, a big sprig of raw broccoli, and very hot peppers are damned near intolerable. They do not dig those kinds of taste. It’s just too much; it’s too strong. About 50% of everyone is a “Taster”: they tend to like or be okay with those tastes. Another 25% are Non-Tasters: they will eat or drink damned near everything.

I think I’m pretty close to Non-Taster status. I like really strong tastes, including vegetables, very sweet stuff, and high-fat foods. But I don’t fit the typical health profile. I’m still a thin old man. My genes are from Northern Europe (Norway on dad’s side; Scotland on mom’s), which fit the Taster-Non-Taster profile. When you go into a local brew pub and see all these white guys drinking hopped-up double IPAs, it’s not just a cultural thing; people who look like that are more likely to like very bitter tasting beer. I most definitely do. There was a time when I went to the Irish brewer Brendan Moylan’s pub and he and his guys had just put out a quadruple IPA: 13% alcohol by volume. Massive hops, like an entire tree of hops was crammed into a small glass. I loved it! But I got too buzzed on just one. Which…I don’t like the feeling of being drunk. Not anymore. In my 20s, and early 30s: yeah. I ran with certain crowds. But not now. Not that day at Moylan’s in Novato, California. I had one - I think they only poured 8 oz glasses it was so strong - and got pleasantly buzzed to my limit. One indication I might not be a hardcore Nontaster is I don’t like hard alcohol very much at all.10

A Supertaster usually can’t stand any ale, much less an India Pale Ale, much less a quadruply-hopped IPA. Me? I liked it. I also love black coffee, no sugar. No milk. And very very spicy thai food.

Women and people from Asia tend to be Supertasters more than men, and I’m trying to learn more about why. But, suffice, it has to do with genetics. Supertasters have good cardiovascular health, because they stay away from high fat foods and sweets. They’re thin women, mostly. They seem to have a higher prevalence of colon cancer, and it’s suspected it’s because green vegetables are too strong for them, so they don’t consume those enough. I can’t get enough of broccoli or cauliflower. Anything bitter and strong: I like that. I use fatty foods and cookies, candy, chocolate, etc, to make the philosophical case for “no free will.” Because sometimes I can’t stop. Again, most people (at least 50% of the population) are Tasters: they like this stuff, but can walk away. They’re not overly attracted to extreme tastes as I am.

I haven’t done the test, but by gawd I fit the profiles: you get some blue dye dropped onto a small area of your tongue: if you have X number of buds concentrated in a small area they can predict what foods you like. A cheap test is to tear out a piece of notebook paper, the kind that has three holes punched on one margin. Tear around until you have one hole, with some surrounding paper to hold onto. Now take a small sip of red wine to stain your tongue. You place the paper on your friend’s tongue - the fungiform papillae at the front, and this is intimate, I know - and count the number of papillae there. If fewer than four in the hole: you’re a Non-taster. You will eat anything. I can dig it. If you count between four and eight, you’re part of the 50% of the population who are Tasters. More than eight: you’re a Supertaster, and have probably been called “finicky” more than once. A Supertaster often finds carbonated water too much to take.

So: it’s not just Oh, check out Jill, she can’t stand anything. Give her plain cheese pizza, because she’s just a fuddy-duddy. No: Jill is a Supertaster. She can’t help it. Cut her some slack. And maybe talk her into a forkful of your garlicky steamed broccoli because she might need it. Just one, Jillsy? It’s like medicine, I know, but c’mon: down the pipe!, there ya go.

There is a hypothesis that really hot-shot high-end chefs are Supertasters, but they have learned to modulate their own tastes in order to engineer their exquisite little Michelin-starred delicacies. After all, possibly 75% of their clientele are Tasters or Non-Tasters. Exploit your ability to tune into the relative strongness of the most minute amounts of seasonings and combinations. For these Supertasters who dare to go there, they notice nuances that I can’t. I’m this Taster-Going-Into-Nontasting Clod, who actually likes being bludgeoned with strong tastes, but probably can’t tell the difference between a $300 bottle of merlot and a $2 one. And furthermore, I don’t care. I like merlot. Any of it, Jack, and don’t be stingy.

It’s also currently thought that less than 1% of the population are Super-Supertasters, and you can bet the farm they’re not all that much fun at a restaurant.

Death: Thinking About It Often? Seems Like a Good Idea

It’s really common to read about or talk to someone about their childhood and find out that they “accidentally discovered” masturbation and thought they had stumbled onto a goldmine: do others know about this? How do I relay this discovery to Alfredo and Annabelle down at the playground?

I think it’s the same with the childhood realization that, hard as it is to believe, but logically ‘tis must be so: you’re gonna die, too. Then: thinking about this often makes you sort of “wake up” out of your robotic sleepwalking life and re-gather and concentrate your actions and purpose in life. Aye: memento mori: remembering that you will die. Sometimes it’s as potent as a shot of espresso for me. It’s not enough to have a facsimile of a human skull on your bookshelf: you must pick it up pretty much daily and stare at it like Hamlet, really wake up and come to grips.

I have often let drop that I “think about dying all the time” and often get something like “What? Why?” as if I’m some sort of goth kid masquerading as an eccentric old white guy. Of course I understand this assumption that I’m torturing myself by dwelling on the morbid. But when I do a memento mori it’s an unwarranted semantic assumption that I’m living in constant fear by thinking about my own death. (On other days I do have paranoia about this…sometimes on the same day as my daily practice of memento mori. Don’t you?)

Like the masturbation scenario, we soon learn that this stuff goes way back, to put it mildly. In Montaigne’s essay “That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die”11 he immediately reminds us that Cicero wrote about the idea, and he was just one in a long string. Cicero thought that when we engage in deep study and thought in solitude, our soul separates from our body, which is a trial run for death. Like masturbation, I felt this idea too before I ever read Montaigne. Then he writes about it so well and you feel at home with a like-minded other, both of you joined in separation of “mind” and body, just sitting there, Montaigne reflecting in his reading of Cicero, Seneca, and Horace; me with Montaigne, William James and Pynchon.

What I wonder about is all those who Ernest O. Becker nailed in his Denial of Death, which is Woody Allen’s favorite book, supposedly. And I think a lot about a culture-wide denial of death and the all-too-human (and childish, I think) money-grubbing and desperate ego-driven primate status game of “Look at me!” Wanting to put your name on something you have nothing to do with12 - you may have lived a life antithetical to the spirit of the location you want your name to appear on - seems like the most pathetic, desperate grasping at something to pretend you’re never gonna die. Or so it seems to me. Putting your name on everything is a human acting like a dog: dogs mark their territory with excretions; someone like You Know Who needs to say “I’m here!” with signs. And apparently no one ever told him this is pathetic, embarrassing, cringeworthy.

Speaking of Woody Allen: what a zen koan his appearance with Epstein seems to me. The rich are different than you and me, for sure. I think I saw some character in Woody’s own Midnight in Paris say something like that. Fitzgerald?

Anyway: Woody once said that some people want to achieve immortality through their children, or some personal act, or leaving behind great works, but he wants to achieve it another way: through not dying.

I’m also sympathetic to that idea, while realizing, scientifically, it’s anything but low-hanging fruit.

12

Imagine a miserable pathetic clod who wants to see his name on a Nobel Prize or the Kennedy Center! It’s a bit much, I know, but just imagine it.

(logo by the incomparable Bobby Campbell)

Falcon Press/New Falcon/Original Falcon/Christopher Hyatt

One narrative - from Nick Tharcher of Original Falcon Press, recently1 related how Wilson was looking for a publisher for his Prometheus Rising, because Jeremy Tarcher had expressed interest in it but had dragged his feet, and Israel Regardie had told Hyatt about RAW, and they talked on the phone for about 10 minutes and made a deal: Prometheus Rising would be published on Falcon Press. This would have been early in 1983, because the first edition of Prometheus Rising came out later that year, and 1983 letters from RAW as late as August imply Jeremy Tarcher was still sitting on the manuscript. Soon after they had a deal, Tarcher told RAW he wanted to go ahead with it, but RAW told him too little, too late, he’d just made a deal with someone else, and then in the ensuing years Hyatt and Nick Tharcher put out a long string of Wilson’s non-fiction books, including books that had appeared at And/Or Press, who had (apparently?) not paid royalties, had undergone a hostile takeover and/or (pun!) was mismanaged, and went bankrupt. I’m still not sure I have the straight story with And/Or, who I covered previously in this series.

In 1995 Wilson did a long and fascinating email interview with Alex Burns for REVelation magazine. It was later updated by Burns in 1997 and showed up at the Disinformation website in 20012, and Burns wrote, “In the mid-1980s, after leaving his work published by a range of major and independent publishers, RAW became involved with New Falcon Publications, a loose cabal of similarly minded authors, spearheaded by Dr. Christopher Hyatt, who wrote the seminal Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation (1989). New Falcon reprinted his (RAW’s) earlier work along with tracts by Leary, Crowley, and other proponents of brain change. Currently New Falcon3 is one of the leading publishers of such modern grimoires, differing from other New Age publishers in jettisoning pompous academia or hazy cosmic foo foo.”

“Believe it or not, I don’t understand how New Falcon came about or even why it does much of what it does,” RAW admitted. “All I know is that Dr. Hyatt was a Jungian therapist, decided Jung didn’t cover everything and became a Jungian-Reichian therapist, and then for some reason became a publisher on top of that. He’s also the Outer Head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I think his major concern is to publish books that he considers important, especially if they contain the kind of ideas that the Establishment publishers in New York won’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”4

I’m one of those readers who, when they discover a writer they find exceedingly interesting, must read everything by them. I immediately did a special order for a number of Wilson’s books at a local bookstore and most of them were on Falcon Press. And I loved Wilson even more after reading these, but found they were edited poorly. It was conspicuous. Tharcher said he thinks this might be because, when they first went into business, Hyatt (AKA Alan Miller) did the typesetting and was a “somewhat dyslexic.” The reason for typos and errors seems more complex to me, but they are revealing, because RAW often got proper names wrong, and Falcon didn’t do that sort of editing. We can have no doubts that when RAW first talked to Hyatt about publishing Prometheus Rising he emphasized he didn’t want editors fucking with his text! As I wrote earlier in this series: RAW wanted a laissez faire editor/publisher. But I also think he’d have wanted typos fixed. Nay, we know he did, and chalked it up to the earliest computerized typesetting: (Prometheus) “emerged with a phalanx of typos that have embarrassed me considerably over the years.”5

Tharcher says he and Hyatt realized people weren’t complaining about the poor editing of their books, so they didn’t care.6 One person who did care about the editing was Wilson’s wife, Arlen Riley Wilson. And New Falcon cared enough about editing to pay her.

In a July 20th, 1989 letter from Arlen to RAW’s friend and benefactor Kurt Smith, she notes some problems with RAW’s publishers for his Historical Illuminatus series of books, RAW’s depression, Wilson family news, RAW’s heavy lecture touring, and other things. Here’s an interesting line from Arlen: “I’ve been doing some editing work for Falcon Press (boy do the need it!). Between that and Trajectories and secretarial stuff for Bob I keep busy.” Later in the same letter she notes that, because of the various problems with the publishers of RAW’s Historical Illuminatus fiction series, “It’s not too easy for him to get up the enthusiasm to complete the next one, The World Turned Upside Down. He’s awfully busy with other things anyway, so maybe it’s just as well. He’s got a contract from Falcon (not all their stuff is crap, only most) to do a book which has the working title Quantum Psychology. When he gets a chance to do it, which looks to me won’t be until midwinter. He’s too good for them, much too good. On the other hand I shouldn’t bitch since they are paying me these editing jobs right now and I hope to get more bucks out of them as time goes on. Hard to find another employer to let me work from home, which they do. I loathe offices, and besides I’m needed here.”78

Jeremy Tarcher

Tarcher started in publishing in the early 1960s, getting book deals for TV stars like Buddy Hackett, Johnny Carson, and Joan Rivers. Then he went to Esalen and had a revelation of sorts: he wanted to publish books from the Human Potential Movement, but no one in the New York publishing circles he knew was interested in those ideas or subjects. In James Fadiman’s non-fictionalistic “novel,” The Other Side of Haight, he quotes Tarcher9 on the New York publishing industry never “getting” the West Coast thinking in the 1960s, an idea that was repeated by not only Wilson, but Ferlinghetti, Leary, Rexroth, Robert Stone and many others. When I was 17 or so, someone told me I had to read some book called The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson, so I did. I still think of that book as the sort of bible for the new Esalen/West Coast human potential epoch. It’s a good book about heavy Generalist-type thinkers. It was issued by Jeremy Tarcher, whose wife was Shari Lewis and sister Judith Krantz. The word “conspiracy” in the title proved to be provoking to reactionaries who to this day use “the Sixties” as the reason why we must do away with democracy.

RAW had written a long PhD thesis for his alternative university, “The Evolution of Neuro-Sociological Circuits: A Contribution to the Sociobiology of Consciousness.” He rewrote the dissertation into a more popular form, which became Prometheus Rising. He offered it to Jeremy Tarcher, who “held it for a full year of meditation before rejecting it; his only explanation for the rejection concerned the mixture of technologese and ‘counter culture’ slang that has since become my most frequent style in nonfiction. (It’s based on the way I actually speak.) When I tried Falcon next, they accepted it within 48 hours, and I received the advance check within the next 48 hours. ‘Oh frabjous day!’” Wilson then mentions Tarcher changed his mind, and RAW says he had to restrain himself from telling Tarcher to go fuck himself: RAW had been living in poverty while Tarcher sat on the manuscript for a year. RAW adds that Falcon “has always served as an alternative to establishment publishing.”10

On February 12th, 1983, RAW wrote to Kurt Smith, “Prometheus (with Oui material rewritten) is to be published this summer. German rights were just sold. No English publisher interested yet.” In this same letter RAW does some considerable complaining about publishers not paying in time: “It is ‘bad form’ for a writer to go around his agent and nudge a publisher personally. And/Or owed me 3700 in July, paid 400 between July and October in 5 installments, hasn’t paid anything since October, still owes me 3200. End of complaints. Just want you to know I don’t get depressed without cause.” In an undated letter to Smith, sometime in late February to early March 1983, he quotes Smith: “‘What the hell is Tarcher doing?’, you ask. I wish I knew. Arlen thinks he is trying to drive me to despair. Whatever the hell he is doing, I assume it makes sense to him. It makes no sense to me. However, the latest word from my agent is that Tarcher is trying to get a paperback sale on Earth, which does make sense to me, at this point. At least, some of my fans might see the paperback. Based on sales, I gather they never browse in the hardback section.”

August 3rd, 1983 letter to Kurt Smith from RAW in Dublin: “Tarcher, ideally, shd be portrayed by Peter Lorre, not Vincent Price. A very nervous, insecure, timid and therefore treacherous type. He is afraid to gamble, but is in a business that is always a gamble, and that explains him thoroughly. For the sake of the poor bastards who will sign contracts with him in the future, I wish he would read Nietzsche.”11

Let’s be clear: RAW only published one book with Tarcher, the hardcover version of The Earth Will Shake, and distributed by Houghton Mifflin. Paperback versions of that were put out by Blue Jay and then Lynx. But I think Tarcher’s distribution would have helped RAW. Maybe. This letter was written the year Falcon first produced Prometheus Rising. From the venom in the August 3rd letter it seems the Falcon deal had yet to go down.

The drama around Tarcher “sitting” on Prometheus Rising, coupled with Tarcher’s perceived role in the long sad nightmare of the publishers involved with the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles (Tarcher abandoned his involvement once The Earth Will Shake bombed in hardcover) seems to have made RAW concentrate his invective toward him, and nowhere is this discussed more pertinently than by RAW’s longtime friend, D. Scott Apel, in his memories of Wilson, from Beyond Chaos and Beyond. When Apel got a journalist assignment to interview Shari Lewis in 1985: “I never saw Bob Wilson hate anyone, before or since, but he clearly hated Jeremy Tarcher (and by association, anyone who would marry Jeremy Tarcher). He thought he’d been treated poorly, unfairly, dishonestly, and all the other disrespectful ways in which a publisher can abuse an author. From that time until Shari’s passing in 1998, I could never mention either of their names in RAW’s presence. At one point I had to bite my tongue from saying, ‘Sorry, Bob, I can’t come down this Saturday — Shari Lewis is in The City and wants to see me.’ Divided loyalties, for sure…but to this day I have no idea if Tarcher actually screwed Bob over — he always impressed me as an intelligent, ethical individual, even if he was a publisher— or if Bob’s imagination had bested his objective analysis of the situation.”12

Mike Hoy of Loompanics

Scott Apel transcribed a brilliant stand-up philosophy talk by Wilson in October 1987. At one point he started riffing around one of his key points that run throughout his work: that we ought to have doubt about our ideas, and that belief seems unnecessary, that living with only tentative beliefs in models keep us intellectually exhilarated and open-minded and emotionally alive. He talked about the Correct Answer Machine that people seem to get installed in their nervous system at some point: when you have this “machine” you don’t need to think anymore about any phenomena. You already know all the answers. And you’re a fucking fool, too. He attributed the term “Correct Answer Machine” to Mike Hoy, who ran Loompanics publishing out of Port Townsend, Washington state. Hoy published RAW’s sparkling broadside, Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy (1987). I bought quite a lot of books from Loompanics13, and I always looked forward to their yearly catalog, which they would send to anyone who bought a book from them. I still have most of them. Here’s RAW in 1987:

Mike Hoy is my favorite publisher. He publishes Loompanics books — books on how to cheat on your income tax, how to pick locks, how to grow your own marijuana in the closet, how to rip off automatic bank machines, all sorts of controversial books. He recently brought forth what may be the ballsiest book he’s ever published: How To Cheat a Professional Dope Dealer. I travel so much that among my circle of acquaintances there’s one of everything, so I know a professional dope dealer in New York. And I told him about that book - or at least I thought I did. He said, “Are you kidding? I bought the first copy!” That’s the great thing about Loompanics books: the people who need them get them. [Laughter] Michael Hoy wrote an article recently for a magazine called Critique, in which he gave a little parable. Supposing somebody told you I’ve got a “Correct Answer” machine, and you say, “Let’s see how it works.” So he starts feeding into the machine all the questions you asked, and the machine came back with a great deal of what was straight, hard-line Marxist propaganda and regular Marxist jargon. And after five or ten questions you say, “Hey, that’s not a Correct Answer machine - that’s a Marxist propaganda machine.” And the inventor says, “Oh, no. This is a Correct Answer machine. It seems the Marxists have the correct answer. The machine is just giving the correct answer, because the correct answer just happens to be the Marxist answer.” And you think, “Ah, this guy’s just trying to kid me. He’s just a propagandist for Marxism.” So you leave in a disillusioned mood, and the guy in the next window says, “Psst. Hey, I’ve got the real Correct Answer machine.” So you go in and you ask the machine ten questions and you get ten answers of straight Libertarian Party philosophy in standard Libertarian jargon. And you say, “You don’t have a Correct Answer machine either — you’ve just got a Libertarian propaganda machine.” And he says, “Oh, no. The Libertarian Party line happens to be the correct answer to everything.”

The strange thing is we wouldn’t believe in such machines, but most of us think we do have a Correct Answer machine in our heads.14

Hilaritas Press

RAW, on his death bed, told his daughter Christina to keep his books in print. And this small press has done so. Run by Richard Rasa and Christina Pearson, they have done very heavy lifting and I think Wilson would be proud. [Full disclosure: I’ve gotten essays printed in some of Hilaritas’s books.] The terrain in publishing since RAW’s death has seemed to mirror increasing income inequality in the population, and many are opting to self-publish. I briefly discussed the New York-based “Big Five” and what a drag they are on writing culture these days: they only want best-sellers.

RAW once dreamed of having his own press, which he’d call Ho House, with a laughing Buddha as the logo, but it never happened. “Hilaritas” is traced back to Byzantine Renaissance philosopher Gemistos Plethon, who defined the term as something like “cheerfulness” and Pound thought we could recognize the gods even in human form by their hilaritas. A cosmic “Ho.” Even in “sad” things there is humor; in humorous things there is some sadness. Ezra Pound liked the term, and that’s probably where RAW first encountered it.

Hilaritas’s editions are on better paper stock, with far better bindings, contain much supplementary material, have wonderful artwork, were scrutinized by a large group of editors for typos and mistakes, etc. They did/do not change any word of RAW’s thought. If something seems too obscure and the current editing team can’t agree what he may have meant, they just leave it alone. Still, an editor friend who worked with RAW at And/Or Press, Peter Beren, thought, “The Robert Anton Wilson Trust, which had established a strong presence online, began to seem more and more like a cult with Bob as the Prophet. The eye in the triangle, sign of the Illuminati, was its symbol and the main slogan” “Keep The Lasagna Flying.” This profound but surreal and absurdist cult still exists online.”15

I leave us here, with much left unwritten about Wilson, his publishers, his would-have-been publishers (Llywelyn, Weiser, Soft Skull, M.I.T. Press), his wailing and gnashing over editors, his difficult writing life. Previous parts of this story are HERE and HERE.

I will comment in general on these affairs in some future blogspew.

15

More True Than Strange: Collected Writing 1968-2018, Peter Beren, p.205 When I emailed Richard Rasa about this, he replied “I wish it was a cult! Then we’d have better sales!” I don’t think Beren had the hilaritas, but then I’m biased. Or… stuck in a cult? Which, if so, I wouldn’t know, right? Help! Help? I’m locked up in the basement of a chinese fortune cookie company! Send help!

(above graphic done by artist Bobby Campbell)

In our last episode, the OG was going on about Wilson’s (ahem) unfavorable attitude toward publishers and editors, and “writing as business” in general. And while Pound had his great champion in James Laughlin, RAW had a few publishers who were champions of his work, too. But small publishers seem often colorful characters…

Aside from Playboy Press, Wilson published his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy with Dell, a major NY publisher. All the rest of his books were with small, marginal publishers, except his “conspiracy encyclopedia,” Everything Is Under Control, which was with Harper/Collins and he said somewhere that their lawyers went over every line to make sure they couldn’t get sued, which was a drag. He had very bad luck with the publishers for his projected five-part Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, which I will go into at some other time, but what’s more striking to me is that when you publish with non-establishment publishers you tend to run into some very interesting characters.

Playboy Press also published his Book of Forbidden Words and The Book of the Breast; of the former RAW complained that it was a:

disaster and again proved my naivete about he publishing industry. The book was not my idea but that of an editor at Playboy Press, who asked me if I could write a history of foul language. I said sure, I could, since I knew a lot about linguistic history and also knew how to do research; we signed a contract and I went ahead — quickly producing a book of high erudition and (I think) some wit. It turned out that this was not what was wanted. The erudition and the linguistic history were excised, along with much of the wit, and in his hurry to turn my work into a more commercial production, the editor in many sections replaced correct grammar and syntax with the kind of pidgin English generally only encountered in TV advertisements.1

(artwork by John Thompson, who worked with Sebastian Orfali at And/Or Press)

And/Or and Sebastian Orfali

And/Or Press in Berkeley was founded by Sebastian Orfali, along with his brother John, and a psychedelic artist RAW thought was Blakean, John Thompson. They may have all been roommates in San Francisco and publishing for Last Gasp and/or an underground comix bookstore in North Beach, People’s Comix in the early 1970s. Sebastian, born Joseph Peter Orfali in Jerusalem, decided to start And-Or Press in 1974. Previously he earned a Master’s in Philosophy at U. of New Mexico, and he worked as a teaching assistant there before moving to the West Coast. Orfali was a daring publisher: Marijuana Grower’s Guide was banned in Canada and was used as a weed grower’s bible by growers in the Emerald Triangle, which received a huge boost when Reagan had the Mexican cannabis field sprayed with paraquat, which provided a strong impetus for cannabis horticulturists in Northern California to develop stronger, seedless weed for the domestic market. Orfali’s colleague Peter Beren says it sold more than 500,000 copies.2 Jay Kinney’s Young Lust comix were banned in England as too pornographic. Orfali appears to be a character in one of Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” strips; Orfali and Griffith probably knew each other from the early 1970s San Francisco scene.3 And/Or’s Holistic Health Handbook sold 800,000 copies in 1978, according to Peter Beren, who worked with Orfali. Orfali was really a trailblazer for books on drugs, and And/Or’s books were hot in head shops, which were gradually closed down under Reagan. I recall my own astonishment at seeing a fat book titled Psychedelics Encyclopedia, by Peter Stafford, on a used book store shelf, for around $10. This was a long time ago, when “psychedelics” were not written about in the mainstream at all. And I had no idea who And/Or were, and there were names like Jonathan Ott, Robert Anton Wilson, and Sasha Shulgin all over it, and I didn’t know who those people were at the time.

Orfali was probably influenced by Michael Horowitz’s burgeoning collection of books about drugs, which eventually merged with two (three, if you count Michael Aldrich) other collectors and named the Fitzhugh Ludlow Memorial Library. Orfali brought back into print a 1929 book titled Black Opium, by Claude Farrère (AKA Charles Bargone, 1876-1957), “featuring striking, exotic and evocative illustrations” by Alexander King. Orfali and Co. put out a facsimile edition of this book, the earlier Paris edition was highly sought after by collectors. Horowitz likened the prose style to James Joyce’s Dubliners. And/Or also graced the counterculture readership with another book of classic drug literature, Cocaine (1921), by Pitigrilli (AKA Italian journalist Dino Segrė), which appeared a year before Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend, and, according to Horowitz’s partner William Dailey, captured “a vivid picture of the cocaine-crazed demimonde of the Parisian 1920s,” of which Stephen J. Gertz says is “an understatement in the extreme.”4

And/Or, over the eight years they operated, also put out books by RAW (most notably: Cosmic Trigger, Vol 1, now a counterculture classic), and books by Jacques Vallee, Colin Wilson, and David Wallechinsky5. Paul Krassner and Timothy Leary also had books put out by And/Or. Terence and Dennis McKenna’s Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide was (and probably still is) a best-seller in that genre. No one had seen anything like it: the brothers published under pseudonyms, O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric6, with line drawings by Kat McKenna.

As much as RAW found to carp about many publishers, I’ve never seen a harsh word for Orfali, and RAW has a very wise alchemist character in his Historical Illuminatus series named “Abraham Orfali.” And/Or operated out of Berkeley, and, after what appears to be some sort of hostile takeover by a larger publishing consortium, morphed into Ronin Publishing, run by Orfali’s life partner, Beverly Potter.7 “He loved telling of being busted on the Ides of March by the border patrol in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for three pounds of pot,” Potter relates.8 His attorney got him off the rap, and later turned into a Buddhist priest.

The DEA at one point tried to obtain a list of And/Or/Ronin’s customers who bought the cannabis horticulture book in Arizona, and they sued back.

Orfali died at the age of 51, and it’s a horrible thing to read about: it seems to have started with teeth problems. Some dentist had inserted a small silver wire jacked into the root of one of his teeth, and this may have led to cancer of the mouth, and the gory, cascading ever-worse details are relayed by Bev Potter in a bizarre, maddening book I found in a used bookstore in Berkeley, Animal House On Acid: The Barrington Hall Saga: A Memoir, 2015.9 Barrington Hall was a notorious (insane!) student co-op near UC Berkeley, and Potter and Orfali lived next door to it. You’ve read about roommates from hell? The denizens of Barrington Hall terrorized the neighborhood and made me think, “I’d have moved out of there years ago!”10

Herb Roseman

RAW seems to have known Herbert C. Roseman through co-editing of The School of Living’s magazine Way Out. The School of Living was founded by Ralph Borsodi in 1928 and was one of the proto-hippie drop-out communal living sort of things, but it lasted. They were serious. They had a large library of anarchist (19th century America: “libertarian”) books of all sorts, and Wilson seems to have read that entire library.

After leaving the School for New Jersey and then ending up in Chicago as an editor for Playboy, RAW thought Roseman’s Revisionist Press would be the publisher of his book on Aleister Crowley, Do What Thou Wilt: An Introduction to Aleister Crowley. Gabriel Kennedy found RAW’s manuscript of this book in Harvard’s Houghton Library. It had been found by Harvard at Carl Willians Rare Books in London and bought in 2018. RAW had apparently written another book about Crowley titled Lion of Light, which appears to not be the version with the same title published by Hilaritas Press in 2023. Who knows where the original Lion of Light is?11

So, Roseman for some reason never put out Wilson’s book on his Revisionist Press, which appears to have been a subsidiary of Gordon Press. They appear to have put out a red hardcover version of the Discordian bible, Principia Discordia. Revisionist once had a Wikipedia page, now gone. There were (paranoid?) rumors that their catalog of conspicuously high-priced books was a front for the CIA and/or the FBI, to gather names of subversives interested in ideas about the controversial, esoteric and revisionist history and the like. Someone online has quoted Roseman, “I wish it was true about the CIA! We might have made more money.”12

What gets me is that RAW wrote this book on Crowley - what we read as Lion of Light (2023) - merely months after being introduced to Crowley and his difficult Modernist texts by Alan Watts. It’s one of the most insightful books ever written about Crowley, was written quickly, and is a perfect example of the virtuoso “quick study” that Wilson was. No doubt his many years of reading dense, difficult Modernist text by Joyce and Pound prepared him for Crowley. It’s a sort of reading that seems to be vanishing in 2026, a cultural reading scene that seems to be reverting to the days when only monks and priest actually read books and manuscripts for many hours of the day. That RAW sent this manuscript to Roseman, hoping to be paid at some point but seeming to forget about this text? There seems to be some missing information here.

My own copies of Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution13 and Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book were put out by Gordon Press, but apparently Revisionist Press re-printed famous works by hardcore revisionist historians like Harry Elmer Barnes, who also were Holocaust revisionists. Gordon/Revisionist were a poorly run family publishing biz and they went kaput in 2001, sold to Run For Cover.14

Paul Krassner and Ralph Ginzburg

Krassner was one of the first to publish Wilson, in his The Realist, in 1959. They remained friends until Wilson’s death. A fearless writer and editor, Krassner was at a nexus with the renegade publisher Lyle Stuart15, who Krassner worked for while he was still in college, was friends with Ed Sanders, Ken Kesey and Leary, knew Mae Brussell, and also wrote for High Times. He turned Groucho Marx onto LSD.16 Before taking the stand for the trial of the Chicago Seven (or Eight), Krassner took acid and testified.17

Ralph Ginzburg hired RAW to write for FACT, and in 1964-1965 Wilson published at least ten well-researched, pull-no-punches investigative journalism and analyses of subjects such as advertising, atheism, free love, the National Enquirer, MAD magazine, the KKK, and William S. Burroughs.18

Ginzburg, another fearless publisher, put out four copies of eros in 1962, got arrested for publishing porn, took it all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, was sentenced to five years, and did eight months, which he writes about in Castrated: My Eight Months In Prison (1973). I admire Ginzburg, who I can’t help but mentally link to certain jewish radical publishers who seemed absolutely driven by both radical free speech, radical ideas, and money, probably roughly in that order. The list is long and I have much to say about these Jewish badasses, but will save it for another day. Krassner writes about a rift between Ginzburg and Lyle Stuart:

Stuart guided Ginzburg through the publishing of An Unhurried View of Erotica, “finding him a typesetter, a printer, a distributor, a mailing house - and when the Post Office seized Ginzburg’s mailing piece, Lyle sent attorney Martin Scheiman to Washington to obtain release of the mailing. One day Lyle was giving Ginzburg help on his ad campaign.

“I’m publishing a book by Albert Ellis called Sex without Guilt,” Lyle said. When you book some of your radio and TV things, could you suggest him as a fellow guest?”

“But the topic will be pornography.”

“Ellis is a pornography expert. He’s testified in many trials.”

“I can’t do that,” Ginzburg said. “What’s in it for me?”

Krassner ads: “Thus did Ralph Ginzburg make Lyle Stuart’s permanent shit list in a single bound.”19

Ginzburg put out The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, which was written by “Rey Anthony” who was actually popular sexual technique writer Lillian Maxine Harrison AKA Maxine Savant AKA Maxine Sanini, and this book was part of the obscenity trial that got Ginzburg time in slam, but she was never prosecuted. I have not yet seen a copy of this book, although I will. One day.

FACT published, in September-October 1964 - just in time for the election - an article titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater,” in which they - RAW was not involved - asked 1800 psychiatrists their opinion of Goldwater’s fitness to be POTUS. In their professional opinions, Goldwater was manifestly unfit. Goldwater sued Ginzburg for $1 million; he got $1 in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages. Ginzburg took another one on the chin. This basically bankrupted Ginzburg. I note this because it reminds me of my reading of the 27 psychiatrists, mental health profesisonals, and psychologists, who contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and declared him a “clear and present danger” to the US, in 2017. Psychiatrists have a professional “duty to warn” which seems to clash with the precedent of the “Goldwater Rule,” which the American Psychiatric Association thought they violated. Anyway…what do these people know anyway, am I right? (cough)20

About Krassner, RAW wrote:

Paul Krassner’s iconoclastic journal, The Realist, has published more of my writings than any other American magazine, and there was a period in the last 1950s and early 1960s when I might have given up writing entirely if Paul had not gone on publishing my work. I think everybody in the “counterculture” owes a great debt to Paul Krassner, but I perhaps owe him more than anyone else.21

At this point, given the quotes from Wilson in Part 1, we must realize his problems with editors and publishers were more with…guys who wore ties and worked in skyscrapers in Manhattan? Because clearly, there were radical, progressive, fearless publishers who published RAW’s work…they just weren’t issuing stock, etc. It’s always more complex, isn’t it? Aye, I think so: delightfully, intriguingly so.

Myron Fass: Schlockmeister Extraordinaire

I recently watched a documentary about the early history of the Pacifica Radio station WBAI-New York, Radio Unnameable (2012 Lovelace and Wolfson), which was about Bob Fass, friend of Krassner, Sanders and the Yippies, and a legendary radio man in New York FM radio. Bob Fass was born in 1933 in Brooklyn. Schlockmeister Kingpin Myron Fass was born in 1926 in Brooklyn. I did searches for both, reading for over an hour to confirm what the Google search AI said: they were brothers. I couldn’t find anywhere where Bob talked about Myron or Myron mentioning Bob, or any of their friends or researchers pointing it out. I’m still in doubt, because so often AI has given me wrong answers, so if it’s true, I can see why neither talked about the other: Bob Fass was a progressive leftist while who knows what politics Myron was about, but there are stories of him brutally beating a writer or editor for one of his periodicals. RAW wrote an expose of his own work for Myron Fass that Krassner published in The Realist, “Anatomy of Schlock,”22 which starts out:

For three months, I have worked as an editor in the country’s leading schlock factory. My boss assured me that our schlock reached 30,000,000 Americans every month, and that, brethren, is a lion’s share of the schlock market. Let me define my terms. Schlock is the next level below kitsch. Kitsch is naive, maudlin, hokey, unsophisticated. Commercial folklore, so to speak […] Kitsch is “ I Found God When My Doctor Told Me I Had Cancer,” “Jackie Kennedy Tells Why She Will Not Re-Marry,” “Should Wives Enjoy Sex?”

Schlock, on the other hand, is brutal, lumpen-prole, aggressive, hairy; like carnival hot-dogs, so spicy you might vomit if you’re over-sensitive. Schlock is “He Beat His Grandmother to Death With Her Crutch,” “Love-Starved Arab Peasant Woman Raped Me Twenty Times,” “The Disease That Liz Caught From Dick.”

After FACT, Wilson found work at Fass Publications. Quite a leap!

He wrote astrology columns, just making stuff up and getting fan mail about how accurate he was. He edited “four girlie magazines simultaneously”23 and he made up captions for the soft-core porn photos of girls, writing they were scientists, stewardesses, or typists, who like peyote and read William S. Burroughs. My favorite tabloid title that RAW made up was “Mad Hunchback Sells Hunch To Butcher/Woman Poisoned By Hunchburger.”

Myron Fass had been influenced by Bill Gaines of Mad magazine, and so had Krassner, who knew Gaines and worked for him, and basically, started The Realist as a Mad magazine for grown-ups. Fass was influenced by Gaines in that the obscenity laws favored “magazines” over “comic books” and Gaines had published Mad as a magazine, not a comic, to evade the new Comics Code Authority. You can get away with more that way. And, my gawd, did he get away with a lot.24

Wilson never mentions Fass’s name nor the name of the magazines, for understandable reasons. Eventually Fass gave RAW reign over one of his Playboy knockoffs, Jaguar. Fass wanted RAW to make it not too schlock and not too egghead, so RAW “revamped my table of contents several times, making it more schlocky each time. I kept two non-schlock articles, a factual piece about Cuba, and an interview with with a prominent novelist, and tried to make the rest of the pieces come out both schlock and non-schlock simultaneously. This I did by giving them schlock titles but sophisticated insides, or, in one case, a sophisticated title with schlock insides.” Fass fired him anyway.25 RAW had published this exposé in The Realist under the pseudonym A. Nonymous Hack, but an editor at Playboy read it and was impressed, and he got hired there, the best paid job he ever had, editing the Playboy Forum with Robert Shea.26

Part 3 will be shorter, and include RAW on Falcon/New Falcon and a few further comments. Sorry for the length!

26

Wilson relates this story in a few places; I’m relying on his audio interview with Michael Taft, collected in Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything. But RAW pretty much tells the story in the same way in his first novel, The Sex Magicians, brought back into print by Hilaritas in 2024. See pp. 34-36 of that novel. RAW had written a scathing critique of Hefner and Playboy for The Realist, and RAW told Krassner at one point that was the article that impressed someone at Playboy. It still seems a tad murky to me. See HERE, including the comments. HERE is a link to RAW’s 1963 article for The Realist that critiques Hefner and Playboy.

(artwork by Bobby Campbell)

RAW’s entire oeuvre, including interviews, is teeming with snide remarks about publishers and editors. It got to the point where he published a large number of non-fiction books with a publisher, Falcon Press/New Falcon, who barely edited his work at all, which was what RAW wanted. A laissez faire publisher.2 A team of volunteer editors at Hilaritas Press has since gone over those books when they were re-printed and reissued with better bindings, artwork, and paper quality. These new editions also include introductions and forewords by Wilson scholars, post-scripts, publisher’s notes, essays by other writers, and miscellaneous notes about all things RAW.

(Robert Anton Wilson)

Falcon/New Falcon books were usually not reviewed in the mainstream, and this seems to have hurt Wilson’s reputation. Why didn’t he publish with a more reputable publisher? It seems complicated to me, and I want to link RAW’s adversarial views about editors and publishers to his very close reading of Ezra Pound, begun when RAW was a teenager, until his death a week away from his 75th birthday. But also: RAW gives reasons why he thinks he’d had a rough time as a writer and I think quite lot of it holds up. Still…let us say that he and Pound were not quiet about the adversarial nature of writers vs. publishers.

Ezra Pound

When I first plowed through Pound’s works I was struck by how cantankerous he was toward academics and universities (“beaneries”) and publishers and editors.

Pound wrote a letter to his parents in 1908, age 22-23, in which he complained about commercial publishing and bookselling and “the curious system of trade and traders which has grown up with the purpose or result of interposing itself between literature and the public.”3

When Pound’s artist and writer friends died in WWI for no good reason at all, he decided he had to figure out what was behind the War, and soon he seemed to have found the reason: it was economics, banking and money loaned at interest.4 When he tried to get certain publishers to invest in his ideas along those lines, he had a rough time, largely because of the antisemitism in those works. Pound was convinced the Jews ran all the banks. Yea, that old noisy grating saw again. Farrar and Rinehart were publishers who shied away, being two examples.

In assessing Wilson’s love of Pound’s work, I see this as very complex, but I don’t think we should underestimate the odd cranky tone of Pound, who was clearly a mad genius, and that tone was often comical and was endearing to RAW, who grew up around non-educated “shanty Irish.” RAW had an Uncle Mick, who had been gassed in WWI and was given to fulsome blather in basic agreement with popular radio antisemite and fascist Father Coughlin, so there was precedent. But given how RAW referenced Pound in his own works, I can’t help but see Pound as RAW’s “crazy Uncle Ezra,” who may be a genius and very esoteric, but also feels a bit “off” and that makes him beloved, and nutty and never boring. He was certainly more intellectually engaging than his real uncle, Mick.5

Here’s a couple of lines from 1931-1932, on publishing and Pound’s evident cantankerousness:

Some months ago and off and on for some time I tried and have tried to stimulate the publication in the outer occident of a series of brochures that would serve as communication between intelligent men, proposing to print such books in America! “dollar impracticable” “fifty cents impossible” undsoweiter can be imagined by 30 percent of my readers; and the conclusion, i.e, that the idea that publishing is a profession not a trade, and the idea of using a publishing house as a focus of enlightenment are both alien to our national sensibility, will come as a surprise to, no one.6

The idea that publishers won’t do what Pound thinks needs to be done, for cheap, is a typical riff from Ezra. What I think RAW got from Pound was that books and literature are absolutely vital to the health of the citizens, or at least the ones who are interested in learning. This seems a conceit of all writers of substance: damn the business and profit motive, these are good ideas! Get them out to the people and stop looking at your bottom line! I also think this attitude of Pound’s formed part of RAW’s identity as a writer, one who would not shrink from speaking out about money issues on behalf of not only his own interests as a writer, but for all writers, especially freelancers. Pound wrote about how lousy economics stifles love. Among other human creative acts.7

“We live in a vile age when it is impossible to get reprints of the few dozen books that are practically essential to competent knowledge of poetry.” Pound writes this in 1933. He was forever complaining (and I have been doing this, too, for the last 15 years, in my own way) that books are allowed to not only go out of print, but libraries are weeding and discarding books “of substance” at an alarming rate. When Pound is engaged here in railing against “microcephalous bureaucracy” the members of which are “sick with inferiority complex,” and which infect American universities with “academic bacilli” and an “inferiority complex directed against creative activity in the arts,” I feel quite uneasy: this is Pound sounding completely nuts, but I also…gotta admit…I kinda see his point. I doubt American academia was that bad in 1933, but now?8 In these fulminating passages Pound seems to be hinting that there’s a conspiracy between editors and publishers to dumb down the students.

Pound and Wilson seem to think there are legions of readers and writers just like themselves. I have never perceived this in my lifetime as a reader, and I never even stuck it out in academia, but continued to read omnivorously. I think their kind of reading and intellectual interests - and they were both outsiders and not academics - to be fairly rare. This brings up the idea of the writer’s perceived audience, and Ideal Readers, which I can’t go into here.

In Machine Art, Pound effuses about the lag in getting Ernest Fenollosa’s work before the public, and calls out one “P. Carus” as being particularly egregious in this.9 As if the public was going to begin fomenting a revolution against current human perception, the syllogism, the problematic in subject-predicate structure in Indo- European languages, or even interest rates after they got hold of Fenollosa’s ideas about Chinese writing and the ideograms. While I am one who does go ga-ga over this stuff, I never believed the public at large would be the least bit interested. Oh, but it was for people like RAW (and me’n you) to Spread the Word. Nouns don’t exist, things are placed in relation and are filled with action, etc: I love this stuff; at the same time every week there’s some article about incoming collegiate freshman who are functionally illiterate.

Who did get excited over Pound’s various enthusiasms and obsessions? Probably at least 50% of those we call “Modernist” writers. Pound’s influence has been humongous, and we’re all influenced by Pound at least second-hand. As Wilson thought about Pound: Ezra resolved to cause a revolution in the arts, and he succeeded.

In what ways is that World now lost?

RAW and Pound Have Lots of Company Re: Publishers, etc

There’s an inexhaustible list of quotes from artists complaining about “the suits,” and just the other day I ran across a quote from Katherine Anne Porter that could have been by Wilson.10 When William S. Burroughs writes about the relationship between heroin dealer and junky, the isomorphisms here seem troublingly apt to me. Charlie “Bird” Parker saw the people who booked gigs for him like dealers: “judges” and “robbers” who had control over his life.11 Sam Peckinpaugh and Erich von Stroheim have similar quotes about the purse-string holders in the film biz. I won’t even go into Orson Welles here…After McLuhan’s book Culture Is Our Business sold poorly, he said the publisher, McGraw-Hill, had been unconscionably been neglecting him for years anyway, and one of McLuhan’s biographers wrote, “McLuhan had a tendency, not unknown among writers, to leap to the conclusion that his publisher was a malign force.”12 Check out Vladimir Nabokov, on his dealings with Olympia Press and the notorious Maurice Girodias:

I began to curse my association with Olympia Press not in 1957, when our agreement was, according to Mr. Girodias, “weighing heavily” on my “dreams of impending fortune” in America, but as early as 1955; that is, the very first year of my dealings with Mr. Girodias. From the very start I was confronted with the peculiar aura surrounding his business transactions with me, an aura of negligence, evasiveness, procrastination, and falsity. I complained of these peculiarities in most of my letters to my agent who faithfully transmitted my complaints to him but these he never explains in his account of our ten-year-long (1955-1965) association.13

American writers seem right to complain about the Big Five New York-based conglomerates14, who are like the movie studios after Jaws and Star Wars: they only want blockbusters, and have almost entirely neglected daring literary works. But the late Slavic writer Dubravka Ugrešić asserted that, despite her high status as a literary figure, in 2017, she couldn’t get published in Croatia, her home country, because she had left it for Amsterdam. In a 2017 essay, “Artists and Murderers”15 she relates how war criminals, thugs, and other PsOS were getting published, selling art, and opening galleries in Croatia. It’s mordant, dark stuff and sounds utterly believable.

Finally, in a July 3rd, 1986 letter to Kurt Smith from Wilson’s residence in Ireland, RAW goes into minute detail about how publishers in England, France, and Poland have interests in publishing his books there, and he winds up this line of discourse with, “I am owed money by no less than seven publishers right now, all of them over a month late.” To quote David Byrne: same as it ever was.

Wilson’s Very Poundian Take on Publishing

An anecdote about editors that Wilson repeated a few times in interviews and at least once in a book was this one:

Nervous editors are always trying to guess the publisher’s prejudices from minimal clues and they often guess wrong, which, of course, makes them more nervous in the future. That’s probably why Gene Fowler uttered the immortal aphorism, “Every editor should have a pimp as an older brother, so he’d have somebody to look up to.”16

In 1977 Wilson sat down for an interview with two erudite fans, D. Scott Apel and Kevin Briggs. Early in the interview they ask RAW about his relationship with publishers, and he didn’t hold back. I feel Pound lurking here, but you be the judge:

Well, by and large, I am not madly in love with publishers. Publishers are businessmen, and businessmen are really not my favorite type of human beings. James Joyce went into business briefly, and after a while he said to Italo Svevo, “You know, I think my partners are cheating me.” Svevo said, “You only think they’re cheating you? Joyce, you are an artist!”

RAW tells Apel and Briggs he was employed for seven years in engineering, but the rest of his life he wrote advertising, and worked in magazines and books - “the whole publishing field” - and he thinks businessmen “have no more morals than a scorpion.” On with RAW on publishers:

There are two types of predators. There are predators who just go out and grab what they want and take their chances on getting caught. If they spend a little time in jail, that’s all part of the game. They lose a few points. As soon as they get out they try to win again, at the same primitive level. And then there is the second type of predator, the type who has figured out that you can do all that grabbing without risking jail. There’s a great novel about this, JR, by William Gaddis. It’s one of my favorite books. JR keeps saying that anybody who steals is a fool; you can get as rich as you want in this country by using the laws creatively. Businessmen are people who know that. They’ve got the same mentality as pirates. When they think they can get away with it, they break the law as boldly as thieves.

Then RAW repeats the Gene Fowler line about editors, but replaces “editor” with “publisher.” Then:

At this point, nothing a publisher does would amaze me. If a publisher came in the door and shit on the table and said, “You’ve got to accept that because I’m a publisher and you’re a writer,” I’d be awed, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing they could do would startle me at this point. If a publisher was caught the way Nixon was caught it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, I wonder why none of them have been caught yet. Sometimes I puzzle about things like the Clifford Irving17 case. I don’t know how guilty Irving was, but certainly the whole ambience of the publishing business is to incite people to behave that way. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the publishers were ten times guiltier than Irving himself.

I guess I sound uncharitable or unforgiving…(raucous laughter), but as you go around interviewing writers, you’ll hear this from all of them.18 This is what writers always talk about when they get together.19

In a wide-ranging 1983 interview, RAW was asked about non-linearity and montage in film and how literature seems to have fallen behind in the 20th century:

Well, I think it’s certainly true that writing is regressive compared to other arts in our time. I’m inclined to blame the publishers. I think writers would be a lot more innovative and experimental and would catch up and become contemporary with the other arts except that it is so difficult to get anything published that’s at all experimental. And so, even people who have done very experimental work, like William S. Burroughs, tend to write more conventionally as they go along because they just discover it’s hard to get their experimental works into print. There is a new anthology of Burroughs’ work that just came out recently which has an introduction in which the introducer says that Burroughs has stated quite frankly that it was commercial considerations that led him to cut down the amount of cutups in his books. Publishers have always been chiefly mercantile, of course, but it’s getting worse as the cost of printing goes up and book production gets more expensive. They are less and less interested in anything chancy. What publishers are most interested in is a guaranteed bestseller. The further you depart from the formula, the more nervous they get and the harder it is to get published. So writers, in so far as they have any sense of survival at all, tend to become more cautious and less experimental. And it’s happened to me; I have made efforts to be more conventional. Of course, it does not always work. If you have an unconventional mind, your books tend to be unconventional no matter how hard you try to be conventional. But it is hard to sell anything that’s the least bit avant-garde or experimental.20

So here we have Wilson referring to publishing problems and his own unconventional mind. The idea that writing must keep pace with film seems Ezratic to me. Wilson in other places extended this to a total view of Science and Literature and the Arts: they must keep pace with each other.

Overall, this may be the main reason he remained as a hero in the marginals milieu, with his “difficult” relationship with editors and publishers as secondary. We as fans of marginally noted writers all must contend with: how come my favorite writer seems so neglected? Are we weird?21 Are other readers stupid for going for that NYT best-seller? What are we missing? At least we have the books and damn the publishing machine anyway.22

Wilson also thought about persecution and esotericism regarding publishing, in ways that Pound didn’t seem to articulate much. RAW published Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, in 1972. You’d think with this title it would sell well, but RAW thought Playboy must have issued the book on “a need-to-know basis, or something of that sort.”23 He may have seen his status as known accomplice of Timothy Leary as possibly a publishing liability. Finally, RAW often remarked that his style of mixing fact with fiction and genre-mixing in order to make the reader think, was a problem with a lot of publishers:

Dr. Jeffrey Elliot, asks RAW about Illuminatus!: Im what sense is the book science as opposed to science fiction?

RAW: I wanted to write a book that combined several different literary genres. As a result, Illuminatus! is a combination detective story, occult thriller, political satire, and science-fiction work, with overtones of a porno novel, a dissertation on politics, and an occult fantasy. It constantly keeps changing. Whenever the reader thinks he knows where it’s going, it turns into another type of novel. That was part of our problem in selling it. Publishers don’t like that; they like a novel they can easily label. I’m still struggling with this problem in my present writing. My next book, Masks of the Illuminati, is something the publisher is going to have a hard time finding a label for, because it deliberately starts out as one kind of novel and turns into an entirely different type of novel. This, to me, is realism. After all, life doesn’t fall into categories. People don’t live their whole lives in detective stories or gothic thrillers or soap operas or science-fiction novels or Hitchcock dramas. People’s lives change from day to day, from hour to hour. I’ve always wanted to write novels in which the reader doesn’t know what kind of script he’s living in. Publishers can’t stand this approach. They want to put a label on a story, and I keep trying to break that restriction. This is all part of my insidious campaign to undermine the minds of readers who think they know what they’re reading. I want people to realize that literature isn’t always what they think it is. Then they might realize that life isn’t what they think it is.24

For decades now I’ve thought about RAW and publishers needing a label and how it may have hurt him, and I still waffle all over the place about how accurate I think this is. He frequently told interviewers that when Dell advertised Illuminatus! as science fiction or bookstores placed it in their science fiction area, that this harmed the status and/or potential for the book(s). At the same time, he had argued that his Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy predated William Gibson’s Necromancer as the first “cyberpunk” book. There he did a trilogy on his own, without pressure from the publisher, and though the framing device is different interpretations of quantum mechanics for each novel, it doesn’t read as science fiction to me, much less cyberpunk. So I’m not sure about that, either. If you have an opinion, I’d like to hear it!

Part 2, on RAW’s publishers, will be here soon. Stay in touch!

24

Literary Voices #1, interview with Dr. Jeffrey Elliot, Borgo Press, pp.50-64; this section pp.56-57. (1980) A much shorter version of this was included in Email To The Universe, pp.213-217, New Falcon ed; 229-234 of Hilaritas ed. Elliot died in 2009 at age 61 or 62.

(graphic art work by Bobby Campbell)

Brief Rundown of Bostrom’s Riff

Along the lines of stoned thinking: the Simulation Hypothesis, which coalesced in and around the mind of Nick Bostrom, c.2003.

As I understand it, Bostrom says it’s conceivable that a technologically advanced civilization other than ours might have run a very large number of simulations of what their ancestors might have been like, so they programmed these extremely sophisticated algorithmically-based simulations of conscious, philosophically thoughtful, self-reflective “beings” with attitudes and experiences in their (fake) world that are like ours. Or flatly: are us. We just think we are who we are, with our histories and experiences, etc. Or we are all those things - remembering, reflecting on ourselves and experiences - but it’s all algorithmic simulation. The Simulators got really good at this and did it millions of times, or more. We are just one model They came up with.

So, like you’re sayin’ nothing is real? Like we’re in Strawberry Fields? Or, like, ya know, what Pink Floyd says in “Wish You Were Here”: we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year? Whoa! What is this shit?

It’s a hybrid my friend came up with. Novel terpene ratio. She calls it Kali’s Shaven Vulva. You like?

Okay, so Bostrom says, you can have one of three takes on this: 1.) Technologically advanced Entities who run simulations like this is a bullshit idea, so just STFU; 2.) Technologically advanced Beings are all over the Universe, but they don’t do simulations like this; I imagine the idea has come up a trillion times and someone says, ya know, Naw, we got bigger fish to fry. We already know enough about our ancestors. Something like that. Or: 3.) Such technologically advanced Beings are all over the universe, and they fucking love doing simulations, and furthermore, there are countless Sims out there. Bostrom asks us to accept there are more Sims than non-Sims, among all the entities with civilizations ‘n shit. Bostrom thought there’s around a 33% chance for #3, which would imply we’re all probably Sims. What if we are Sims? I like comedian David Cross’s joke, about Homeland Security’s daily threat level during the Iraq War:

Honey, it says here the threat level is orange today and orange is: “High, or high risk of a terrorist attack.” What do we do?

Well, get out the bread and let’s make some sandwiches.

Not A New Idea, Methinks

I was brought up by a couple of quasi-hippies, and never went to church. Around age 17 I had to read the Bible on my own, just to see what all the shouting was about. I recall thinking Genesis was like someone dreamed it up. Probably it was a story dreamed up by many, told over and over until a good version of it prevailed, then, with writing, someone took it down. There are some weird problems, like there seem to be gods, plural, and then just the one god. What happened to the Others? I wanted to know more about them, but they just seem to have been forgotten. Adam, I later learned, had an earlier wife named Lillith and they got a no-fault divorce or something like that. In order to get a new squeeze, the Simulator took a rib from Adam…wild! People buy this? (Well, at the time I was reading the Bible and right wing Christianity was burgeoning, they were buying Man From Atlantis on TV, so…) Anyway, here is a transcendent Being making us and giving us ideas (one of ‘em was “Don’t get no funny ideas about knowledge, see?”), setting us down in a Garden, then walking away to watch from a nice vantage point. Proto-Candid Camera.

Arch-Taoist Chuang-Tzu AKA Zhuang Zhou AKA Zhuangzi, Chinese philosopher, (c.369-286 BCE; Socrates did the Hemlock Self-Offing trip in 399 BCE for perspective) had this idea: I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering and flitting about, happily doing butterfly things. Suddenly I woke up and realized I was the same ol’ Chuang-Tzu…or… am I the Butterfly, and only dreaming now that I’m some Chinese dude named Chuang-Tzu? Thus does everything transform into everything else, a Taoist basic.1

In 1713, the Irish Bishop Berkeley2 wrote, in his Philonous, “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to suppose, that one idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, pray how do you account for the origin of that primary idea or brain itself?”3

In Scientist As Rebel, Freeman Dyson writes about how Olaf Stapledon had a prototypical sort of Simulation Hypothesis in his novel Star Maker (1937), in which there is an early version of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, called “Many-Worlds.” The Star Maker makes some universes into mature ones of extraordinary complexity. Taking a few pages from Stapledon, Sir Martin Rees had a thought-experiment concerned with the “fine-tuning” hypothesis that seems needed to account for this universe we live in, which, according to astrophysics, needed to be set-up just-so mathematically or life could not exist. How did we get so lucky? Rees says: with Many-Worlds, we would see an extremely high number of possible universes that would conform to some Cosmic Anthropic Principle, and we just happen to exist in one of those universes. Once again, we gotta ask: Who or What caused the Universes to exist? For some, it’s the old God Game again, from here to eternity. For others, it’s chaos and numbers and maybe some Hindu metaphysical thought thrown in. The point I’m tryna get at: this creation thing. It’s a bitch, isn’t it? 9th grade Trigonometry will not help me here. Here’s Dyson discussing Rees:

If our present universe is a simulation created by intelligent aliens interested in exploring the consequences of alternative laws of physics, then we should expect the laws of physics that we observe to be chosen in such a way as to make our universe as interesting as possible. We should expect to find our universe allowing structures and processes of maximum diversity. The immense richness of ecological environments on our own planet gives support to Rees’s proposal.4

I find it utmost refreshing to note this last item: ecological environments on our planet: Elon Musk, who said we absolutely live in a Simulation, wants to populate Mars, which would need to be terraformed and we don’t know how to do that. Mars’s soil is literally poison. 5

Apparently there are a number of science fiction novels that address a simulation hypothesis, including Greg Egan’s 1997 Diaspora.

If we veer back toward Philosophy, from the 1960s to the 1980s we got a lot of Other Worlds from modal logic, like that of David Lewis, who wrote On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), which built on counterfactual thinking like it was no one’s business but his own.

Others who seem to have had a Simulation Hypothesis idea predating Bostrom are Ed Frenkel (who I often mix up with Ed Fredkin), Jacques Vallee, Rudy Rucker, Stephen Wolfram, and Hans Moravec. And let us not forget the Wachowskis and their Matrix films.

Conspicuously absent from this discourse among philosophers are the names of Charles Fort, John Keel, and William Bramley, of Gods of Eden fame. Lemme just briefly riff on Fort here:

Fort writes in The Book of the Damned: “Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation? I think we’re property." Fort floated the notion, in 1919, that some alien race made us, and we’re like farm animals to them. Jeffrey Kripal, a Professor of Weird Religions, noted that Fort’s idea that we are some colony or “property” of alien beings had its precedent with a musing by William James.6

Benjamin Breen’s recent book Tripping On Utopia, discusses John Lilly’s 1971 book, The Center of the Cyclone: “He spoke of the universe as a great cosmic computer in which all conscious beings were mere simulations.”7

Novelist Jonathan Lethem had fun playing with the Simulation Hypothesis in his 2009 book Chronic City, in which the most colorful character, Perkus Tooth, walks home the morning after a blizzard and realizes he lives in a Simulation.8

Professor Carlin Weighs In

“I think many years ago an advanced civilization intervened with us genetically and gave us just enough intelligence to develop dangerous technology but not enough to use it wisely. Then they sat back to watch the fun, kind of like a human zoo. And you know what? They’re getting their money’s worth.”9

How Do We Think About This Stuff?

You could reject Bostrom’s idea that consciousness could arise from a computer. I admit that’s my main model right now. I think we need to be evolved, embodied, carbon-based sensory processors with florid emotions in order to be conscious, and I base this on a number of philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientist’s thoughts, but the Portuguese Antonio Damasio made a big impression here.

You might just look at the mathematical formalisms Bostrom uses and say he’s wingin’ it from the get-go. Or you could reject it on the basis that something as complex as our worlds, bodies, minds, societies and creations could reduce to any mathematics at all. This was recently done by Dr. Mir Faizal, Lawrence Krauss, Arshid Shabir, and Francesco Marino, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, this past November. 10 They haul in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem of 1931 to show that the entire cosmos lies outside of algorithmic understanding. I quote Dr. Faizal: "It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated. If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation. This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation.” In other worlds, for the Beings that might be simulating us in Bostrom’s hypothesis, who or what created them? It feels a lot like “what happened before the Big Bang?” question that any intelligent 13 year old will pose. Faizal, Krauss and pals think that, where it was previously thought that you can’t debunk The Simulation Hypothesis, but now they did. But here’s where it gets a bit weird: Space and Time come out of Physics, but there needs to be a substrate for it, and they see: Information. Okay…where does the Information come from? From scientific laws, which are prior to anything, ehhh…and they posit it all comes out of some sort of Platonic Realm, with a mathematical foundation that is “more real” than anything in our…ehhh…universe. And it feels to me that they went through an old trap door that led to a rusty old storm grate near the sewer system, crawled through that, and came out in a dark old abandoned house, took a spiral staircase to some immaculate, weird all-white and pristine room…they had reached David Bohm’s Implicate Order via a non-orthodox way, although Bohms’ Implicate Order is not mentioned.

Bohm’s Implicate Order is beyond Space-Time and so…a religious idea? I don’t know. The Laws of physics itself are weightless, timeless…I’m getting some gooseflesh just thinking about it. Bohm was a favorite student of one Albert Einstein…

Frankly, I don’t know what to do with this, but the Gödel stuff feel intuitively correct enough to me to hurl a monkey wrench11 into Bostrom’s works.

More objections: how do we know Sims and Non-Sims are in the same epistemic situation? Or is what possible similarity between the two plausible? How does thinking about the Sim Hypothesis harm or dent our thinking about the possible future applications of computers? Maybe it really would not be “cheap” to run billions of Simulations for these many beings? Wouldn’t we detect glitches or boundaries if we were in a Sim? We can go on and on with this, but in my Generalist way of thinking, I can’t rule out that we are living in a Simulation, because I just don’t know enough, and there are interesting ideas about how we “are” in a Sim, and these are by highly intelligent people. I personally estimate the probability that we’re living a Sim as 0.1%. Which is not nothing, but far less than Bostrom’s 33%.

David Chalmers

I don’t know what Chalmers makes of the recent application of Gödel to this idea, but in 2022 he thought we couldn’t prove (“it’s impossible”) we weren’t living in a Sim.12 What’s Chalmers’s estimate that we are living in a Sim? Around 25%. How does he arrive at this? We seem to exist relatively early in the universe. While we’ve made some pretty fancy simulations/alternate reality computer games and scenarios, we aren’t close to making something like the vivid universe or even the Amazon basin. We haven’t encountered any other intelligent beings. (I will write about this topic some time in the future.) When a guy like Bostrom says 33%, I sorta give a Bronx Cheer, but when a guy like Chalmers says 25% I find it a tad unnerving. Still: get out the bread; let’s make sandwiches.

Robert Anton Wilson

In a June 3rd, 1987 letter to his friend and benefactor Kurt Smith, RAW tries to explain his theory of perception to Smith, who had trouble understanding the early, Loompanics edition of Natural Law: Or: Never Put a Rubber on You Willy:

You look at a space-time event and see a thing which you call a chair. A snake looks at it and sees a heat field, not a thing, and probably does not call it by that name. An electron microscope looks at it and sees empty space with such peculiar twinkles that attempting to explain them leads to all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. What is “really” there? I don’t know, but I rather doubt it “is” a Platonic Idea or an Aristotelian Essence or even a Kantian ding an sich. Operationally-existentially what is “real” for us is what we encounter and endure, but that is not “real” in any absolute sense.

In the Buddhist epistemology, the chair is real — to your nervous system. The chair is not real — to the electron microscope. The chair is both real and not-real, because your images and the microscope’s image are not contradictory, but, in Bohr’s phrase, complementary. The chair is both real and not-real because it has infinite aspects not containable in either your image or the microscope’s image.

The “real” “thing” of which chair and heat field and twinkles are images may exist somewhere, in some Platonic or Aristotelian realm, as I cheerfully and repeatedly admit, but as Nietzsche and Bridgman both demonstrated, by different arguments, since we cannot contact those realms, it is meaningless to talk about them. What we can talk meaningfully about is out existence and our operations — what our brains encounter and endure and what our instruments encounter and endure. As Heisenberg said to Bohr, Einstein’s continued attempt to go beyond that existential-operational level to a Platonic “reality” sounds to us skeptics much like the medieval debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I feel obliged to work RAW into any discussion, and so there ya go. But more seriously: his theory of perception is colorful, difficult, trippy and quite scientific. I think we should be thinking more along RAW’s lines than armchair probabilities, using mathematical formalisms.

Further: this is what we know about reality. Would posited aliens performing Simulations on their ancestors see “reality” like we do? Do they understand all this? Moreover: does Nick Bostrom understand this?

Final Riff

I touched on the vivid dense richness of Earth’s environment. There are some critics, like Marco Gleiser, who think being serious about the Simulation Hypothesis is a dangerous escapist fantasy at best.13

When I think about this idea from many angles (you read about some of ‘em here), I keep coming back to something that genuinely terrifies me, and I’ll admit it: guys like Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and Bezos are demonstrably anti-Humanities. I don’t know much about Bostroms’s background, but he’s an academic. But quite nerdy, and he’s said and written some racist things in the past. All these guys know is computing and attendant problems along with computer science. When they pontificate outside of the area they know, they sound like morons. I have citations and receipts, but that’s for another time. All of these guys and the kiss-asses that they surround themselves with who want us to think about never-ending growth, using much more energy, living forever, and colonizing space…they’re, full of it! Full. Of. It. The facts of Astrophysics, Thermodynamics, current medicine, etc. say so. They’re banking on a significant level of the public just accepting whatever they say about this stuff, ‘cuz they’re rich. And the reason they’re so rich is they were at the slot machines right at the time when they paid off not because they’re transcendent geniuses. And they now have political power and guess what? They are ready for the planet to be trashed. These fucking idiots have given up on saving the planet. They just want more money, then escape from the planet. Good luck!14

They have a famous ailment: Engineer’s Disease.15 This is where if you’re an expert in some STEM field, you think you’re an expert in everything else, too. We ought not listen to the billionaire tech bros and work on our own, all-too-real problems living on Earth, because we are not going anywhere. Not Mars. Not space-cities that house tens of thousands or millions. Not soon, that is. Not soon at all, given the actual problems, here at home, which has what we need for sustainability. Our problems are political, not technological. Let’s get real!

(OG artwork by Bobby Campbell)

The TV series White Lotus has apparently become notorious for showing penises, and a question asked has been why. Since there’s been quite a lot of full frontal female nudity in TV and mainstream films, why has TV so shied away from penises until relatively recently? Santiago Fouz-Hernandex, film studies professor at Durham U. subscribes to fellow film studies professor Peter Lehman’s idea of the “Phallic Mystique,” which Lehman first wrote about in the 1990s. The phallus is a concept and symbol, and hardly anyone calls a particular penis a phallus; it’s “the phallus” as a symbol of masculinity, power, and privilege. Mere penises are kept off-camera, the theory goes, because to show it is to normalize the phallus, and strip it of its patriarchal symbolic powers.

Some critics think the brains behind White Lotus, Mike White, who I thought was self-identified as gay but apparently claims bisexuality as his identity, is “flipping the script” by showing more frontal male nudity than female nudity in the White Lotus series. The term I often see in popular culture these days is “normalize.” Now, I don’t know if Lehman’s idea of the taboo about showing the penis is TV or film robs the phallus of its patriarchal powers, but if it’s true, maybe we should all be rooting to see penises everywhere. Anything to rob patriarchy of its privilege, I say. What really are the arguments for women as second-class citizens, anyway? I see no good arguments at all. I never have. 1

I grew up in a household where mom and dad walked around naked, so we did, too. It was no big deal. As you get older, you realize: it’s a big deal. For some reason, but it is. I don’t think any of my friends had suburban pagan parents like I did. Mom and dad couldn’t wait to get tickets to see the live nude cast of Hair when it came out. I lost my mom’s vinyl record of that, but I later bought the CD, ‘cuz I loved those songs.

Is it true that the penis and its occulted reference, the phallus, can be “normalized”? I suspect that showing penises all the freakin’ time on TV and in movies could rob the phallus of its power. Will this happen? I don’t see it, no. I hope I’m wrong, and not just ‘cuz I wanna see other guys naked. While I’m not gay I do see the nude male form as beautiful. But if the idea that we haven’t seen many penises on TV or film is ‘cuz it (subconsciously?) takes the shine off patriarchal values, count me in.

The modern hero here, for me, wasn’t on TV or film, but was Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, who, at the end of the chapter “The Lotus Eaters” nonchalantly goes to the public bath and sees his own penis in the bath, “the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.” Just-so! When we look at the rest of the 20th century, it’s mostly how large so-and-so’s cock was. We seem to be interested in that.

Meanwhile, yet another study suggests women care less about size than men do.2 Some variation on this study arises every six months, it seems: some women say size matters to them, but most say it’s other stuff that matters. Gawd it’s boring. Because no matter how many studies are done: men will not get it, it seems. All of which suggests Peter Lehman’s “Phallic Mystique” might have very deep roots, and that he’s not drilling in a dry hole there.

The worst scenario would be: the normalization of the penis on screens, but every time it’s a gorgeous hunk of man-meat actor with a large schlong, which would, I’m guessing, just bolster patriarchal values? I don’t know.

On to food.

Food: Some Noteworthy Dinners

Ezra Pound left the US for Britain, introduced himself to W.B. Yeats and said I’m gonna be your secretary, and he was. Yesterday, as I write this, January 18th, was the 112th anniversary of Pound’s party at fellow poet Scawen Blunt’s house; Pound told Blunt that they were going to have a party at his house and eat roast peacock. Pound wanted to meet all the poets of Britain. It was the kind of thing he could pull off. Also at the dinner - in which a marble box designed by Gaudier-Brzeska housed the recent poems of the dinner guests - were Richard Aldington, F.S, Flint, Yeats, Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, and Blunt’s neighbor, Hillaire Belloc.3 It appears there were no women present (though they were behind the scenes: Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespear), it was a very exclusive MeetUp. A real sausage-fest…with roast peacock.

Have I ever eaten peacock? Not that I know of. Would I, if offered? Only if I were very hungry and had few other choices. I imagine it, like so many other exotic meats, “tastes like chicken.”

Peacock tongue was evidently part of Roman aristocratic power dinners in the first two centuries CE. Fried door mice too. De gustibus non est diputandum for reals. When you read history do you picture yourself in some of the scenes? I do. These guys might poison you, too, by slipping something into the wine if you were a rival. Do you try to hide the stuffed snails in your napkin? Fancy some African ostrich? How good is your gag reflex? You want to be able to gag at will, it would seem to me. The mores were different: you ate yourself silly, then vomited. It was all the rage. In a review of Barry Strauss’s Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors From Augustus to Constantine4 - a book I have merely lazily examined - there’s a brief section listing some of the recipes in Marcus Gavius Apicius’s The Art of Cooking, which:

lists more than 400 recipes for camel heels, parrot, coxcombs, venison, pheasant, thrush, rabbit, goose liver, brain-stuffed sausages, peacock, flamingo, caviar-stuffed crayfish, cranes, ostrich, ham, legumes, vegetables, and an array of seafood from sea urchins to red mullet, bass, bonito, and snails, for which special spoons were designed.

Ham, vegetables, legumes and seafood we get. And look at what it’s juxtaposed with. “Brain-stuffed sausages”? Really now…I once had a huge plate of snails - escargots - at Los Caracoles in Barcelona. They weren’t bad, but little bits of the shells kept getting in my mouth. Copious amounts of garlic didn’t hurt. Overall, I’m lazy, and while I’ll try anything once, I don’t like to have to develop some dextrous technique in order to get at the food. Pasta and vegetables are just so easy to deal with. Has anyone reading this had flamingo? Camel heel? Do tell!

16th century Popes were just as culinarily outlandish as aristocratic Romans: monkey brains, parrot tongue, Turkish fish, etc.5

We’re all aghast at the idea of eating such things, but as the cultural anthropologists have taught us, stuff we can’t imagine eating is part of the ho-hum daily fare all throughout the world, though it seems increasingly there’s a McDonald’s down the end of the dirt path. Which Bourdain book was it where he was determined to eat Bird’s Next Soup? As I recall, it didn’t go well.

I’m very amused when food and crime mix, as in my reading of a history of the TV show 60 Minutes from around a year ago. The Chinese were selling rubbery truffles to the French, with the Mob as go-betweens. They put “Product of France” on the packages and made much more than a trifle on bogus truffles.6

How daring are we as eaters? I tend to think I’m on the “daring” spectrum, and can’t recall turning anything down that I’d never tried. I did not like vegemite at all, but I wonder why? I tend to like just about everything. There are many things I choked down then said to myself, Never Again. I used to hang out with a couple of Afghan brothers when I lived on the Los Angeles harbor, at San Pedro. They invited me to a special feast, in which they hung a piece of meat out on a line for a couple of days, then ate it: Lahndi. I admit to being a tad nonplussed, but hey: they were all eating it. When in San Pedro by way of Kabul. Hours later, alone, at home, I really thought I was going to die. They’d find my corpse slumped over next to the toilet. It was bad. I told my buddies about this a couple days later and they laughed. So did I. I made it through. It’s this sort of experience that causes me to say, “Oh, thanks, but I just ate before I got here. I’ll have some garlic naan and chai though.”

Would I try human placenta? I don’t know. Probably not, in the exceedingly odd chance I’d be offered. I only bring it up because apparently, YouTube “influencers” had people believing placenta was “healthy.”7 I tend to consider alleged health-giving effects of a food way down the list of my priorities, and “adventure” at the top. There are some things that others have eaten that I would not even consider trying, though.

Like the Frenchman “Monsieur Mangetout,”8 (“Mister Eats-All”), born Michel Lotito, who died in 2006 at the age of 55. He had pica, which is a psychological disease in which you crave…non-nutritious things. Like metal or glass. An entertainer of sorts, he once ate an airplane. A Cessna 150, to be exact. Put an asterisk next to this, though: it took him two years to eat the airplane. Mon dieu! He ate a television. He ate a bicycle. (So that’s where my bike went!) Make claims for your adventurous eating, but we’re all pikers compared to Michel Lotito.

Death: Why All the Fear?

I’m gettin’ up there. I have the medical records to prove it. I often think of the Stoic riff: why fear death? Think of all the time before you were born that you didn’t exist. Then you were born, lived your life, then die. Why not worry about all that time before you were born? There are variations on this, and it seems a neat trick. I can work myself into moments where I lose the fear of death, but then I find my ego has gained control again and is horrified at the Very Very Bad News that it - my ego, which thinks it’s running the whole show - will at some point reach thermodynamic equilibrium. This Ego of mine thinks it’s imperative that I live, and…show others I could…what? Write? Play the guitar well? Tell an amusing anecdote? Be some sort of caretaker or teacher?

It’s kind of ridiculous, but I think it has a lot to do with our background assumptions about what it means to live a human life. How many of us are unwilling to interrogate those assumptions? I know I’m unwilling and terrified of doing so sometimes. Then, the disappearance of fear and a hearty belly-laugh at how strange it all is: this. All this. Living. A grotesquely huge level of good luck seems to have attended my existence. No, I’m not rich but American standards. Hell: I make almost nothing. And I do need money. But still: I was always so damned lucky. I had nothing to do with most of the conditions of my life. You want to be remembered well…as if you live on after death somehow, basking in the golden words of others: they remembered how kind or smart or funny you were and that one time…But you’re fucking dead! YOu’re not listening in on all the lovely things (or non-lovely) people are saying about you. It doesn’t matter! Your reputation? What do we care about that after we’re dead? What matters is being a decent, interesting person NOW. It matters a lot, seems to me.

I welcome any and all dissenting opinions in the comments.

In Pynchon’s Vineland, Mucho Maas and Zoyd Wheeler talk about how the State was threatened by LSD, because it gave you the feeling of immortality. I resonated with that passage. They did Windowpane down in Laguna in the 1960s. Zoyd say, “God, I knew then…I knew…” and Mucho interrupts him:

Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the state panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it’ll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us.9

Similarly, Robert Anton Wilson, in his epoch self-programmed non-psychedelic trip that was heavily influenced by Aleister Crowley, on July 22nd, 1973: “I lost all fear of death, knowing it to be literally impossible. I understood the wit of Yeats’s fine line, “Man has created death.”10

Let us all find some peace and equanimity when it comes to thoughts of our own demise.

10

Starseed Signals, RAW, p.181

…So, that’s how the zebra got its stripes. What was that? Bonobo sex? That’s a good one, and I’d like to answer it, but it’s gonna have to wait, as I see by the little sundial there on your spacious patio next to the…sex swing, is it? that I have to get back to that…thing I was talking to you about earlier, Ellen. Thanks for the invitation and hospitality and that lovely brunch of crepes and steak, you really are a la cordon bleau, ain’tcha? Remind me to riff on bonobo sex the next time okay? Thanks for showing up and if you need your parking validated, ask Frankie the Mook and don’t worry, he’s harmless; if you need personal validation, lemme just leave you with some words I may have ripped off from Mr. Rogers: You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and consarnit ‘n hells to the yeah: people like you!1

RAW, Leary and Francis Crick

In the 1970s, Crick made the case for panspermia: the idea that life on Earth originated elsewhere in the galaxy or universe. This had been an idea for awhile, but thought of as fringe and kooky, however if you are a Nobelist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, people will listen to what you have to say, even if it’s about an idea like this.2 As most of you well know, there are two broad types of panspermia, both of which circumvent the problem of how inorganic matter spontaneously (?) became organic matter, then after that, a very complex proto-RNA somehow appeared. Somehow. Either some Intelligence put life here (Directed Panspermia)3 - and who knows whether they really meant it or were just goofin’ around - or life accidentally surfed the cosmic rays and landed here (Undirected Panspermia). Crick was good on fleshing out the history. Naturally this idea was very appealing to Erotic Cosmologist acid head intellectuals like Leary and Wilson. What’s interesting is: Crick did LSD, too.

The crux of RAW’s “darkest heresy” was the problem of the seeming fantastic level of order spit out by Evolution. Sure, ya got 4.6 billion years to get the James Webb Space Telescope, human discovery (or invention of ?) and implementation of quantum mechanics, which is the most successful physical theory ever, and ya know, like, Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, Finnegans Wake, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But for some, evolution by natural selection, even given this time span, doesn’t seem quite enough. There’s gotta be more. Back to Crick.

Somewhere I read or heard RAW riff on how the order in our world coming from Natural Selection was like throwing a bunch of spare jet engine parts over the fence and then seeing a 747 come out of it, by itself. Another time he used all the parts of a television spread out that somehow combined together in just the right way to make a working TV. Francis Crick’s hypotheses about panspermia seems to have fueled RAW’s doubt about the adequacies of Neo-Darwinism, which I find deeply ironic, given Crick’s absolute antipathy for vitalism in Biology4

RAW and Leary speculated wildly with panspermia in the late 1970s, but Leary more so than Wilson.5 Crick did use LSD (What? When? How often?; Perhaps it’s in Cobb’s recent biography?), but only allowed this to be known after he died in 2004. Crick called LSD a “thinking tool.” If Crick is right about Directed Panspermia, presumably we all have ET DNA in us, an idea that RAW seems to have taken a gnomish delight in.6

Note that the hardcore Physicalist Crick hates any hint of Vitalism, and his complex organic compounds/DNA-RNA (maybe) came from another world, theoretically: it’s still a Physicalist view, but Crick had to get it from Elsewhere first. And Crick has to admit there’s no (1981) evidence for Directed Panspermia. I find this cosmically hilarious, personally. Maybe it’s just me.

Brief Notes on the Influence of Korzybski and Pound on RAW’s Cosmogenesis

Wilson began reading Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity and Ezra Pound’s essays and Cantos as a teenager. Though Korzybski was trained as an Engineer and tried to adapt the mathematical calculus to everyday thinking, for everyone, and Pound was a brilliant if nutty poet who, as Wilson argued, set out to start a revolution in the Arts and succeeded, I think both may have contributed to Wilson’s urge to transcend the Neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Wilson read Korzybski repeatedly throughout his life, often while stoned on cannabis.7 :

Everything I have written, however improved or disimprooved8 by my own wisdom or idiocy, begins from the shock of taking a book off a library shelf and encountering the world of Alfred Korzybski. […] it still remains, in 1994, somewhat controversial - and painfully confusing (“unreadable”) to many specialists. Perhaps I found Korzybski easier to navigate than many learned persons because I had not yet specialized in anything when I read him - and even at 62 I still haven’t specialized in anything. I suspect that perhaps I suffer from intellectual Don Juanism. I love too many reality-tunnels to give my heart entirely to any one fo them. I agree with Korzybski’s friend, R. Buckminster Fuller, who said , “If nature wanted us to be specialists, we’d be born with one eye and a jeweler’s lens attached.” 9 […] Or perhaps I found Korzybski congenial because I read his book over and over, perhaps two dozen times in the first ten years after discovering it, many times under the influence of marijuana, a herb which makes it easy to understand Korzybski’s major thesis, which holds that our seemingly-immediate perceptions of a seemingly-external “reality” contain as much guess-work, abstraction, induction, deduction, outright “gamble” etc, as any of our more slower, “conscious” ideologies, belief systems, religions, sciences, etc. All science and philosophy that follows its own method logically will eventually end with relativity, uncertainty, and zeteticism because the sense-data from which we start remains wobbly and unsure.10

We need to add that Korzybski’s idea of humans as “time-binders” - while plants bind energy, non-human animals bind energy and space, humans bind energy, space and time because of writing. We can receive signals from Plato, Confucius, Scotus Erigena, and Giordano Bruno, due to our symbol systems and writing, which, when added to the scientific method, eventually led to the steam engine around 1750 and then history accelerates to a startling level, considering where we had been. Graphs of various levels of historical phenomena having to do with human social activity all show “hockey stick” activity starting around 1750: this is mostly due to writing, which is epigenetic: we now know that it’s not Nature vs. Nurture, but Nature via Nurture, and that genes are switched on and off, or are modulated like a rheostat due to those genes being in particular environments. Korzybski groped at this without knowing what it was. Epigenetics is quite recent. But it has to do with how what’s outside out body interacts with what’s inside our own genome. Writing is epigenetic, and thus seems to extend the heresy of Lamarckism in the history of Biology. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was a big deal until Darwin came along, then Lamarck became a sort of embarrassment, but now he’s “back” with epigenetics. So, Korzybski’s notion that homo sapiens are unique in that we have writing and bind up time is a biological idea, too, and while it’s Lamarckian, by the time Korzybski published his theory of time-binding, it was 1919 and Lamarck was still on the outs.11

Ezra Pound’s mystical outlook is evident to anyone who enjoys reading him. From all the cognate “vitalist” terms throughout history and people planet-wide (see Part 1, footnote #4), for Pound it was the god Dionysius (largely) that indicated Vitalism, and here’s a few lines from Canto XCII:

The Divine Mind is abundant

unceasing

improvisatore

Omniformis

unstill

In The Spirit of Romance, Pound is blatantly Vitalistic (what true poet isn’t?):

Let us consider the body as pure mechanism. Our kinship to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us; but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and, because this is less obvious -- and possibly more interesting - we forget it.

We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive.12

The influence of Pound on Wilson will have to wait; it’s a dense thicket in there for me, and I’ve yet to see the extent. So complex! I will add here that Pound thought there were three domains we draw from when we read writers: 1.) phanopoeia: how well does the writer project images into your mind?; 2.) logopoeia: how does the “dance of the intellect” in the writer appear to you?; and 3.) melopoeia: how “musical” is the writer? How does he/she use the sound of words? Rhythm? Pound thought that “Music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe,” which he speculates about in his book Translations. Pound scholar Eve Hesse says of this: “Properly attuned, the poet’s voice becomes the voice of inarticulate creation.”13 So powerful were books in Pound’s (and RAW’s) cosmology that he even sounds Vitalist when he talks about them: “If a book reveals to us something of which we were unconscious, it feeds us with its energy.”14

I assume we all could stand to read more poetry. Just a thought…

Comparison: Thomas Nagel

The living academic philosopher Thomas Nagel, most known to non-philosophy specialists for his short essay from 1974, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”15 In 2012 he came out with Mind and Cosmos, in which he argues that physics and chemistry are inadequate to fully explain evolution; something else is needed. He’s not sure what that something is, but he makes some guesses. Nagel’s stance toward the Neo-Darwinian synthesis seems quite isomorphic to Wilson’s.

Nagel reads “card-carrying naturalist” Francis Crick’s Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature and writes, “But Crick acknowledges that there is no basis for confidence in any of these likelihoods,” meaning proof of Directed Panspermia.16 Nagel wants to be a Physicalist, too, but he kept coming up short. So he went over to a non-reductionist view, but admits this seems extravagant and costly, because its implications throw everything we know, from biology to physics into a vastly changed worldview that would include Mind, somehow, in everything.17

This was one of the reasons we called it counterculture.

I really like Nagel’s work, on everything. He’s one of my favorite living philosophers, holding on as I write, at 88. In this gripping short work (Mind and Cosmos is 128 pages and very well-written for Generalists like myself), by page 44 he’s arguing that the reigning paradigm of Neo-Darwinism and reductive physicalism keeps faith that biology can be reduced - completely - to chemistry and physics. And Nagel cannot agree.

About the forms of consciousness in evolution?:

I believe it cannot be a purely physical explanation. What has to be explained is not just the lacing of organic life with a tincture of qualia but the coming into existence of subjective individual points of view - a type of existence logically distinct from anything describable by the physical sciences alone.18

Nagel seems to argue that even if physicalist reduction can account for consciousness in organisms in evolution it can’t account for subjective experience, which would be outside its explanation. (?)(!) Physicalist-materialists must account for the appearance of consciousness in evolution: how?

Early in Mind and Cosmos, Nagel cites three books by Stuart Kauffman that argue biological variation is not due to chance, “and that principles of spontaneous self-organization play a more important role than natural selection in evolutionary history.”19

Nagel ends up arguing for Teleology. By 2012, things had begun to thaw, this sorta stuff was thinkable, sayable, and you could write about in in academia. But he ends up where RAW and Leary already were: the universe is so constructed that it wants to see itself.20

Wilson seriously entertained Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of formative causation and morphogenetic fields, and David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics and a holographic universe, with an Implicate Order behind where we all exist now, the Explicate Order. Among many other ideas. I’m not sure a large number of academic philosophers espouse Bohm or Sheldrake, but things seem to be changing pretty fast over the last 15 years.

There are a number of thinkers I like along these lines who seem to break with the mainstream Neo-Darwinian synthesis who are working in “respectable” academic and Think Tank fields: Stuart Kauffman, who we’ve already mentioned. Kauffman thinks really interesting things happen at the far edge of complex adaptive systems: read him!21 The trio of heavyweights Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Evan Thompson and their autopoiesis hypothesis seem totally worth consideration to me. 22 I was impressed with David Haig’s From Darwin to Derrida. Haig took over Robert Trivers’s job at Harvard and they’re old friends who collaborated on a book about genomic imprinting 25 years ago, which I still haven’t gotten to. Trivers tells an anecdote in his magisterial Folly of Fools: “As one evolutionist told me, his genes couldn’t care less about him, and he feels the same way toward them.” This evolutionist was David Haig.

A Crick Anecdote

In In Praise of Indecency by the late friend of RAW, Paul Krassner, there’s an essay about pornography and masturbation and the topic turns toward the TV tabloid murder-trial involving Scott Peterson, a fertilizer salesman, who was convicted of murdering his wife Laci. During the trial the prosecutor noted that three weeks before Laci disappeared Scott had added some hardcore porn channels to their subscription satellite dish, which Scott’s attorney Mark Geragos answered by saying was “as great a form of character assassination as I don’t know what,” even though, as Krassner adds, Scott Peterson was then on trial for the murder of his wife and unborn child. In Krassner’s comic analogic mind, this discourse about jerking off moves on to a 57 year old judge named Donald Thompson, who a court reporter complained masturbated through his robe during trials, using a penis pump, that Thompson had literally jerked off through many trials, including rape and baby murder trials. And so Judge Thompson went on trial for this, with several witnesses for the prosecution: cops and jurors who heard a “swooshing” sound of the pump through Thompson’s robe. The testimony was damning and the judge got four years for indecent exposure. From there Krassner moves to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Clinton’s surgeon general, Joycelin Elders, who advocated for masturbation as part of Sex Ed. Then, to our surprise, Francis Crick shows up:

Several years ago I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him in order to borrow some pornography. It was Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize for his and two others’ seminal (yes, seminal) discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a bestselling 1968 book, The Double Helix, James Watson wrote that Crick was so elated on the day of that discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered “the secret of life.”

Their discovery in 1953 helped launch the modern field of molecular genetics, with far-reaching implications for understanding our biology, as well as spin-offs relating to genetic engineering to DNA fingerprinting, plus DNA imprinting found in blood, saliva and hair follicles. Certainly, to reveal that Crick liked to play with himself is not, in the words of Geragos, “as great a form of character assassination as I don’t know what.”

I’ve waited until after Crick’s death to write about this, but the seemingly incongruous image of a Nobel Prize winner masturbating to porn in no way diminishes his accomplishments. There is not the slightest bit of inconsistency between his jerking off and being described by Caltech professor Christof Koch, his collaborator for many years, in these words: “He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate and always willing to revise his own opinions in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him. He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist until the bitter end.”

The Los Angeles Times obituary stated: “An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells was parasitic junk.” Ironically, in recent years, DNA has become a euphemistic synonym for semen. So there you have it. A fertilizer salesman, a judge, a president, and a Nobel Laureate. Together, they represent a monument to masturbation as the Great American Equalizer.23

Okay, I’m spent. I didn’t get to everything I had about RAW and his erotic cosmogenesis. I maybe covered 40%. I got bogged down jerking off there at the end, thinking of…no, no not Francis Crick…maybe Monica Lewinsky.

23

In Praise of Indecency, “Masturbation Helper,” Paul Krassner, pp. 35-37

Today I visited a friend in the terminal stages of dying by cancer. I came home and wept — not just for my friend, but for Arlen2. His death-process forced me to relive all I went through during her dying last year. I wept. [Jesus wept: the shortest verse in the Bible.]

Then my son and daughter came over and we had a wonderful birthday party. I felt their love and my love for them as more tangible, more “real” (whatever that means) than the furniture in the room.

We discussed evolution and I found to my delight that they both shared my doubts about Darwinian dogma. All evolution, we agreed, did not look like an accident to us. As to the “non-accidental” aspects we all shared a deep agnosticism and sense of mystery. I felt very happy that 2 such independent minds shd. share these darkest of all my Heresies.

RAW then goes on to quote Pound, citing Cavalcanti and love, a radio show from his childhood starring Lionel Barrymore called “The Mayor or the Town,” which concerned the mystery of death, then he paraphrases Alfred Korzybski, and ends with a long quoted passage from Finnegans Wake, which he would type out from memory.

It’s this “darkest of all my Heresies” that we’re concerned with here.

As part of his self-training as a teenaged “monster of erudition”3 he read Darwin, who he flatly called a writer for “adults” in an early 1970s paper on American horror films as folk-art.4 Coming out of an impoverished early childhood in a neighborhood of “shanty Irish” near Brooklyn, he successfully enrolled in the storied Brooklyn Technical High School, where he encountered kids his age from wildly diverse backgrounds. There were Protestants, atheists, Jews and agnostics. He was fascinated. It was quite the 180 from his Catholic school torments at the hands of nuns and “brothers.” “The result was that I started reading all the authors the nuns had warned me against — especially Darwin, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Mencken, and Nietzsche.”5

(a meta-narrative!)

We’ve already seen how RAW had developed a organicist, or vitalist outlook on cosmic evolution with his relationship with plants. I will discuss some of the wider views what I call his cosmotheism.6

RAW was impressed with what physicalist/reductionist Biology had done with the Ne-Darwinian synthesis.7 During the 1970s his reading convinced him that NeoDarwinism could not be the Final Answer in Biology. In a September 1974 essay in Green Egg, Wilson argued that a huge mistake was made when Giordano Bruno’s erotic cosmology was overthrown in favor of Newton; in the 20th century both Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary had tried to revive Bruno’s pantheism but both were thrown in prison. In the late 1970s, after Leary’s release, RAW helped Leary flesh out his Eight Circuit Model of the brain and consciousness. The first four circuits were heavily scaffolded upon NeoDarwinian ideas. By 1977 RAW had speculated that the 8th circuit had to do with consciousness outside bodies, or what Aldous Huxley had called Mind At Large:

Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop. “Out-of-body experiences,” “astral projection,” contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) “entities” or with a galactic Overmind, etc, such as I’ve experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Edison, Buckminster Fuller, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately, “the extraterrestrial unconscious.”8

RAW published a very brainy quiz for Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog in 1989. In it he asks Questions, then a couple of pages after that he discusses Answers. After every Question he has a box for True or False, but the article is titled, “Beyond True and False: A Sneaky Quiz With Subversive Commentary.” Questions #31 and #32 read thus:

The Darwinian Theory of Evolution has been conclusively proven.

The Darwinian Theory of Evolution has been conclusively disproven.

When we skip ahead to the Answers, we read:

31 and 32, asserting that Darwinian evolutionary theory has been proven or disproven, I personally would classify as None Of The Above. I regard such assertions as propaganda in the Cold War between Darwinians and Creationists. The Darwinian theory has more or less stood up for over a hundred years, has flaws which most biologists now admit, and may need considerable revision in the near future, but remains, as Popper9 has often argued, not in the same ball park as all the “laws” of sciences like mathematical physics. (Personally, I don’t see any better biological model around than Darwin’s but considering the criticisms recently raised within biology I strongly suspect a better model will arrive shortly — and will probably be equally offensive to Creationists…)10

It’s not that RAW ever really broke with this position; it’s just that he was more interested, from the 1980s to his death in 2007, in thinking about all those aspects that seem unanswered by the Physicalist Neo-Darwinian scientists: how life began on this planet, anomalies, erotic cosmotheism, the necessity of some sort of Mind in evolution, etc. In a 2003 interview with Gabriel Kennedy, RAW talks about how Space/Time/Matter can’t be broken up; they make a whole, and then he pretty much confirms what he was thinking about NeoDarwinism in the mid-1980s:

Obviously, you can’t leave mind out wither, because how do you know the space-time-matter are there are all unless there is a mind to observe them. So, space-time-matter and mind make up the four parts of any transaction. So where does that get us?

GK: It’s good for me.

RAW: Oh, yeah, also, I object to Fundamentalist Materialism. Although, in some ways I lean very closely to what I’d call a literal materialism as a working hypothesis that’s safe most of the time. As long as you’re directed into a goddamn dogma or an idol. The Fundamentalist Materialist is what I call these people, this mindset, that takes the materialist model and revers it as passionately as a religious conviction. Like some of these goddamn Darwinians I see in television. To me, they’re as embarrassing as the Fundamentalist Christians they’re arguing with. All these Fundamentalist Christians are yelling, “God created the world in six days.” All the Fundamentalist Materialists are yelling back, “Evolution is not a theory; it’s a proven fact.” Well, it’s not a proven fact. It’s a hypothesis. It’s a very plausible hypothesis, seems to me the most plausible hypothesis. You can’t confuse it with a fact; in the first place it can’t be tested in the laboratory, so it can’t be refuted. According to Karl Popper, any theory that can’t be refuted is not part of science. I think evolution did occur. I mean I beliee in it. But, jesus, some of these people are so fanatical about it they sound just like the Christians.11

A very fine yet massive detail here, that many seem to miss, possibly because our culture has brainwashed so many people into thinking in just two categories: Right/Wrong; True/False; Science/Not Science, etc: Wilson agrees with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, but objects to calling it a “proven fact” on grounds laid down by Karl Popper’s epistemology. Is Darwinism science? It looks like it, yea, to RAW. Is it on the same epistemological level as mathematical physics? No. In Wilson’s universe there are many granular levels of detail and no one Knows All.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wilson crammed a lot of his ideas into his Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy of novels, which contain a dizzying level of free play with scientific ideas, along with scads of non-science. Leary and Wilson had pounced on Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson’s massive, seminal, wildly controversial 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. They both read it like Talmudic scholars and RAW’s subsequent writings, including the novels that make up Schrödinger’s Cat reflect this with musings on insects, ecology, genes, ethology, status hierarchies, and ideologies.12

Later RAW criticized EOW for giving humans very short shrift (EOW was an Entomologist by training), and asserted that Sociobiology only addressed the first two of Leary’s Eight Circuits. In 1991 RAW cited JBS Haldane’s golden quote about the Mind behind evolution: “The great biologist, asked what dominant trait he would attribute to the Mind behind evolution - if he admitted such a Mind - replied at once, ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles.’”13

We will see that RAW asserted a more Grand and poetic idea for this Mind, and that he has many more allies both in the Academy and outside it in 2026 than he had at his death in 2007.

(I will try to conclude these essays on RAW’s cosmotheism, vitalism, and his personal efforts to transcend physicalist NeoDarwinism in the next section. Wish me luck! - Michael/OG)

1940s and 1950s

RAW received the Sister Kenny Method1 of treatment for his polio, which orthodox medicine did not approve of. It consisted of hot compresses and soft, or “passive” manipulation of affected body parts. This nurse-nun thought the muscles of polio patients needed to be “re-educated,” having been “alienated.” It’s part of the basis of what we call “Physical Therapy” today. RAW was able to walk without much trouble for most of his life, until he was forced to deal with Post-Polio Syndrome symptoms during his last ten years.

This healing via unorthodox method planted a strong suspicion of the authority of the American Medical Association throughout his life.

As a 24 year old intellectual in New York, Wilson found out Wilhelm Reich’s books were being burned at the Gansevoort Incinerator, in 1956. Trucks backed up to the incinerator at Gansevoort and Hudson and dumped six tons of Reich’s books there, where they were burned. It was largely American liberals and the FDA that were behind this. The Nazis had earlier burned Reich’s books. Wilson had become extremely affected by WWII and the Nazi regime and had imbibed the message that fascists burn books, but we are free and for free speech. It was only 11 years since the end of the war. He had to understand why a former star pupil of Freud was so vilified and feared by authority. RAW went on the study Reich’s books for a good portion of his life, and if you know nothing of Wilhelm Reich but are interested, you might want to read Wilson’s Wilhelm Reich In Hell, a play, with a Shavian preface by RAW, in which he discusses Reich’s individual theories, persecution, paranoia, and the role of heretical thought in societies.2

Reich had been persecuted by the Stalinists also. He was kicked out of the Communist Party for his sex theories and especially for his 1933 theories of why fascism seemed to be the default mode, worldwide, throughout history. Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism appeared in 1933. Why would “socialists” (or “communists” for that matter) be so threatened by a book on fascism?3

For our purposes, later in his career, Reich became convinced there was an undetected life-giving force that permeated the universe. It was called Orgone. RAW cited a long history of peoples all over the world re-discovering this vital force. If you’ve heard, read about, or had your chi manipulated, or were told how to breathe to build up prana, you know this force.4

One of the giants of post-WWII scientific ecology, William Van Vogt, published The Road To Survival in 1948, when Wilson was 16, and Wilson read that and began following Ecology as a science before the age of 20. He was also heavily influenced his entire life by Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? (1948), which was at the nexus of quantum theory, the new Information Theory of Shannon, and Biology, and could be considered a backdoor for respectable neo-Darwinists to entertain ideas that might be considered quasi-vitalist.

(in nature there are no “natural” closed systems: everything is involved with everything else)

Wilson was also a riveted reader of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and there is much from Frazer about ancient peoples fucking in the fields to encourage plant growth. Sexuality and fertility of humans was analogous to fecundity of plants, and this vital, progenitive sexual force seemed to have been intuitively known by ancient peoples, and might be considered the ur-religion. More on this below.

“Herbert Muller, a Nobel laureate in genetics, once said that we’re all giant robots created by DNA. There’s a lot of truth in that metaphor. DNA is immortal and has designed everything. Bucky Fuller points out that there’s no engineer or technologist, including himself who’s achieved the simplicity and tremendous structural strength and economy of a tree.” - Wilson in a 1977 interview with Weird Trips magazine

Wilson in Southern Ohio, 1962

On December 28, 1962, Wilson had his first psychedelic trip, on peyote, in an old slave cabin in the woods near Yellow Springs, Ohio.5 He experimented very extensively with peyote in the woods - at least 40 trips - and one time, the day after a trip, while weeding in the garden, “a movement in the adjoining cornfield caught my eye.”:

I looked over that way and saw a man with warty green skin and pointy ears, dancing. The Skeptic watched for nearly a minute, entranced, and then Greenskin faded away “just a hallucination…” But I could not forget him. Unlike the rapid metaprogramming during a peyote trip, in which you are never sure what is real and what just the metaprogrammer playing games, this experience had all the qualities of waking reality, and differed only in intensity. The entity in the cornfield had been more beautiful, more charismatic, more divine than anything I could consciously imagine when using my literary talents to portray a deity. As the mystics of all traditions say so aggravatingly, “Those who have seen, know.”6

Wilson reads the new book by Castaneda five years later and this same warty green being, the spirit of the peyote plant, Mescalito, appears. So RAW had an experience with this entity before reading Castaneda, and this was a challenge to his educated Materialism. Could Mescalito be part of the Jungian unconscious? The anthropologist Weston LaBarre in his The Peyote Cult cited this dancing green warty being as seen by many peoples.

Is Mescalito a Vegetation “plant spirit”? It taxes the sophisticated intellectual’s credulity. And yet, Paracelsus had believed in these beings. So did Goethe, Rudolph Steiner, Gustav Fechner, Luther Burbank, and George Washington Carver. Thomas Edison was determined to catch these spirits on film, but never did.

In wondering what might be going on here, RAW cites that eccentric, uncategorizable 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, and IBM’s Marcel Vogel, who studied plant-human telepathy for over a decade: Vogel hooked up a polygraph to plants while people in the room…thought erotic thoughts. “The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement.”7 Vogel’s findings naturally trigger wonder about Reich’s orgone and plant-human connections, Frazer’s fucking in the fields idea, and:

Mescalito could be both an archetype of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and an anthropomorphized human translation of a persistent signal sent by the molecular intelligence of the vegetative world. Naturally, the ability to decode such orgonomic or neuro-electric signals would be eagerly sought by all shamans in societies dependent on agriculture. In other words, according to this model, Mescalito is a genetic signal in our collective unconscious, but activated only when certain molecular transmissions from the plant world are received. 8

Brief Detour to Ancient Babylon, Egypt, India

If Cleve Backster (discussed in my previous article about Plant Intelligence), also a major player in The Secret Life of Plants (recall this nutty book predates by 50 years all the surprising new data on plant signaling and intelligence) and Vogel used polygraph machines to obtain data from plants, how did the ancient shamans know that fucking in the fields was a powerful magic to enable the crops to flourish? They got this info from the amanita muscaria mushrooms, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, cannabis, and peyote. Wilson’s reading leads him to the idea that the only religious practice older than taking plant-drugs is the ritual orgy. Frazer called these knowledgable shamans “Primitive Scientists.” Wilson thinks they discovered the “magick function of the ecstatic state” and it seemed to lead, historically, to hierogamy or “sacred marriage,” where, in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, India, the mass ritual orgy in the fields was condensed down to one significant couple having intercourse to ensure, not just the crops, but the welfare of all their people. Often this couple was the King and his sister. (Look up Royal Incest in Egypt, for example.)

While this might disgust us, Wilson thinks the development of mass orgy ritual in the fields to hierogamy may have led to the practice and philosophy of Tantra.9

Timothy Leary’s “Vegetable Conspiracy”: As Wilson Advocates

Both Leary and Wilson held varieties of panpsychism, erotic cosmology, and the like that I lump under the rubric of “cosmotheism”, being influenced by esoteric scholar Wouter J. Hanegraaff. Check out how this psychedelic idea plays out in 1977, as RAW talked to Weird Trips magazine. Our linear, left-brain, one-thing-after-another-rational-empirical brain has led us to the brink of environmental collapse, and clearly, we need to learn to think with general systems, ASAP. (Or is our time on this planet a fait accompli?) Here’s RAW explaining a Leary idea:

[…] because we’ve been thinking too much with the left brain we’ve been creating ecological havoc on the planet, so that DNA had to get new signals through to us. It did this through the vegetative kingdom which was being severely endangered by pollution and so on. So the vegetative kingdom conspired to get chemicals into us that would teach us ecological common sense. The only way to get them into our nervous system in vast quantities in a quick way is hedonistically. So the vegetable kingdom set out to seduce us with drugs that get us high and make us happy and at the same time open us up to right brain activity. You see, the fifth circuit is the sugar coating to get us into the sixth circuit. First it turns us on and gets us high, and then it opens us up to a more cosmic perspective. It’s a vegetable conspiracy to communicate with us. The mushrooms and the cacti and the hemp and so on are signals from the vegetable kingdom to our nervous system.10

This seems to me a funny riff on cosmic conspiracies. It reads like a sort of hippie fable. And yet, like all fables, it teaches something true at its core. Given the science I’ve read on the molecular structures within plants that get people high via passage of the blood-brain barrier and plant molecules looking enough like serotonin to be picked by receptors in the brain, the intentionality of plants to develop these chemicals in order to teach us a “cosmic perspective” seems ludicrous, if a hilarious rhetorical ploy by Leary and Wilson. These chemicals were there WAY before we started the spoliation of the planet; what’s fascinating to me is the happy accident of shamans and psychonauts stumbling onto these plant substances. For Wilson to repeat this Leary riff speaks, I think, to his quite serious ideas about plants and vitalist cosmotheism. His erotic cosmology. For which I see Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) as the original progenitor in the Modern era.

Sidetrack: Bruno’s Erotic Cosmology

Before the Inquisitors, a trial in Venice,11 Bruno was given a chance to recant, soften, or amend some of the things he had written or said, but he chose to make things worse for himself, or he didn’t understand or care about the situation he was in. He talked of how everything lives, grows, acts and abides in perfection, due to Providence, but that “God” communicates in an “inconceivable” way and “God”’s essence, presence, and power are “unspeakable.” Here’s Bruno, not exactly sounding like what the orthodoxy of the Catholic church wants to hear from one of their own:

Now I understand all attributes to be one and the same in Deity, and, with theologians and the greatest thinkers, I conceive of three attributes: power, wisdom, and goodness; or, mind, comprehension, and Love. Things are through mind, they are ordered and distinct through intellect; they are in harmonious proportion through universal love, in all and above all. There is nothing that doth not shine in being, any more than anything is beautiful without the presence of beauty; wherefore nothing can exist shorn from the divine presence. [And here’s where they start gathering the kindling-OG] But distinctions in the Divinity are made by the method of Discursive Thought and are not reality.

Pantheism, held together by Love. There is no Trinity, which men made up using their powers of reason. Whatever God is, it’s unspeakable, but we see this higher power’s trace in Love and - literally - everything. Any divisions between Father/Son/Holy Spirit were concocted by men. Bruno wasn’t buying. And he had a hard time finessing his positions once he got nabbed.

Bruno talks of other planets and worlds, which alone was probably enough to get him burned to a fine crisp:

I hold the universe to be infinite as result of the infinite divine power; for I think it unworthy of divine goodness and power to have produced merely one finite world when it was able to bring into being an infinity of worlds. Wherefore I have expounded that there is an endless number of individual worlds like our earth. I regard it, with Pythagoras, as a star, and the moon, the planets and the stars are similar to it, the latter being of endless number. All these bodies make an infinity of worlds; they constitute the infinite whole, an infinite space, an infinite universe, that is to say, containing innumerable worlds. So that there is an infinite measure in the universe and an infinite multitude of worlds. But this may be indirectly opposed to truth according to the faith.

No! Ya think, Giordano? Hey, we now know your vision was far more close to being scientifically true - as of three weeks ago, there are 6065 confirmed exoplanets in our little backwoods galaxy, the Milky Way. There are 1025 confirmed planetary systems: a star that has more than one planet orbiting it, like ours.

Bruno then - and it’s very hard to understand his little shifts here and there, but we must place a heavy burden on him being kept in solitary squalor for years at this point - Bruno tries to explain how he agrees with Aristotle about the Prime Mover thing and tries to square this with the doctrine of the Trinity, but then he says, “All things, souls and bodies, are immortal as to their substance, nor is there any other death than dispersion and reintegration.” Here Bruno sounds like an atheist. I like to think Bruno would like the recent “mushroom suits” people are providing for their own deaths: something that will allow their dead bodies to break down more quickly so their organic compounds can feed the soil and flowers more efficiently. Bruno at this point said he thought the souls of the dead might take up residence in other things: the dreaded transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, strictly verboten to think about. But I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Suffice: The Nolan is not doing a good job buying fire insurance.

Admitting he could never see how finite flesh of a human could be fused with the Word, Bruno tells the authorities their Trinity doctrine is bullshit:

To make clearer what I have said, I have held and believed that there is a distinct Godhead in the Father, in the Word, and in Love, which is the Divine Spirit; and in Essence these three are one; but I have been able to grasp the three really being Persons and have doubted it. Augustine says: “We utter the name of Person with dread when we speak of divine matters, and use it because we are obliged.” Nor have I found the term applied in the Old or New Testament.

As he continues to be grilled on official Church doctrine, a prosecutor - Gabrielle - asks, “And so you are a skilled theologian and acquainted with Catholic decisions, are you?” Bruno answers: “Not much. I have pursued philosophy, which has been my avocation.” It’s around here I get the feeling Bruno’s burning at the stake would be a fait accompli. Bruno’s grilled on magick books that Mocenigo told them he found in Bruno’s possession:

Judge: And what of the books you are known to have read? Occult books, the works of heretics?

Bruno: I have indeed seen condemned works such as those by Raymond Lully and other writers who treat of philosophical matters. I scorn both them and their doctrines.

Here Bruno’s outright lying to save his bacon, not realizing it was already in the pan. They found Seals of Hermes in his possession. Bruno had mocked the Faith. He insisted that the universe was infinite, which was bad, but to posit there must be Life on other planets throughout the universe: Burn Him. It was bad enough that he embraced the brand-new ideas of Copernicus. He denies the Trinity. He is burned alive, with an audience, in Rome, February 17th, 1600.12

Hanegraaff goes to long, articulate lengths in showing how, after Bruno, the Church, then embroiled in corruption, official doctrines about occultism, Hermeticism, etc being a no-no, but the new Protestant sects were overtaking them here. And then there was the so-called Age of Reason, and the advent of modern materialist science. Over the next 400 years, thinking like Bruno would be to think like a weirdo, the Other, and Hanegraaff details exquisitely the making of scientific reality vs. an “orientalized” Other that included Hermetic thought, magick, occultism, alchemy, and this notion of Intelligence being inherent in all things, which we today are seeing called panpsychism. Hanegraaff shows there have always been varieties of panpsychism. He asks us to imagine an extreme “manichean” dualism and extreme pantheism:

But by far most typical for the context of “Western esotericism” are the many intermediary “panentheist” versions that may be referred to as cosmotheism. The term was coined by Lamoignon de Malesherbes in 1782, and adopted by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann as a logical counterpoint to monotheism.13

Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmotheism

In a June 16th, 1983 (Bloomsday) interview conducted by John van der Does, at Wilson’s Dublin residence within sight of Martello Tower, RAW addressed his cosmotheistic ontology. John asks RAW why he calls God “It”, which might be confusing for people:

Actually I started that back in 1959. I was reading Science and Civilization by Joseph Needham, and I was thinking that I agreed with the Taoists more than any other religion. And I started asking myself why.

RAW discusses the semantics of “It” over the three great monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and their “He.” He thinks this neurosemantically makes us think of a “cosmologically huge human being,” which can’t be correct. “I do have a very strong intuition of some kind of cosmic intelligence. I’m an agnostic on the level of not being passionately convinced. I just have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence.” He returns to this intuition in hundreds of places in his work, both fiction and non-fiction. My suspicion is that he was averse to just saying he “is” a panpsychist, though in other places he says this outright. He goes further:

I thought, “Cosmic intelligence is not a gaseous vertebrate,” which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of the Christian God. It does not have a penis, so it is not a “He.” I can’t think of it as an Eastern potentate or king. All the Christian symbology, "Our Almighty King or Lord,” “Our Great Father,” etc, seems to me to be a continuation of infantile thinking projected onto the universe. I don’t think the universe is a punishing father. I don’t think it has any of the traits of an old paranoid man. It’s impossible for me to think of cosmic intelligence peeking into bedrooms, taking notes and giving people gold stars for making love the right way, and black stars for doing it the wrong way. All that seems absurd to me. So, I can’t take Christianity seriously as an intellectual force. It’s a continuation of infantile anxieties.14 And so, the same goes for Judaism and Islam. As far as the Western World is concerned, I’m an atheist.

RAW goes on to elaborate on his idiosyncratic cosmotheism.

But I do have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence, and I find Buddhism quite compatible. But I find Taoism even more compatible. So, I prefer to speak of cosmic intelligence as It rather than He.15

Skipping down:

I have reverence for a great many things: trees, flowers, animals, children, some adults, art, Beethoven, Bach, mathematics, great scientists, the sun and moon and stars, and the ocean and rivers…To quote T.S. Eliot, whom I generally don’t agree with, “I don’t know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god.” I feel all things are full of gods. So, I have reverence for a great deal.

RAW then talks about intelligence as radically decentralized and cannot relate to Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship because of this. “Every biological system is intelligent, if you really understand what Darwin is saying. But it’s not a centralized intelligence, it’s a decentralized intelligence. Darwin’s ruling metaphor is the tangled bank, with every plant trying to maintain its own space to expand its roots, and the whole system is intelligent.”

He then expounds on the Margulis-Lovelock hypothesis of Gaia. “I’m inclined to think that probably on a higher level, the galaxy is an intelligent being.” Remember: this is his “intuition.” He refuses to commit. Further in this marvelous interview RAW speculates on Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noosphere, which he not only thinks is real and true; It, too, is evolving:

Well, the noosphere is the mental part of existence. Consider the mental as having an existence that you can think about, although I know some materialists try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It palpably does. When I talk to you, obviously I’m feeding things from my mind into yours. When you talk to me, your mind is feeding stuff to me. And I can communicate with dogs and they can communicate with me. I have a certain amount of success in communicating with all life forms. By experimenting, I found, to some extent, I can communicate with plants.16

Okay, Substack just dropped its red banner on me about my perennial problem: length. I see I’m up to 5000 words here today, so I will take a rest. If you liked this, I’m very glad. If you want more, I have a whole lot more. Let me know! It was fun researching these last two articles on plant intelligence and cosmotheism. William Zinsser was a big influence on me with this book Writing To Learn.

There is a LOT more about Wilson’s cosmotheism, which I will get to in due time, but the OG also needs to think and write on other topics. If you have any topics you’d like to see me riff on here, please do harangue me about it! - Michael AKA the OG

16

All of these quotes from the June 16th 1983 interview by John van der Does are only found in the Hilaritas Press edition of RAW’s Coincidance: A Head Test, which is most often referred by Wilson scholars as his “Joyce book”. The interview is not found in the New Falcon editions of the book. The interview is wide-ranging and a doozy for showing not only RAW’s ideas of cosmotheism, but his cosmic intelligence on everything. Highly recommended. Passages I’ve quoted here are in the Hilaritas edition, pp. 341-343.

(artwerk: B. Campbell)