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bc: Robert Anton Wilson described the language used by James Joyce when writing Finnegans Wake as holographic prose, an ur-hypertext comprised of multilingual portmanteaus with a branching network of meanings and associations. Indeed it is sometimes easy to find the whole in each part of FW's "chaosmos." Just to start things off with a cannonball into the deep end of the River Liffey...

What are the implications of FW's holographic prose within the fields of General Semantics and/or Linguistic Relativity?

MJ: Whoa, I don't know who's addressed this head-on, or if anyone has, but I'm gonna try. Make a stab, go on a foray, insert some probes, monitor them and see what readings I "take"; chart a passage from Mt. Holograff (location: Everywhen) to the fields of the formidable Polish logicians... 

A hologram instantiates the Hermetic code of "as above, so below." As does, it seems to me, the mathematics of Chaos Theory, and who hasn't already gone into some altered state looking at fractal art? 

To wildly simplify Korzybski, he was interested in uniting the new physics of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics with the everyday citizen's conscious apprehension of the world, and a huge problem was unconscious bias in our perception and the idea that things were static, block-like entities, when according to physics we live in a Heraclitean universe: all is in flux, you can't step in the same river twice, much less stick your finger in the same pie twice. There are a great number of passages in Science and Sanity in which Korzybski shows how nothing is "identical" with anything else, and there's a truly golden passage early on where he demonstrates that even the piece of paper you're reading him on is undergoing chemical changes right where you are sitting now. Not only is everything in flux, but everything has a date, which just passed a nanosecond ago, and...here comes another!: It's gone, too. What the hell is "now"? 

RAW's friend Prof. Carlin was one of our great poets about Time in this regard:

"We try hard to keep track of time, but it's futile. You can't pin it down. For example, there's a moment coming...and it's not here yet...it's still in the future...it's on the way...it hasn't arrived...it's getting closer...here it is...Oh shit it's gone!" (Napalm and Silly Putty, 165)

Okay, so while this is very weird - and the first time I read Science and Sanity I thought, "this new strain of weed is pretty trippy" before I realized I hadn't yet smoked anything - Korzybski's work seems to me more than anything else as a therapeutic approach to language and reality, in light of World War I. He thought we were still thinking like non-human animals, our big brains aren't keeping up with the modern world and if we don't hack language, language will hack us; it has a major downside. To put it wildly mildly. And it's not as if we're going to abandon language; it's kinda what we do. And his magnum opus came out the year Hitler was named Chancellor, 1933. 

So he wasn't drilling in a dry hole. He wants us to fully understand that nothing "is" anything else. He says it over and over again, so much so that Aldous Huxley's writes in his letters to his Nobel Prize-in-Biology-winning brother imploring Julian to read Science and Sanity, in which Aldous calls Korzybski very important but "maddening" in his repetitiousness. Korzybski was writing in his, I think, fourth language: English. His style reflects this not-first-language-ness, but I also think he was just a very hardcore Engineer, extremely well-steeped in Math and Logic. In fact, he argues over 800 pages that mathematics "is" the language that's best able to describe the structure of the world. If knowledge exists, it must have a structure, and math is really good at describing structure. If we can develop a set of gimmicks that sort of mimic the processes of the calculus, but for Everyday Joes and Josephines like us, by gad, he'd do it. And he did. 

But if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you need to practice. Or take a cab. And if you want to think like Korzybski you gotta practice a lot. RAW thought General Semantics was like practicing Zen and that cannabis helped him to observe on Korzybski's Object Level, which is pre-language, but "higher" than the Event Level, which is whirling energies all around us. Once you perceive that you've perceived an event and use language to label what you've perceived you're on the way to "abstracting" from your experience, in which you're going to leave far more out than you'd think. But we all need to abstract to get on in the world, so you may as well get really good at it. That's what most of the book tries to get you to do: to get better and better at "consciousness of abstracting." The more people are conscious of their abstracting, the "saner" the world will seem. 

Korzybski's overall vibe of urgency about the world situation and how we don't know how to control language, which is leading to cultural insanity, has only seemed even more urgent after Hitler/Stalin/fascism/The Bomb/TV/Internet/etc. The general semanticist and media ecologist Neil Postman saw McLuhan's "the medium is the message" as a restatement of what was earlier called the "Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis" - our Linguistic Relativity - and added, "Had Korzybski been as skillful a punster and phrase maker as McLuhan, he might have had a more dazzling impact on the intellectual community." (Teaching As A Subversive Activity, p.105)

Indulge a brief semantic-pedanticism: The universal genius Leibniz had formulated, in the 18th c, the Principle of the Identity of the Indiscernibles, which states that there cannot be separate objects or entities that have all of their properties in common. Korzybski was showing us how this "is" true in light of relativity and quantum mechanics. In the 19th century the British mathematician-logician Augustus de Morgan had recognized, in his book Formal Logic, that the "is" of identity was a huge problem: "The complete attempt to deal with the term 'is' would go to the form and matter of everything in existence, at least, if not to possible form and matter of all that does not exist, but might. As far as it could be done, it would give the grand Cyclopedia, and its yearly supplement would be the history of the human race for the time." - Korzybski quotes this passage in Science and Sanity (pp.750-751 of the 4th ed). Korzybski had tackled this problem..."as far as it could be done."

All of this has left out how trippy Korzybski is to read, both for me and for RAW, who in his Introduction to Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, says he re-read Korzybski stoned on cannabis, all the better to grok the levels of perception we abstract..."in"?

To me, Joyce's Finnegans Wake might be what you see after a few light years traveling in the realms of Linguistic Relativity, which may have gotten started with Chuang-Tzu (currently being referred to as Zhuang Zhou), but for our purposes let's say it visibly "got legs" and started running off into the forest of mirrors we call "reality" with Giambattista Vico, who linked the origin of language with singing and grunting and pointing, then poetry, while thunder plays the role of Angry Sky-Daddy-God. Vico was a major influence on Finnegans Wake. RAW liked to cite the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as the "Vico-Fenollosa-Pound-Korzybski-Whorf-Bandler Hypothesis," as he did near the end of his life in a Maybe Logic Academy course he taught. RAW had included other names in his writings over the years. The aforementioned Postman called it, the "Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan Hypothesis." "Ames" was Adelbert Ames Jr, who expanded on pragmatic ideas about perception but never wrote a book, although Einstein and John Dewey thought he was pretty badass and his work genius. You've seen the Ames Room? Ames developed what RAW called and studied "Transactional Psychology": The world we see is largely inside our head, etc. 

As other purveyors of Linguistic Relativity, I've seen the 19th c. genius Wilhelm Von Humboldt added in here, as well as Buckminster Fuller, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Herder, Goethe, Franz Boas, Nietzsche, and our man Jams Jaws/Germ's Choice/James Joyce. I have a list somewhere in my notes that runs to over 80 figures. Some other time...

George Lakoff and Lera Boroditsky have contributed significantly to aspects of Linguistic Relativity in recent years, among very many others. 

RAW was involved with a small group in Berkeley off-campus that included a lot of radical Linguists, Sociologists, Anthropologists and other weirdos, and he said they were studying "metalinguistics" which is usually related to the Whorf Hypothesis, but I think they were including Leary, McLuhan, Erving Goffman and...anyone who was at odds with Chomsky's hegemony in Linguistics. They were interested in logical paradoxes and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, gestures, body language, and how uncannily powerful metaphors...errr...seem. This would have been in the 1970s. I don't know about you, but when I think of "meaning," much less holographic, hermetic meaning, Chomsky's semantics looks like a Void. Meaning: I don't think his linguistics programs could account for all the "meaning" he found when he read between the lines of State Dept memos in his work as one of the great critics of the State, versus his syntax über alles Linguistics work at M.I.T. One world didn't translate into the other. Not for me, at least. 

(I love and admire Noam Chomsky and will cry when he dies; he's definitely a culture hero for me but I'm simply not as impressed with his long term Linguistics program as ten million other intellectuals seem to be. What am I missing? We ought not bow to his formalist linguistic work simply because we admire his moral courage as an intellectual. I wish I could dig Noam's linguistics, but I don't and it's a drag.  Chomsky would no doubt respond, as he did to colleagues who disagreed with him on this: "You completely fail to understand what I said." Or some variation on that. Hey, I tried, Noam. One time in an interview someone asked him about Orwellian use of language by politicians, religious leaders, and advertisers and he said that was more about "Pragmatics", so go read about that if you're interested. I'm thinking right now of the volatile dust-ups he had with George Lakoff, a former Chomsky acolyte, whose work makes WAY more sense to me, as a person who cares about how language works not only in the personal cognitive sense but also socially. See the newer edition of Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistic Wars.)

There was a time in the US, after WWII, in which General Semantics or certain techniques that came out of GS, was taught fairly widely in schools, but that went away. (Quick: find the referent in "Make America great again." Now tell us all about it.) Is it a conspiracy theory for me to say that advertisers, Big Religion, both political parties and the Business Community wanted it gone? Okay, then I'm a conspiracy theorist with this case. Around the same time Korzybski waned, Chomsky's computer-code recursive syntactical works that don't have anything to do with the citizens protecting themselves against predators gets big, at least in academe. Was it driven by Physics Envy? The "formal logic" they forced on us as undergrads was weak tea indeed, compared to General Semantics.

I personally find it embarrassing now when I read "experts" in Linguistics who try to debunk Linguistic Relativity, because I find the Soft Whorfian claims - that the structure of our language influences our thinking - indisputable. The Strong Whorfian says our language determines what we can and can't think about or even perceive, and that seems too strong a claim to me. 

When I think of RAW's thinking about Joyce and Finnegans Wake and holographic prose, I turn to the psychedelic (to me) essays in Coincidance: A Head Test. What was Wilson trying to argue for in those essays on Joyce? There's the surface arguments: what any hip intellectual would come away with there. Then there's - maybe? - an argument subtly hidden that Joyce had somehow managed to tap into some planetary intelligence that was superhuman, and this linked up with RAW's heretical ideas about Evolution: Yes, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of genetics plus Darwin's natural selection theory, was scientific...but not quite enough. The lacuna was yawning. How do proteins know how to fold into those intricate 3-D shapes so they can dock on receptors? How did Life begin on the planet? And if non-organic matter became organic: let's see the fire. Enough smoke. We've been waiting. There seems to be something vital or wholly Other that Biology/Chemistry/Physics can't get at in the evolution of Life and Intelligence. Whether that's some Neoplatonic object pulling us toward it, pulling toward the Ur-hologram or the thing that radiates and shines intelligence and light on all beings, or Bruno's erotic universe, something like Orgone, or Teilhard's Omega Point, or possibly has to do with Bell's Theorem or morphogenetic fields or any number of such Objects like one or all of these Things, I don't know. I think Wilson thought Joyce had some similar views, although I'm not going to dogmatize about it. And neither would RAW. 

So, the implications you ask about would seem to me to have to do with transcendent Intelligence immanent in (this?) universe. That's the esoteric read I get from RAW on Joyce and Finnegans Wake. The exoteric interpretation I see most strongly was: Both James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson were very weird Irish characters of considerable genius that no test measures. They were both near madness but stayed creatively fecund to the end. There's a passage in a letter Joyce wrote to his son Giorgio from 1934. Joyce worked hard for 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and wrote, 12 years in, to Giorgio: "I work every day at my big long wide high deep dense prosework." Could it all just be...hard work? Maybe, but it seems, like RAW's take on Neo-Darwinism, that there's gotta be more. 

Both Joyce and Wilson wrote about what they knew. The trouble is that few of us knew what they knew, and hence we are guessing about RAW on FW and Joyce indeed will keep the scholars busy for a thousand years or until we burn or blow ourselves up, insomnia or not. 

To the extent Intelligence Writ Large is "made of language" as Terence McKenna thought, it would seem to "be" instantiated in this transcendent, great Whatsit. Maybe a morphogenetic field, but what's knowingly, intelligently pulling on that? It could be the most boring, mundane system imaginable, and all these to-date fictional but Cool Ideas are just what people like us need to spice up our collective invention of "deep reality"? Or to what extent - hang with me here, this is brilliant - are all those ideas, like Omega Point, morphogenetic fields, quantum telepathy from Entanglement, an erotic and holographic universe filled with Orgone, etc: to what extent are these ideas "real"? I mean, some of us live with these objects, mentally, for a long time. We play around in their "spaces." We use them in countless What If? scenarios. We imagine what it would be like for them to be more Real. I think RAW was right and we do live inside of books. All of us. (Maybe?..)

When it comes to holography, it's possible in principle to make a hologram out of any wave...well, what about the "pilot wave" of David Bohm and Louis De Broglie and the holographic universe? At some point the implicate order becomes explicate, or everything we've ever known and perceived. There must be some interface between implicate and explicate, that can be characterized. There might be some interaction there...Did James Joyce have a hotline to this Source? If so, how? Who else had a direct line to the Source?

I know I sound like I just smoked a bomber of 35% sativa, but really, I only read books and think about ideas, although I will now leave this topic to smoke said bomber.

bc: Do you think the emergent properties of language within Finnegans Wake are more of an invention or a discovery?

MJ: Another slider, high and tight, but I can't lay off it. Gotta take a cut. 

I got on my swami turban and bogus seer regalia, dimmed the lights, fired up the sandalwood, gazed into a crystal ball bought at a gimcrack market, did a few bongs, and tried to summon Jeem his own self. Finally, he showed. I asked the invention/discovery question. A cryptic transcript of what was said, in his brogue genuine, viz: 

"The one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Joyce out!" 

And poof! he was gone. (FW, 33)

The easy answer - and the most accurate? - is that it seems when we discover something it's a sort of by-product of already trying to "uncover" something else, while when we invent something, this is in the framework of not being aware of the Tradition of other artists who went before us, and especially others who influenced us. We try to forget how much of an impact others have had on us and pretend to light out for the territory with only our honed skills and wits, but Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" seems always present in some way. And discovery leads to invention; invention to discovery. This seems like a version of the easy/obvious answer. I'm making semantic distinctions that should be considered idiosyncratic. But I do think invention maybe seems like a stronger case, so I'll try to argue for invention.

I wonder who was the first to pun. No doubt it was WAY before writing. But there's Joyce's knowledge, and then there is his wordplay, which takes punning to some whole level many magnitudes beyond what anyone else had done. When you pun in twenty languages is that discovery? I think it seems more like an invention. Joyce finishes Ulysses and embarks on Finnegans Wake and a grand schema of Schriftspiel: a writing game. How to project that world? Well, if the world is made of language, why not emphasize how far-out you can get with language? Etymology and fossilized poems, deeply intertwixing metaphors, neologisms and portmanteaus for days in an eternal night, a "monomyth" of scads of layers, herstory, history, ourstory, a spirit of ludic joy and hilaritas pervades throughout. With periodic lapses into jocoseriosity.

But now I'll revert to one of Joyce's big influences, Vico (1668-1744), who had this idea, verum factum: what's true and what we can possibly know are only those things humans made. So: invention. Vico cannily leaves Nature and Its laws to God; we can't truly know that stuff 'cuz we didn't make it. 

But we humans made language, history, poetry, art: these are things we can truly know. Robert Anton Wilson thought Vico was the first modern Sociologist. Another time he credits him with being the first Anthropologist. I find both claims tenable. And when it comes to social epistemology, too many accounts of the sociology of knowledge leave out Vico. One of the most influential High Kultur texts for me is Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise In the Sociology of Knowledge, which has persuaded me in a significant way not only that we construct reality but they describe the micro-details about how it's done. A similar book of essays by total wiggy thinkers was The Invented Reality, which only solidified these methods of humans inventing reality. Not discovering. Inventing. Anyone who's immersed in Robert Anton Wilson will like both of these books, and he cited Berger and Luckmann a few times. See Ernst von Glaserfeld's piece in the latter book, "An Introduction to Radical Constructivism" for more insight into RAW's takes on perception/"reality" and transactional psychology. Glaserfeld doesn't mention RAW, but check out the idea of "radical constructivism" and note similarities and differences between RAW and Glaserfeld. Or not. Have you gone putt-putt golfing lately? Had a wedge salad? Sat naked in a bathtub filled with cold Roosevelt dimes? Put in a bid on a llama?

I find it a bit weird - wonderfully so - that one interpretation from quantum theory, which would have to do with interpreting Nature in the finest-grain sense, is the Copenhagen Interpretation put together by Niels Bohr, with help from friends like Werner Heisenberg. The equations of quantum mechanics constitute, by far, the most successful physical theory ever, you wouldn't be reading this on your Gadget if it didn't work, but what the hell does Copenhagenism "mean" about how Nature works? Copenhagenism - at least one formulation of it - says we can only know what our equations and formal schemes "say" about Nature (I'm capitalizing it because sometimes I like being in the 18th century), so we are always at least one-remove from knowing Nature. This seems to back up Vico. And while Many-Worlds has been gaining on Copenhagenism among PhDs in Physics, Copenhagenism is still the most widely-held interpretation of the Schrodinger Wave Equation.

Interestingly, Vico's "verum factum" seems strongly isomorphic to Korzybski's "the map is not the territory" too. Maps are human artifacts and only describe the territory by leaving out an enormous amount of it, in order for other humans to gain a purchase on some aspect of knowledge. The effective map-maker must be very conscious of what she's abstracting from. I think a fascinating frame for Finnegans Wake is as a "map" of consciousness: of human consciousness from the Lower Paleolithic to now. What did Joyce leave out? (Answer that in your own time.)

Vico's verum factum seems like one of those ideas that was either discovered or invented by humans like Vico in order to 1.) get at something basic to epistemology, and 2.) delight stoner-intellectuals like mostbunall of you reading this, right where you are sitting now.

In Korzybski's last writing - he died while editing it, in 1950 - "Language In The Perceptual Process", collected in a book titled Perception: An Approach to Personality (ed. Robert R. Blake), he quotes Dr. Alexis Carrel on the topic of "the inescapable characteristic of living":

"To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and sculptor." From a Vichian standpoint this implies that "we" made/invented/constructed ourselves. Michelangelo said he saw the finished statue in the hunk of marble and he merely had to chip away at the marble that wasn't needed. I paraphrase that genius. "Are" we really like that? If so, it would seem urgent as all get-out for every one of us to visualize what we want to "be" and get to chippin' away: verum factum-like. We will have to deal with the suffering best we can, but the show must go on.

Verify dem factors! 

"Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear." (FW, 76)

I fouled it off down the 3rd base line and out of play. Hooked it just left of the foul pole. 

bc: Given that the trio from Erik Davis' High Weirdness, Terence McKenna, Philip K Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson, all share an almost supernatural reverence for James Joyce, and Finnegans Wake in particular, is there an inherent Joycean or Wakean quality to the psychedelic spirituality that emerged from the 1970's counterculture?

MJ: I love that book by Erik Davis you mention! The subtitle is "Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies." I'm trying to sell more books here, if only because I want more people to talk to...like you! That book was basically Davis's PhD dissertation in Religious Studies at Rice University. But Davis writes really well, and all these wiggy ideas don't come off as academic mire. He's a PhD, but quite accessible, if ridiculously learned and thoughtful. Even if you're not a huge fan of any of the three guys, but you love 1970s history, this book is for you! (But you are ALL enthused by Joyce and/or PKD, RAW, and Terence, aren't you?)

There seems something eerily prescient about Finnegans Wake with regard to psychedelics. When you first immerse yourself in FW, you're never the same after-words. (Ha!) And, aye, there seems something inherently Wakean about "reality" after you've turned on. But I can't pontificate about it, because I really can't put my finger on it with any surety. But I will speculate, wildly, as one will. Suffice: find a person who truly digs reading FW and loves talking about it but who also says they've never gotten high: that person may as well have had a profound acid trip or four, right? I mean: they's our peeps.

Leary said that reading Joyce had prepared him for "psychedelic space." Albert Hoffman had synthesized LSD in 1938 but didn't know what he had yet. Finnegans Wake is finished and presented in 1939. Joyce dies in 1940. The war against fascism - which at that time was considered undesirable by Unistatians, O! I wax nostalgic! - begins a race to weaponize the energy in the atom. The physicists demonstrate that a controlled nuclear chain reaction can work, on a converted squash court underneath a football stadium in Chicago, December 2nd, 1942. Hoffman takes the lysergic acid diethylamide down off the shelf in as the Sandoz labs in Switzerland to tinker with it again on 19 April, 1943 and accidentally ingests some, or it's absorbed by the skin, who knows, but anyway: the Bicycle Ride for Eternity.

Somewhere in my notes I've compiled lists of writers who drop quotes from FW into their texts to illustrate some point they're trying to make. Some of you may have noticed: there's a quote to cover just about anything you can think of. I know I sound like some nine-year-old boy watching sleight-of-hand at the Magic Castle: but how did he do it? How did Joyce do it?

Norman O. Brown uses a lot of quotes from FW - have a look at Closing Time for example - but did he ever trip? I don't think so. One of the greatest psychonauts of the 20th century, Dale Pendell, studied under Brown at UC Santa Cruz and wrote a very engaging book about his discussions with him when they hiked together in the Santa Cruz area, called Walking With Nobby. Terrific book. I get the feeling NOB thought mind-manifesting drugs were out of bounds; they were Dionysian, which was what we need, but he was still uneasy. He knew about Pendell's proclivities and seemed to agree to disagree on the topic. But here's the thing: Brown seems psychedelicized to me, in all of his books. 

McLuhan quotes from FW a lot: no way did he ever drop acid though. And yet I find him deeply trippy. Michael Horowitz said that McLuhan was the most profound influence on Leary. Leary, McLuhan, RAW, Terence, and Joyce were all involved with the Catholic Church at some point in their lives. What does that mean? Not sure, but I was brought up default pagan, went to my Catholic-convert grandma's church when I was 17 or so, and I found it really weird. The scene, the Latin, the lighting, the windows, the music, the garb: I had no idea what was going on, but it was very weird to me. That's all. Further experiences with the Catholic trip have only made things look weirder to me. The child fucking and Hitler-backing and Inquisition and Mafia and fascist money laundering through the Vatican Bank, massive land-grabs, the burning of Bruno, the "hellfire sermons" aimed at children, inculcating terror and alienation over basic bodily desires, as recounted in every ex-Catholic novelist's books at some point... it seems there are some down-sides to it, too. 

Some people - like Bucky Fuller and Ezra Pound too - seem to have psychedelic minds even though they never tripped. Hell: JS Bach and Leonardo, too! (BTW: Why does writing enthusiastically about psychedelics seem like a too-male thing? Or am I missing something? Melissa Cargill seems like one of the most underrated chemists of the 20th century: studied Chemistry at Berkeley, teaches Owsley about making the pure stuff. Nick Sand and Tim Scully...But Cargill! Sasha Shulgin was a mentor, too, somewhere in there...Where are all the fantastic female writers on psychedelics? I like Sadie Plant's Writing On Drugs. Name a few more.)

But your query has to do with 1970s counterculture. It seems to me that, once I tripped, I saw everything slightly differently, and I remember realizing - this was long before I'd read books about psychedelics - that I was now in some vague secret society, and I began to look for signs in the works of others: maybe they had tripped too? But then I sort of realized I'm projecting most of the time. Or: a lot of the time. If some book or artwork or music or director felt trippy in a certain sense, they must have been initiated, too. And the wild thing is, I think there just are psychedelic minds who have never tripped. For a while this vexed me, but now I really dig it. I suspect the psychedelic mind is inherent in human potential, and some people just turn on in other ways. (Read Wilson on the 5th, 6th and 7th Circuits.)

The math-y aspect of this is that: in the 1960s and 1970s psychedelics were widely available. The population explosion called by demographers the "Baby Boom" generation did shrooms or LSD, even potent cannabis, and were never the same: they saw through a lot of social games. Or a large subset of a larger set did. What's interesting about the three guys you mention: only Terence was a Boomer. I think he was born right at the beginning of it. But PKD was born in 1928 and RAW in 1932: they were Silent Generation guys. But they were artist-intellectuals, and already deeply weird - at minimum very bookish and alienated as teenagers in Berkeley and Brooklyn - before they ever got "experienced" to allude to one of my favorite guitarists.

So, I think of those artists whose work blew us away: psychedelics definitely aided their creative output, but I'm never really quite sure, because so many artists throughout history that I deem fantastic and psychedelic: there's precious little evidence they ever tripped. 

I often think of PKD: psychedelics seemed a bit much for him. And yet few writers of the 1960s and 1970s seem trippier than him. I tend to think his amphetamine use did him in, but the output was huge. This brings up two questions around this topic that I find interesting.

One: does being obsessed with ontology and with an ability to convey your ontological obsessions in a non-technical way just make you trippy? PKD's fixation on What Is Real? may not have required mind-manifesting drugs. His novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) is super-psychedelic, but he wrote that before he ever did LSD! He had merely read a lot about LSD before that. Can a certain type of reading allow for experiences that are wholly Other? Do we "trip" when deeply engaged with fiction? I suspect: yes. Entraré: to enter a "space" in Italian. We suspect some of us do this far more vividly when reading in fictional spaces than most others. I do think we can all get better at "entering" the text, and maybe you just dedicate more of you attention, over longer periods of time, and you inhabit books in deeper ways. It is not "mere entertainment." PKD was presumably reading mostly non-fiction about psychedelics, though. Still: maybe readin's readin'.

I don't know. Terence's use and play with Neoplatonic and gnostic ideas seemed already psychedelic, but I think he was 11 when the famous Life magazine article by Wasson came out in 1957, the one where he followed his mom around the house in Paonia, Colorado, saying "This is what I want to do!": he was already weird. And Wilson documents his reading of very-conservative writer Russell Kirk's review in National Review of Huxley's Doors of Perception around 1960-61 and his subsequent experiments with peyote in 1962; he'd already written a deeply trippy piece on Joyce and Taoism that was written in 1958 and published in 1959; he later commented on the piece, "Sure sounds like an Acid Head wrote it, doesn't it?" (Email To The Universe, 85)

Two: how do certain mental illnesses that many wildly creative types evince converge with this "psychedelicized mind" that I posit here? I mean, just for example, I was riveted by Kay Redfield Jamison's study, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and became convinced that our culture would have suffered profound losses had some cure for mania been found in the 18th century. And my gawd: what if homosexuality hadn't existed? We'd be fucked! The weird, the "mentally ill" creatives, and the gays: holy shit! They form a ridiculously outsized contribution to profound art and the aesthetic pleasures of life in general. Jamison, a PhD Clinical Psychology, had herself struggled with manic episodes, and recounts them.

All of which further complexifies and spaghettifies your original question. Sorry!

So: does the psychedelic 1970s counterkulch seem that way 'cuz of blotter and shrooms, or do people who are already genetically predisposed to Weird Thought gravitate to psychedelics, and it's like a long-lost rich uncle has embraced them? Leary seemed to think we were a genetic caste. I'm uneasy with that because of the nature via nurture equation, but I don't really know. It's something I think about, in some way, almost every day.

A good place to dig for more (meaning: better) insight into your wiggy Q would be places like reception of Finnegans Wake by disparate communities. This literature seems inchoate and scattered at the moment, not to mention often buried in academic libraries that don't lend out their stuff to non-academic readers like myself. An academic Joycean named Tim Conley put out The Varieties of Joycean Experience in 2021. I was interested in reading this because supposedly he thought RAW one of the weirdest interpreters of Joyce, and because there might be some insight around your 1970s counterculture question in it. One library I have access to in California bought one copy of it. They wouldn't lend it out when they acquired it because it was new, and their policy was to let their university students and staff have first dibs. It was promptly marked as "missing" in the catalog the next time I looked. Consequently, I've never seen it. It's out in paperback now for $35. The hardback is $125. This is what we're up against. (That, and some even more dire situations, as of November 2024.)

Bobby: What is your take on this Q?

bc: I think, in terms of actual causal influence, that the High Weirdness of the 70’s would have happened with or without Joyce, and that it’s really tough to discern between qualities that are Joycean/Wakean and Psychedelic. (Which maybe highlights the neuro-semantic aspect of the psychedelic experience, and perhaps even the impact of holographic prose on perception, but I digress!)

There’s also perhaps a kind of a retrocausality involved in this, where early psychonauts, who experienced psychedelic states of consciousness, looked back for antecedents of this new paradigm, landed on Joyce and Finnegans Wake, and then re-interpreted it in that context.

So as much as FW maybe influenced the wave of High Weirdness, that same wave has circled back and influenced FW by providing a new lens of interpretation and a new demographic of readers/explorers.

Personally, I went from sitting in a hut in the Amazon jungle watching “forest television” on Yagé to just one week later being assigned to read Finnegans Wake by Robert Anton Wilson for his 8 Dimensions of “Mind” class at the Maybe Logic Academy.

So for me the High Weirdness / Finnegans Wake influence is pretty direct and literal!

Also, in terms of history, we have the actual, literal, sequence of events, the impossibly complex network of causes and effects that lead events to undergo the formality of actually occurring, to abuse an Alfred North Whitehead quote. And then there’s the stories we tell using fragments from that network of cause and effect, which we call history.

I think of Terence McKenna as one of the world’s greatest storytellers in this genre. Terence seems, in hindsight, to have been a kind of transmedia reality star. And in his self-constructed mythology, the Experiment at La Chorrera is his origin story, the starting point from which his cosmic giggle timewave oeuvre proceeds, and who is cast in a central role in this infinitely tall tale? Of course, James Joyce and Finnegans Wake!

Dennis McKenna revealing James Joyce as the divine architect of the McKenna Bros “True Hallucinations” adventures is one of my favorite plot twists ever!

Is it literally true? Certainly not! But when they printed the legend that’s what went in the record.

Now with PKD, I’m unsure about that line from The Divine Invasion:

Is this just a line in a fictional novel? Or is he actually expressing high regard for FW?

IDK. I sent the question to Erik Davis. If he responds I’ll add it to the discourse!

I have two more questions if you don't mind fulfilling the law of fives :)))

bc: Famously, Joyce omitted the apostrophe from Finnegans Wake to turn the title into a statement, an observation, a warning to the ruling classes that in every cultural cycle the oppressed eventually rise up. The Finnegans wake up. ( I won't here ask about Elon Musk's fear of the "woke mind virus," but I could!) Given Joyce's usage of Vico's cycle of ages as the organizing structure of FW, where would you put this awakening in that cycle? Or does it represent the breaking of the cycle?

(Also! Just to sprinkle a soupçon of Crowley in the mix... Oz Fritz has been tracking the cross connections between AC & JC, and something I've been wondering is if Vico's Ages and Crowley's Aeons are essentially analogous?)

MJ: The question about what the title Finnegans Wake means seems to me too often neglected. A title, a statement, an observation, a warning...a reveille to wake up? My long-dead dad was a great whistler, pitch-perfect and fast, and would wake us up for elementary school by whistling "Reveille" while rapidly flipping the light switches on and off, reeking of aftershave. He'd then do a Strother Martin (the vicious prison guard from Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is...failure to...commun-cate") imitation as we woke, gooey-eyed, in our bunk beds: "C'mon boys! Ya need ta git!"...flipping switches still... "off t' that yonder school o’ yers! Heee hooo!" Dad thought this was hilarious. It did get us up and out of bed. It was very effective. His whistling of "Reveille" was alarmingly accurate, not to mention loud. (He grew up in Pasadena, California, and was not a military man, quite far from it, but watched a lot of westerns on TV and in movies. He was quite far away from sounding like Strother Martin in everyday life.)

We woke. And rose. Back to Wake...

Without the apostrophe it seems - given Joyce's politics as covered by a scholar like Dominic Manganiello, whose book Joyce's Politics covers quite a lot - like a claim for solidarity among all of us. There's a word that's become rapidly, sadly archaic: solidarity. RAW commented on Manganiello's book in a letter to Kurt Smith, how Joyce "combined individualist anarchism, pacifism and Blake into a unique political stance all his own." Here it sounds like us Finnegans might've been secondary in Joyce's politics, but the way I currently read it: us Finnegans waking was Joyce's "public" politics; the Blake/pacifism/individualist anarchism his private concern, as much as politics can "be" "private." Note RAW's "all his own." As if it's on par with Joyce's negotiations with Thomist aesthetics. What does it mean to have constructed a unique politics? I'll leave that to better minds than mine. I recall Chomsky defining politics: "Who gets what." Joyce was a poet and so a seducer, not an assaulter, so his politics would never be set out in explicit terms. We have to read between the lines, which makes this topic trickier and much more fun.

But then we must think about and read and ponder and cuss and dis-cuss history - even just 1940-now - and in my opinion the story of us Finnegans as being aware of our political and social...agency?...seems kinda dire right now. We don't seem to feel like we're bound to all the other Finnegans right now. Ain't got no solidarity at the moment, and so, speaking for myself, I long to wake from the nightmare of the US in the 21st century.

And then of course we must ask: Why the lack of solidarity? And How are things different elsewhere. (A Where question in addition to a How Q.) And maybe Who might have had it within their interests for us to be polarized, atomized, alienated, friend-starved, cubicle-d, clueless, disparate, road-raging, barking up all the wrong trees, etc. When did this turn capital bee Bad? Or does "stuff happen"? Does some chaotic fractal working in history, driven by accelerating information-flows, when planets and world-societies get to our point in their histories, just drive this kinda thing in this Cycle, and we cluelessly describe it post-hoc with imaginative maps? I tried to stay in touch, in community-feeling, and solidarity with a lot of Finnegans. In Ulysses Mr. Deasy tells Stephen Dedalus that maybe all this sadness and cruelty and imperialism was solved by the idiotic question-begging "Perhaps history is to blame." Classic d-bag answer. Mistakes were made. And my riff on the chaotic fractal feels like a paraphrase of that, so pretend you never read it. Any one of us can legit feel like we lack agency within the social sphere, but as a mass of Finnegans in solidarity, we must diagnose and treat why we abdicated to billionaires, or even accepted the idea of billionaires in the first place. When I go down the Freudian road I find I repress...

Or am I just totally biased as an olde timey - all-workers-unionized Leftist living in Dumpy "Unique Estates of Amessican"? (FW, 105). I am biased as all get-out. 

What would a Finneganian solidarity look like? Will we rise again ("from the dead") or is it over and we've centrifugally spun out to some whole other epoch, a breaking away from the Vichian cycle? Go 'head and whittle your whisky 'round like blazes; Imma just keep lying here for a million years. I don't think I have any unique insight here; I no longer know, and what I thought I knew has just been dashed, off the precipice, on the rocks below, in shards. We Finnegans must come to grips: we might be "duddandgunne" (FW:25), noewheremore, Finiche! (FW: 7).

I'd like to think I'm "woke." I see nothing bad in being "woke," as it's called now. How would I define it? Well, as something like becoming evermore aware to the suffering of others, a thematic variation on the Golden Rule, even sumpin' to do with Buddha, adopting the language of what people want their self-descriptions to match - it's rather little of them to ask, no huge effort for me that I can see - and of extending my sense of a moral feeling of who is "we" when we make "we" statements. I also think it means knowing the score on some basic things, like none of us has a say in how much the Pentagon is given every damned year. Or the dollar amount in white collar crime vs. the standard Eyewitless News depiction of crime. Some of us were born on third base, more on second, even more on first, and, most unfair lineup card: a lot were born with two strikes against them, still at the plate, or struck out and long gone, sent down to the minors. (I got caught stealing in a rundown between first and second: long story.) The seemingly omnipresent pretending that we're all born at home plate is something I see as one of the great fatuous ideas that permeates inhuman Unistatian politics. 

That "race" is bullshit, basically. It's deep historical global migration of genes under differing environmental conditions giving rise to a panoply of phenotypes and that's pretty much it. All else divides/conquers Finnegans.

That one's social identity and status as a primate seems indeed important, but not nearly everything. 

A few other things. Wee things, doncha know...

In my utopia, and, I daresay in Joyce's, solidarity is bigger than my identity as a "cis-white-male" or whatever the designation would be this semester. Yea, I'm privileged. But I worry about paying the utility bills. If you're a genderfluid BIPOC? Cool. But you're still a fellow country-person and we want the same basic things, right? I want you to flourish, I will help if I can, but we should be able to meet, eye-to-eye, Finnegan to Finnegan.

In this I'm heavily influenced by the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who was born in 1931 and died about six months after RAW did. Rorty even thought we should channel our ethnocentricities by, for example, not saying (and believing) things like, "It's really horrible what's going on in our inner cities. We should help the blacks more." Rorty says, no: Those people are Americans. And we Finnegans ought to feel shame about how some Americans are living, and try to do better. That's the solidarity thing. Harness our ethnocentricity in ways like that. (Rorty, as far as I know, never mentioned Finnegans Wake. He seemed to prefer Nabokov or Orwell.)

If I sound ridiculously dated, it's because I began negotiating my values a long time ago, they've shifted here and there, but they no longer seem recognizable in this world. I feel like some guy in 2024 who waxes on about how great Gunsmoke or Abba was. Completely backward. As a totally out-of-step Klown I dare to say: women should have the legal right to decide what to do with their own bodies and it's WAY more important than anyone's legal right to own a military assault rifle. I'm completely out of step with the new direction. It's hopeless for me. I'm a walkin' talkin' book-readin' feminist-dude anachronism. Who's probably high now, as you read me. 

Confucius say: Man who stand on top of toilet: High on pot.

And I'm ANTIFA AF. (Hey anti-antifascists: you don't get to root for Rick and Ilsa and Victor Laszlo. Sorry, but you have to root for Major Strasse. And know that you're flippin' the bird to Grandpa and his time at Anzio/Guadalcanal/Iwo Jima/Midway/Luzon, etc. Live your values! Be consistent! Be happy! You just won the election!)

But here's the problem with Woke, as I see it: All the "woke" issues should be seen as secondary to all the issues we Finnegans have had for a long time: unionizing, a fair wage, news that's not owned by billionaires. A social safety net. Meaningful work - whatever that is, now - and a social society where people meet, mediated by their clothes and language. (At times, without clothes, but this goes beyond my ambit.) Or what was an Economy for? Who was it for?

Rorty was very adamant about this and I agree: around 1965 the humanist intellectuals in our universities turned away from the old Finnegan ideas about solidarity: Vietnam, racism, imperialism: we were irredeemable. It's not worth saving. Tear it all down. And I say: yea, that was all Bad Shit, but we can't stop trying to be better. Or else you give up on the country and right wingers laugh at you and you lose elections. And all that happened. Not much Finnegan-Solidarity coming out of the Humanities or English Departments. It's far too much Foucaultian-based ressentiment, histrionics, and jargon. (Ain't got a beef with M. Foucault, just with how he was used.) That jit needs to change, like yesterday. And yet I smell the stale stench of inertia emanating from the insular Groves. (Or how I imagine academia is: I am not educated: no degree.)

Just to be clear: no fucking way is Elon Musk a Finnegan. Trump is about as far away from being a Finnegan as you can get. No one who has billions is one of us. TFG/TCG was bequeathed $413 million from daddy, used it to buy casinos, and the very stable business genius somehow lost money at that. That he's a "thing" means a lot of Finnegans have lost their way, and in geologic time it took nanoseconds. At some point you bought a second vacation home, cornered "the murketplots" (FW: 352), syndicated with well-dressed goons, and now pay more for private security in a month than most of us earn in a year, and live behind gates: you're no longer a Finnegan. Good riddance. I'd even say if you've got $10 million or more in assets you're probably a big part of the far smaller set of Non-Finnegans but I don't even want to go into All That, here, now. 

I welcome push-back on my excommunication from Finnegandom and these...people. Joyce said something about his Finneganian audience, paraphrasing from memory: my consumers: are they not also my producers? Here Comes Everybody was gist, so maybe I'm wrong here.

I think Gandhi and MLK had a line on something hot with the Satyagraha, although I have long felt the deep wisdom in the supposed Zen anecdote I may have first read from RAW:

Zen student: O Zen master: what is world peace?

Zen master: Two drunks fighting in an alley.

I didn't know of Oz Fritz's project to link Crowley to Joyce: fantastic! I can't wait to check that out. No one's done it, and if I had to pick one person to get that conversation started it would be Oz.

Quick bc edit! Two of Oz Fritz’s pieces on Joyce/Crowley:

As far as Vico's cyclical model, it's difficult for me to not see us as in...wait for it...the second barbarism stage. Or: a new barbarism stage. I don't think I will personally make it out of this one. Bet the farm on me not getting out. I don't see myself living in a renewed primitive state...except in my own mind. What would be some hallmarks of a New Primitive Age, 21st or 22nd century? Here's where I always clashed a bit with RAW. I mean, I think I really do understand his enthusiasm for Hi Tech. And it would be easy to list really great things that have come out of this Epoch, but I agree with the Frankfurt School guys in many ways: the Techne needs Telos. The Frankfurt guys saw a huge lack of human-needs-based Telos at work. RAW and Leary did have a Telos: space cities, immortality, drugs to eliminate stupidity, everything omniephemeralized so that it was faster, smaller, cheaper, and could do more. And Wilson wrote a lot about things like a Guaranteed Annual Wage, negative income tax. Today you see actual pilot programs for Basic Income. Or: WTF did we build a technological economy FOR? 

I mean, I'm writing this on my ancient MacBook Pro, and I love this fucking thing. I do have a "smart" phone. I hardly use it, though. I'm not on Facebook or Xitter or any of the big anti-social media platforms, and I like it that way. 

A more fully-fleshed-out Telos for me would be the elimination of hunger and homelessness and billionaires (tax them at a graduated rate like the 1950s, under commie-Republican Eisenhower), education and health care for all. Renewable energy: finally accomplished! Ya know, the little things. Who thinks this is not desirable? Okay, then who thinks it's not possible? Why? Have you looked under the hood? Checked the fuses? Multiplied by 1/137?

I don't believe any of the Agitprop that comes out of Silicon Valley anymore. They will not do a fucking thing for the poor, which I define as almost all Finnegans, or more than not. And the sooner Elon Musk moves to Mars the better. Very early on I got the feeling they tended to be Geeks. I like Geeks. And Nerds. Usually they're harmless, and if you get them talking about their passions, it can be fun and informative. I had no idea the Ethos of Silicon Valley was For Me To Win, It's Not Enough; Others Must Lose. And guys like Musk seem like 9-year old boys to me, ethically. Get thee to Mars ASAP, Musk! I feel I was made for Earth and am happy here loving "plants and birds and rocks and things," but if other Finnegans want to relocate to the Red Planet, cool. 

I'm really old, but I love riding my bicycle anywhere I can. I dig the conscious states in bicycling. Saving fuel and being green and doing aerobic exercise is fine, but I dig the qualia of riding. I like to go slow in life. What's the damned hurry? "He who dies with the most toys wins" is a perfect slogan for the citizen under NeoLiberalism. Many Finnegans fall and fell prey. I understand how speed is a rush, I really do. Maybe vary your velocities? Follow your fastball with a changeup.

Cars have been a scourge, let's take the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face. Scads of personal freedom have been afforded by the automobile, and they should still exist, but my gawd: that whole scene with the roads and oil and noise and death and pollution and alienation and - gasp! - finding parking has not made us happier or healthier. More mass transit, practically free. I'm thinking like how I personally think a Finnegan could or should or ought to think. You will have differing ideas. But how much can they clash if we're true Finnegans? I like pluralism: tell me what you want. I'm listening, but if you start to go on about climate change is a "liberal hoax" I will bid a hasty adieu. My wants list is long and I'm impatient with institutions that promote needless suffering. Like the way our prison system works. Or the Supreme Court.

All these basic ideas about how Finnegans might desire a better world I stole from a bunch of someones smarter than me. Some smart-assed Finnegans who're better wired than I am.

You know another thing that I think would be a hallmark of Finnegan-thought? That all things SEX (and aye: "gender") are a private matter. If you want me to call you They, cool, just cut me some slack so I can break a lifelong habit. Crime is crime; I have no problem with the laws as they existed up to the day Trump's SCOTUS decided to take away rights from women. Why is this so hard to come to grips with? It's not like the Fetus People actually care about the Fetus when it actually becomes a Human. I mean, c'mon! What's that line from Arch-Finnegan George Carlin? When you're a fetus you're sacred, but the moment you're born you're fucked? (You will thank me for withholding my palaver on the deep roots of misogyny, which would be maybe 1.5 times as long as the rant you're reading right now.)

I support Adam and Steve in their relationship. Alex and Kelly, too. If someone never felt like they were born in the right body, and they've really thought it through, how the fuck is it any of my business? Transition the hell outta that phenotype and then dig the more harmonic you! That's a whole series of consciousness states I will never know. We can do those operations and use those drugs. We've gotten good at it. Human felicitousness! Who wants to be trans is a non-issue for me. I daresay 4 of 5 Finnegans agree? So politely fuck off, Karen. Or Gov. Abbott.

It seems needless to say it, but no Finnegan thinks the State should be able to tell any of us what we can and can't do when exploring our own consciousness. As long as no one is hurting anyone else: Finnegans Bake. Finnegans Trip. Some Finnegans abstain. Hey, I'm hip to your kink.

I have ridden this soapbox for all it's worth. Your Q was about Finnegans maybe waking and I simply think it doesn't matter all that much unless Finnegans have solidarity with other Finnegans. Hence, the rant. Plz xcuz my ABCED-mindedness?

As to the where-R-we on the Aeon/Cycle/Epoch/Era-Ages, I will say that Uncle Al's Aeons and Johnny Vico's Cycles seem analogous enough; but all my life I've been interested in Wild-Assed Models of History. Timewave Zero and the ingress of novelty via the I Ching? Takes the cake for sheer tripsy Rube Goldberg inventiveness. Its machinations are marvelous to behold. And his Irish gift of gab activates my endocannabinoid system. I listened to McKenna talk and it stoned me. My gawd Terence's whole spiel around that is entertaining AF to me. I had a look at The Fourth Turning, which seems definitely analogous to Vico, though finding out Steve Bannon is a big fan took some shine off. And Hesiod maybe started all this. Was it Eliade who first sent us the memo that more cultures think of their history as cyclical than our unidirectional arrow flow in the West? Maybe it was Toynbee. (HG Wells? Hegel?)

The Jumping Jesus Model makes maybe more sense than anything, though it seems to downplay the cyclicality riffs. Ditto the discrete epochs in the future. But acceleration? Man, I feel it Every. Damned. Day. And Meine Göttin! RAW was right: with acceleration comes Chaos. Which increases every day, because of increased unpredictability, due to logarithmic info-flows throughout the social sphere. Hard 'n fast, ladies 'n germs. Acceleration up a hockey-stick ying-yang. 

Maybe only the direst of Great Dyings can gain anyone a reprieve, and no one wants that. Or maybe some do: with all the income inequality - Oxfam said the richest 1% got twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together, 2021-2023: no doubt because they work really hard; they're smarter than us Finnegans. 

Pffffffffffft! 

Somewhere in FW he uses the term "politicoecomedy" and if I recall, he was referring to his own book. I prefer at times to think it our world. And what's the difference?

Anyway: the unsanely rich need MORE, clearly. "Having an actual life" is not exactly what they do. And sooner or later, they're gonna want our...land? Whatever. They clearly will believe they need it - gotta win - and what they obviously don't need is us Finnegans. Soooo...Fully Autonomous Targeted AI-Drone Killings of the Poor, anyone? Hey, it would seem that Scenario was tailor-made for plausible deniability. Or maybe you don't need that anymore; it's Old Skool. Now you just appoint corrupt judges, for the same reason a dog licks his own junk. (<---my gawd I lack couth!)

On that deeply sardonic-castic note, I move on to yer last Q.

bc: I've come to suspect that with Finnegans Wake James Joyce intended on creating a new sacred text. Literally! Not a parody, satire, or commentary on holy books, but actually the thing itself.

What do you think Joyce hoped to accomplish with FW?

MJ: The humorous aspects of the book makes the entire Thing "jocoserious," as I see it. 

Joyce was so "fuckin' weird" - as RAW said - that I can't help but suspect he knew he was writing something that would be seen as a distillation of himself, his outlook, and his aesthetics, which were...fuckin' weird, indeed. I think he accomplished this. Overwhelmingly. He no doubt read other authors and their language games in what we now call High Modernism (but to him was just "writing"), and parts of Ulysses are as experimental as anything in Finnegans Wake, but inventing a dream language in a entire book spanning one night in which the dreamer is in touch with all of history and is Everyone and sometimes "inanimate" objects in an all-at-once-ness really took the cake. He made me see how the way words look can be alienated from how they sound and mean, and for that alone I'm forever grateful. There was a strong whiff in the experimentation in the air when he composed FW (roughly 1922-1939) and he knew all the other gamers, and he just blitzed everyone. No one even came close. I suspect there was a competitive aspect. 

'Cuz humor and virtually all its forms seems most baked-in to Joyce's cosmology, his "serious" sacred text would seem to require the spirit of massive jest, or so it seems to me. And let's face it: Birth, Life, Death, History: it's hilarious! If some people don't get it - who even READS his "claybook" these days, anyway? - then fuck 'em if they can't take the cosmic giggle factor aspects. If FW is a Holy Book, it's the first with humor at (or near) its core. What took us so long? 

Jung thought Ulysses could be a new Bible for the "white race." I don't think he got near grokking FW. Joyce uses "Mamalujo" and seems to be in a religious lineage that extends at least back to Blake, but every god and goddess and religion in the world shows up in Finnegans Wake, it seems. Is it a holy book for a select group of counter-culturalists, extending back to the 1930s? And what will be FW's destiny? Part of me wants to play the part of Zhou En-Lai, who (the story seems dubious but makes good copy) was asked by Kissinger about his opinion on the French Revolution, and Zhou supposedly said "It's too soon to tell." Maybe the fate of Finnegans Wake is too soon to tell.

But I'll now adjust my tone knobs. Midrange...volume...can't seem to ever find the balance levels...do you like reverb?

No but seriously: who even reads books these days? Much less High Modernist stuff? Much less experimental prose? I once read an article around 15 years ago: some librarians were interested in who still reads all those 900 page novels from the 19th century like Bleak House, War and Peace, Les Miserables (Signet ed. of mass market paperback: 1488 pages), Brothers Karamazov, The Count of Monte Cristo, Middlemarch, etc? Well, academics, because it's their job and often they admit they don't enjoy these books...and secretaries, bus drivers, househusbands, box-office attendants, accountants and other weirdos like the kinds of people who might read this email-interview. Certain types of people read those books, to this day, when the hordes are constantly checking their Facebook status and can't remember what it was like to sit quietly and live inside a dense text, because they have lost their attention spans, they have abdicated a major peninsula of their autonomy, or never had a pre-Facebook attention span to begin with, thinking of the date and the rise of "smart" phones and how those kids are coming of age. (Do they focus well for hours on end in "first person shooter" scenario games? Hey...that's just...ducky, kid.)

Right now some RAW fans are reading Moby Dick together online. But in a sold-out stadium of 67,000 sports fans, maybe 17 have read any one of these books because they just wanted a "good read." I just made up that number, it's probably high but so am I, but suffice: the massive dwindling of readings of serious dead-tree fat books is a thing. (q.v: The prior question and us living in a Vichian Neo-Barbarism Age.)

And those books, while long and rich in characterizations, ideas, four-page-long descriptions of the wallpaper in the sitting room, social drama, whathaveyou, are not written in a private portmanteau-brimming dream-language that demands mega-wattage from the reader and her powers of decipherment. So: if Joyce wanted to write a Holy Book, and I think he did: the question is: how many ideally insomniac readers did he think he'd have? And furthermore, did he care if the number would be recedingly small? He had gotten feedback from his peers, with Ulysses über-fan Ezra Pound complaining of the "circumambient peripheralization" of the Thing. 

The artistic avant were mostly his fans. Would that characterize his current readers? I suspect today's "avants" are mostly just fed up Strange Ones, "sensitive types", intellectual outlaws, nocturnal mandarins, prodigal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-poets, unemployable crackpots currently surrounded by 3,300 books on diverse subjects, inveterate list-makers intractable, AWOL mathematicians living in a friend's mother's basement and learning Bossa Nova guitar, do-it-yourself sociologists, those whose perversities are extra polymorphous, statuesque maidens entering graduate management accreditation, abstruse comic book artists, sound engineers well-versed in cabala, those who always use their turn signals, once-promising drop-outs from Art History graduate school, those who obsess over what happened before the Big Bang and worry if Time never began or will ever stop and who also catch themselves daily wondering what it's like to "be" the opposite sex, women "of a certain age," people with an overweening urge to obtain a penny farthing bicycle, those who habitually read words backwards and forwards, readers of different books about the battles of Contarf and Boyne and Rathmines that number in the double-digits, malcontents highly disaffected, sex workers who can run intellectual rings around all their clients, those who've sought clemency and deferments and pardons and stays and dismissals and postponements a rather large handful of times, humans who have fallen asleep in the public or university library too often to count, certain street-corner chefs reeking of hash, fans of Luigi Serafini and/or The Urantia Book, bohos of varying income, followers of Patrick W. Shakespeare, highly literate down-and-outs, someone who once heard the term "police blotter" and immediately thought of a little hit of acid with the image of Sting on it, capricious ne'er-do-wells who hope to "match wits" with the Author, virtuoso brewers, brick-hauling day-laborers hoping to find representation, devoted fans of Kandinsky and Scriabin and Nabokov, one writer who thought it funny he'd invented a character who was born on September 3rd, 1752, first generation Chinese immigrants with high IQs who sound like Valley bros, euphuists, hardened criminals who never hurt a flea, softened criminals who have hurt a flea, aristocratic slovenly unkempt slouchers, people like "Arthur Gopnik" in the Coen Bros film A Simple Man: the brother of the main character, who works privately in a cramped little notebook in suburban living rooms in Minnesota on his "Mentaculus" which is a mathematical theory of everything, those "on the spectrum," those most at home "in the theater," persons who this very day are thinking about Ethnomethodology and how to score some 2C-B, those who wonder "what I did I do to deserve this" and really mean it, human-like entities who are under the radar and getting away with it, and, to rip-off Jack Spicer, ones whose "vocabulary did this to me." 

Aaaaaaand: YOU! (I jape. "I kid! I kid because I love," to quote Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky's son.)

The question of readership seems weird to me, but so do those hardcore Finnegans Wake fans. Hey, I know I'm weird AF and frankly I'm cool with it. At times I wonder if there's a series of genetic mutations we all have in common. I mean: are there more enthusiastic adherents of DMT or of FW? I'd honestly like to know.

And what does it "mean" to read Finnegans Wake for pleasure, much less as a Holy Book? I have finished it. I will never finish it. Of course you know what I mean. No one has "read" Finnegans Wake like you read a John Grisham novel. (Maybe?) We never finish the watery circular Finnegans Wake, which is one of Its symptoms. I suspect we are one of Its symptoms, aye. And I don't know what that means. Sometimes I feel like Finnegans Wake has dreamed us into being, in some sense. But...but...that makes me sound crazy. I withdraw my statement, your honor.

Jury? Please disregard that previous statement. (And don't think of a waltzing zebra, either.)

In neurobiology there's a term: anosognosia. It's a condition in which a person with a disability is unaware of having that disability due to the underlying physical condition that gave rise to that condition in the first place. Sorta like an organic version of Dunning-Kruger. I don't mean to offend anyone by suggesting a medicalization of our Finnegans Wake-reading weirdness, but maybe there's a smidgen of something there. And if so, what of it? 

The pioneering neurobiologist Norman Geschwind discovered that people with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were very often excessively religious, displayed hypergraphia, have "sticky" personalities and preferred conversations to go on for a long time, often with repetitions, had lower or higher-than normal sex drives, and an intensified mental life. (What? Why is everyone staring at me? Hand to Goddess I've never had an epileptic attack! Or were you picturing Joyce in your mind just now? No evidence of TLE with JJ; lots of eye issues, though.) And Geschwind had published on this novel insight into organic brain dysfunction, but, as one story I read - was it from Sapolsky? - a hotshot intern thought that Geschwind might have prematurely shot his wad on this, and did an intake with a patient and went back to Geschwind and said, "Uhhh...that new patient with TLE is not interested in religion at all." Meaning: yo, Teach: you might be wrong about TLE. Geschwind was startled and had the intern take him to the patient. Geschwind asked him, my intern here says you're not religious? No, the patient said. Geschwind then asked "Why?"... and the patient went off for an hour about how many theological texts he'd read closely, fine points in Martin Luther, how Buber's answers about the ways of God to Man were inadequate and why, certain aspects of Paul Tillich, etc. So: definitely "excessively religious" but in an interesting way. Wish I could've seen the look on the intern's face. 

None of us have temporal lobe epilepsy, right? (That's as far into the neurobiological woods as I want to get with us and our reading of Joyce.) 

But still, there seems to be an elite small few of us. We enjoy: wordplay, puzzles, poetry, spotting recondite references, consulting secondary and tertiary texts (major aid for me was air-dropped by Roland McHugh, John Bishop [great!], Campbell-Robinson, James Atherton, Adeline Glasheen, Bernard Benstock, John Gordon, and William York Tindall, to nick the surfaces), and the impossibly grand scope of FW's universality. If I came across "maji" or "wavu" in the text - and they're there - sorry, but I never would've guessed they're Swahili for "water" and "net." I need some secondary sources, at least some of the time. I have never sat down to learn Swahili, so sue me.

(I still haven't gotten to Edmund Lloyd Epstein's book: did you like it? Sound off in den Kommentaren! There's another one I wanted to read but haven't seen: Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake, by Margaret C. Solomon: lemme hear from those who gave this one a whirl? Any other hidden gems, exegetes? Maybe I should email Peter Quadrino...)

Perhaps it should suffice to say Joyce came up with something so rich and weird that it would delight the hyper-semantically-flexible who were a lot like himself. We are also people who are aware of what we want to do with our "free time." Because that muthah of a book demands of our hours non-insignificantly. And we seem to be hyper-aware of all the things we don't want to do with our time...I'm thinking right now about that moment I fell in love with Socrates. In an early dialogue, he has smart youth following him around Athens, and they hit the agora, the outdoor marketplace, and at one point Socrates says, "Oh! How many things there are that I do not want!" I paraphrase from memory...

Robert Anton Wilson told me his highest value in a book is its "inexhaustibility" which certainly fits FW; in an interview with someone else he said he much preferred "puzzles to be worked on" over "puzzles to be solved." So: the indeterminacy of the book must be something we all dig. It seems the Great Mass recoils from uncertainty. It seems history is to blame. No but seriously: Maybe we weirdo-Finnegans like our indeterminacy in specific dosages. And we titrate like champs. 

Many readers have used metaphors when talking about FW that make it seem Wholly Other. Terence McKenna said FW "is a book that, in some sense, tries to climb into the world and be instead an autonomous event system." (Archaic Revival, 51) Here we get a sort of Flatland metaphor in which a book moves into the next dimension "up." And it also makes the book into an event, and sort of like the uncanny alien-info-thing, which is PKD's territory, although he lets anyone squat there for free.

When we imaginatively increase the literalness of a book climbing into the world to become the autonomous event system it wanted to be, the only two reactions would be ones deeply related to religion: fear and awe. It's also eldritch to the max. Unheimlich, even.I don't think I even need the book to climb into an event-level dimension to get transported, even sense transcendence, swirling around down by the ankles and up the spine. Not always, but in some reading-sessions...

Has there ever been someone who genuinely read FW, taking the time to understand it on some appreciable level, then said, "Meh. It's okay. There were a few parts that made me chuckle. Talk about a slow book! He knows a lot about myths, I'll say that! I related to Shem. But I prefer Robert Ludlum." ? (Maybe?) The idea of that seems unlikely to me, because the book demands such deep immersion, for many years. Or perhaps I lack imagination.

Do certain of us desire a dizzying complexity to get lost in? Ecstasy comes from ek-statis: "standing outside of oneself." Vertigo seems adjacent. Do you do that when reading deeply? Direct religious experience, when described, has as one of its hallmarks a discrete mental departure from everyday reality. In a sense, those who still can pay attention and read books - any books - get "lost" in the text. (Roland Barthes had the lovely phrase: "luxuriate in the text.") We find later that we were so engrossed we forgot about everything else in the room. It's a non-ordinary state, and highly valued by some. I jones for it every day, and you can see me testify, brothers 'n sistuhs, in these spaces. Could there be some sort of continuum by which some get "way more lost" than others? Is this experience with texts far more intense, given the reader and their "yoga" (Sanskrit: to yoke or unite) with it? And do said readers cop a religious experience from it? I think so, based on testimonies other than my own. This should set some readers to recollecting in tranquillity, etc, etc, etc. 

Take your time...

I realized just now I waxed on about the phenomenology of reading for Question #2, above: on the 1970s counterculture. I guess it's just exceedingly interesting to me.

The most famous Holy Books have all kinds of stories around their readers that suggest a sort of mania: people who memorize the Qu'ran. Those who learned to read but pretty much only read the Bible for an entire lifetime, and any mundane story you have for them about local gossip can be linked to a line, citing chapter and verse. But FW seems textually so weird that only an elite few stick with it, and I mean "elite" here in the most special pleading sense I can muster. What does it mean to try to read a profound book written in an opaque manner? It seems different to me than reading the Upanishads or Vedas or Sutras or Qu'ran in translation. Kabbalah seems like a text about a series of texts, with a series of operations needed to derive a welter of possible meanings, and this is, I think, getting at FW. Same neighborhood? And yet, the differences seem vast.

In Terence McKenna's essay on the exceedingly weird Voynich Manuscript, which is still not-cracked, author(s) unidentified, he draws on Structuralism and calls that book a "boundary text" to read: an unreadable book that you're trying to read. (Currently, it's thought to have been put-together around 1420, in Northern Italy, author(s) still unknown. Radiocarbon dating of the paper was done long after Terence's essay-talk on the Voynich.) He also cites The Necronomicon as a boundary text, although there, Terence, I suspect, might be having us on. But FW is readable. We have all "read" it and made sense out of passages. At first it feels onerous, but it's not completely impenetrable, you'll find. And you get "better" as you develop reading strategies for working with the Thing.

Rather than structuralism and boundary/unreadable texts, I'd cite Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of information. If a text is completely unreadable - it now looks like the alphabet-like symbol system the Voynich was written in was mostly decorative, so it probably won't be cracked - it's mathematically isomorphic to "noise." In the Voynich the artwork is very, very strange. Cryptographers who had helped crack the Nazi Enigma Code have had a go at the "writing" in the Voynich and came up short. When you can't make out the first thing in a text, despite world-class cryptanalytical chops, you're looking at "noise" in the system: a dead channel of static, snow, pretty symbols that add up to worse than gobbledygook. Relax, and look at the writing in that weird book as filigree. In Shannon's sense this noise is far too much information and nothing can be predicted. FW is not that. Joyce actually wanted to say something; we'd just have to work. The book itself seems vastly ludic, so in our "work" at making sense of it, it would seem that our strategies might need to match some sort of "playful" wits with Joyce. One I use is to read it aloud, with a lame Irish brogue. I've heard those recordings of Joyce reading, and I try to channel that sound.

How individual readers of the Wake have prepared for it is always interesting for me to hear about. It would seem we're screwed without reading ourselves into a basic grounding in Irish history, etymology, world mythology, folklore, comparative lit, pre-1950s psychology, and linguistics, just for starters. Just to get the door slightly ajar. Here we have a text that can lead to an entire education. One must give oneself over to this education, which seems related to a quest and this in turn seems related to the "religio" question.

For actual decipherable text you must have redundancy in the mathematical sense. I don't wanna get off here on Shannon's Information Theory, but he did bring up C.K. Ogden's  Basic English, which was an attempt to bridge massive gaps in understanding and communication among even the least-educated people, and to blow down the Tower of Babel, figuratively. Shannon writes, "Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high. This is reflected in the expansion that occurs when a passage is translated into Basic English. Joyce, on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content." (found in The Codebreakers, by Kahn, 745) 

What Shannon means with redundancy, compression, and expansion is how a text can be manipulated and still retain its message; a simpler way to think about it is that texts with a low information content become predictable to a given reader, while texts of high information demand more from the reader and it's nearly impossible to guess the next words in the sentence as you're reading it. FW would be at the apex of difficulty, the information level so high that it verges on "noise" but never really achieves it, although the wild card is what the particular reader brings to the table. That Shannon writes FW is "alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content" we perhaps construe he was no fan.

This discourse of digital information theory and FW often shows up in books about FW. Of course! But it also shows up in books on consciousness, early architecture of computer systems as developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, attempts to measure and model creativity, and many other places. In 1964 Timothy Leary published "The Effects of Test Score Feedback on Creative Performance and of Drugs on Creative Experience," in which he posits computers as improving "games" but "only a living organism possesses consciousness from which spring new games." (Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years, 120) Try telling that to Sam Altman and his posse. In this paper Leary links Joyce's "lexicographical experiments" of using "innovative manipulations of a rather impoverished set of verbal symbols" into texts dense with meaning. Leary goes on to link the types of experiments Joyce was doing with the cut-up/fold-in methods of Gysin and Burroughs. 

More recently - Or: I Remember the 90s -  the philosopher Daniel Dennett had posited a "Joycean Machine" that could simulate the kinds of things that went on in FW. This was all around computers and AI getting at a model of consciousness. Which included daydreaming. With hindsight, I'm dubious, but Dennett has a goodly amount on this Joycean Machine in his book Consciousness Explained, which many of us read as soon as it came out and called it Consciousness Explained Away...

The odd-seeming digital-computer-consciousness riffs about FW have always seemed to me, in some sense, like groping for connections when they aren't "really" there. And yet, I have been convinced by Wilson of the value of discerning isomorphisms - similarities of structure - between seemingly disparate discourses. And then, of course, reading itself seems really fucking Weird: we use 26 little symbols/letters to represent the sounds we make when we talk, and those symbols combine to make "words", which, together with a handful of punctuation marks supposedly can convey any possible thought. On the face of it, the idea seems ludicrous. Are these written words the "same" as the ones we speak? Naw, man: they take on a life of their own when set down visually, by someone with a pencil, or stylus, or pen, or MacBook Pro. To read is not the same as to have a conversation. For one, the movements of the eyes are completely different when you compare. Probably a bigger deal in setting these two forms apart is what is going on in the brain when you sit alone with a text, eyes moving right to left in industrial linearity across the page, decoding the letters/sounds/words into "pictures" in your head and then interpreting them, virtually all at the "same time," versus a conversation. Which one is more like prayer: reading or a conversation? This seems to have vast implications, but I will leave this line dangling...

(Apologies to our Chinese friends, who read up to down, and those readers of Hebrew: left to right. Hey, I can at least gesture towards DEI.)

Joyce seems to be everywhen: In 2012 - a looong time ago - William Gibson published a series of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor. In one he recounts his reading of synthetic biologists who made a self-replicating genome and inserted a line from Joyce in it: "That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurement of mutation. So James Joyce's prose is now being very strongly pummeled into incoherence by cosmic rays." (43-44) (The line was "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" from A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Because why pick something from FW, which already looks like it has been bombarded by cosmic rays and undergone mutation?)

In Richard Preston's book Panic in Level 4 there's an New-New Journalistic essay about two Russian brothers - the Chudnovskys, who seem related to de Selby in some way in my mind, but they're "real" - in New York, who linked together a bunch of computers working in parallel and spent a lot of money and space on cooling them, as they set the network to work out pi to as many digits as possible. Doing that is their whole life. "Mathematicians who have visited Gregory Chudnovsky's bedroom have come away dizzy, wondering what secrets the scriptorium may hold." And it's either in Preston's book or some other article about the Chudnovskys that they proffered: if you assigned letters to numbers in pi, eventually it would write the book "about the sea" that Joyce was said have been planning after FW. Hey, I'd read that.

One could go on and on with this. In RAW's Coincidance: A Head Test he essays a tackling of FW. The book seems like an alien intelligence not unlike Terence's, but Wilson probes at this intelligence from multiple angles with morphogenetic fields, Bohmian holographic universe model-metaphors, Bell's Theorem, etymology, brain hemisphericalization, Leibniz and binary code and computers and I Ching...on and on and it's really the trippiest writing on FW I've ever seen. He had long wanted to write the book, thought no one would be interested, and he'd have to sell copies on street corners. The feeling I get is Joyce making a sort of transcendent Golem, the forerunner to Frankenstein and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice." The wise Rabbi Loew of Prague made the Golem out of mud or clay ("If you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs [please stoop!] in this allaphbed! Can you rede...its world?" FW:18-19) and earthly matter, animated by rituals and Hebrew incantations. When the Rabbi put a piece of paper with lines from the Torah in the Golem's mouth, it spoke. There are very many stories about the Golem, but It's made out of the lowest matter and yet lives and speaks! And for Wilson, "something unknown is doing we know not what", to quote Sir Arthur Eddington, who explained Einstein early on. But RAW thought that "something" may have to do with Intelligence, working evolutionarily in a way we haven't yet been able to pin down. It might be the wellspring of creativity. How ironic that It had released its metaphorical spores and gave rise to Finnegans Wake! In McLuhan's wild-ass "Laws of Media", near the end of his life, he's waxing on about how one media "obsolesces" another. An example: "Money speeds transactions and gives rise to uniform pricing systems, obsolescing haggle and barter and much of the human relation to commodities." And no matter what, "obsolescence" is not the end: "Obsolescence is not the end of anything; it's the beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of taste, of art, of eloquence and of slang. That is, the cultural midden-heap of cast-off cliches and obsolescent forms is the matrix of all innovation." (Essential McLuhan, 379-380) This profound biological book/machine of alien intelligence, the innovative Finnegans Wake, can be made of...trash. Profound levels of knowledge, aye. But also: found objects. A "midden-heap." And yet It speaks. "Cast-off cliches" and "slang" take on new dimensions in FW. And it's as if Joyce was directly connected to this alien intelligence/eternal boon of midden-heap sources. (Or: he just worked really hard at concocting a long Irish joke.)

Or at least that's my esoteric reading of RAW's esoteric reading of Finnegans Wake. A very short version, at least. I remind myself and the Reader that the Latin etymological roots of "religion" are to bind/bond, obligation and reverence. FWIW.

Dear Bob Campbell: Thanks so much for letting me blow long-azzed solos like late Coltrane here! You gave me the basic chords and let me go off. I'm very much interested in your own take on Finnegans Wake as a religious text. Care to chime?

bc: What an honor and a pleasure! Thank you so much for pushing these ideas forward so definitively that you’ve undoubtedly hit a long fly ball back to deep left center field, back, back, and that ball is outta here! HOME RUN!

For anyone that’s found themselves following breadcrumbs along the pollen path of the tale of the tribe, this is a WARP ZONE!

In regards to Finnegans Wake as a religious text, I’d also have to appeal to the etymological roots and invoke the Joseph Campbellian idea of religion as “religo,” a linking back, linking back the phenomenal person to a source, the mystery from which we emerge, presumably to which we return, and that which we maybe never actually leave!

I’d say whatever gives you that feeling of connection counts as a religious text, and to my tastes, FW seems especially well suited to this type of reading experience, and I suspect Joyce designed it that way very intentionally.

I must have originally picked up the idea from Toby Philpott, in 2005, when we worked on a Tale of the Tribe piece about FW & Vico called Falling on Deaf Ears, which ends with the line: “And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.” But it really took damn near two decades to actually sink in! 

Though if indeed Joyce intended on writing a sacred text with Finnegans Wake, certainly he envisioned a new kind of holy book, something that would resist dogma, central authority, and belief itself. FW issues no commandments, but rather invites direct participation in the mystery.

Given Joyce’s annoyance at WWII for distracting people from reading FW, I’d guess he hoped for a more immediate and large-scale recognition, but clearly he also built this thing to withstand centuries of scrutiny, and the long con has only barely kicked in.

Though, for the record, I see no imperative here! No need to evangelize. I wouldn’t bother recommending FW to the disinterested. It doesn’t need converts, or prominence, or success, it already exists! Fully accomplished and available for enjoyment by whomsoever wishes.

Simply finding the others, exchanging ideas with like-minded Wakeans, and making resources available for further edification seems like the name of the game to me.

FW entered the public domain in most of the world back in 2012, (natch!) and will do so here in the states in 2035. I know I have a vision for something I want to do with Finnegans Wake once the rights become free and clear, and probably others do as well!

(D.B. Weiss, of Game of Thrones TV adaptation fame, wrote a brilliant dissertation called Understanding the (Net) Wake, where he opens up Umberto Eco’s can of worms about FW being an “open work,” with fascinating implications for the future of art!)

I’d never seen that McKenna quote about FW as an autonomous event system!

What a perfect sentiment for Maybe Night! The original premise of which combines the Robinson-Campbell proposition of the Winter Solstice as the date of the dream in FW with McKenna’s hypothesized 12/21/12 timewave novelty singularity. (Also, that RU Sirius quote about the future getting determined by events rather than ideas.)

IDK if Maybe Night will successfully make it all the way to autonomy, but that remains the goal. Maybe someone phone up Ireland and tell them I found another Bloomsday in the pocket of an old coat. Certainly the pubs in Dublin wouldn’t want anything to do with that!

bc: Your highly anticipated new book on the influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson, known colloquially as Straight Outta Dublin, has reportedly moved closer to official publication, and given that this is the most frequently asked question I receive about Maybe Night, I'm hoping you can tell us more about this tantalizing tome...

How did your book about James Joyce's influence on Robert Anton Wilson first develop?

EW: While working on An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, I asked Bob what he would like me to focus on. He said he'd like me to focus on Joyce's influence on his writing. While writing that book I also wrote my master's thesis on The Influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati. I took one of the appendices from my book and expanded it into my thesis.

bc: I'm assuming Bob Wilson was probably aware that you were working on this book, and perhaps even read an early draft, did he provide any direct feedback regarding Joyce's influence on his writing?

EW: Shortly after my book came out in December 2004, I sent Bob a list of possible topics for my next book, including the idea of expanding my master's thesis into a whole book on Wilson and Joyce. Bob liked that idea best.

bc: What's the latest news on the book's development?

EW: I've finished the book. I just need to make a few revisions. I find myself moving slowly, but I hope to finish before the Spring Equinox of 2025.

bc: This is a bit of a meandering question, so bare with me please!

Towards the end of his life, Bob Wilson seemed especially interested in the works of James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Two vanguards of modernism.

Similarly, the trio of James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Aleister Crowley, all featured in Masks of the Illuminati, seemed particularly important to him. I believe he took them as emblematic of the discovery of relativity in each of their respective fields, literature, science, and religion. All having their epiphanies around the turn of the 20th century. Again, roughly congruent with the paradigm of modernism.

Does it seem safe to say that we still have not yet fully integrated the discoveries of modernism into our culture?

And might we find ourselves in something of a cultural stasis until we successfully do so?

Do the works of Robert Anton Wilson have anything to say about this?

EW: You might want to ask Michael Johnson this question. It does seem safe to say that most of us have not integrated the discoveries of modernism into our cultures. I saw a recent book on modernism that didn't even mention Ezra Pound. People see modernism in many different ways. 

I don't see cultural stasis. We seem in a chaotic freefall in many ways, and modernism does not seem as relevant to me today as it did when Bob died in 2007. Of course, it seems reasonable to model modernism as relevant, but I don't find myself thinking in those terms too much any more. 

Robert Anton Wilson's works say a ton about these matters. In fact, rereading Wilson helps me see the relevance of these figures to trying to decode our current world. I have struggled so much with Joyce, Pound, and Crowley since I started reading Wilson in 1982. I have deliberately left Crowley alone for the most part since 2005, I haven't really dealt with Pound since I stopped teaching his books in classes in 2020. I plan to have the final revisions of my book on Wilson and Joyce done for the Spring equinox, March 20, 2025. Working on that book for 23 plus years has made me a bit exhausted but exhilarated with Joyce.

bc: Having had a long and unique relationship with this material, what do you think Joyce hoped to accomplish with Finnegans Wake?

EW: Part of me, the Wilsonian part, thinks Joyce wanted to heal the world, wake the finnegans (the ordinary people). Joyce said he had written the book of day, Ulysses, and now he wanted to write the book of the night. John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of the Dark, contends that Joyce did not just mean dreams. I think Bishop saw dreams as one component of the night. Others see the Wake as basically a dream narrative. I just saw that Bishop died in 2020 as did Joycean Shelly Brivic. I got to participate with both of them in a Finnegans Wake session at the 2011 North American James Joyce Conference. (Bishop participated over the internet due to poor health.)

Bob Wilson contended that Joyce wrote the Wake in part to confound the censors. The difficulty of the language of the book made it possible for Joyce to slip in a lot of erotic and scatological content which would likely have gotten the censors upset had happened with his earlier books. I think the scatological material turned Ezra Pound off. He never warmed to the Wake.

 bc: How did Illuminatus! find you and what impact did it have on your life?

MJ: It was around 1992.  I have it all in journals somewhere, as I had become a compulsive chronicler of my quotidian doings starting 9/8/89, but there are now sooo many spiral-bound notebooks crammed with minutiae on dusty shelves in a closet that it would take half a day to find the exact date. Anyway, here’s how I remember discovering RAW: My wife and I had gone out to our favorite diner (in Torrance, CA) and afterward, as we often did, browsed a bookstore across the street from the diner. At that time, my biggest influence was Aldous Huxley, a novelist/essayist whose wide range of topics made me swoon. I read everything by him, sometimes thrice. I still have a long couple of shelves of his stuff. But I was interested in...if not "everything" then certainly too many areas of knowledge. It's a weird problem to have, I think. I know some people find they really love one or two areas and they go all-in for decades. Civil War buffs, medieval European history, Carl Jung, city planning and infrastructure and building codes, Elizabethan poets and Shakespeare, French cooking, etc. Bless these folk but I cannot do it. I've tried, like the cigarette addict who "quits" 2,300 times. 

Anyway, I'm browsing and found a couple things I'd been wanting to read. Then I saw this spine of a thin book titled Right Where You Are Sitting Now. Interesting title. Robert Anton Wilson. Nevah hoidda dis dude. No familiarity at alI. Colin, Edward O, Edmund, even August: I knew these Wilsons and had enjoyed them all, especially Edward O.  I did what I call an "x-ray" of the book: you open at random for a hit of the thing. You flip around inside and get the general lay of the land. Is there an index? No, but: a quiz next to an essay on politics (and his seemed a lot like mine, or close enough), odd and trippy artwork and illustrations, a glossary? Cool! And I didn't know some of the terms. The structure of the thing looked wild. Sorta like some Modernist magazine format. Okay, I'll get it. 

I went home and started reading it and read it all into around 4AM, couldn't put it down, was instantly enchanted, went to work bleary-eyed with this Wilson guy's ideas/tone/outlooks/provocations rattling around in my cortices. Came home tired, took a nap, then started reading it again. It's still one of my favorite books.

Now: I've been a bookish person for as long as I can remember. My mom said she read to me every day as an infant, and around age 2 or 3 (the story varied), I astonished her when I just started reading by myself one day. I remember her teaching me phonics. When you're this sort of person you develop a reading style with certain habits. Reading "fingerprints", for lack of a better term. This first reading of RAW was not normal for me. I think the cut-ups - which I'd been somewhat familiar with because a colleague at work - a gay poet - loved Burroughs…were particularly provocative. And so I'd seen some of WSB's cut-up stuff and knew a bit about the theory of it. I liked RAW's cut-ups. Or rather: he used them in a slightly different way than WSB did: he seemed to still have an agenda for his audience's reading brain. There were messages he wanted to get across, so there were breaks in the cut-ups, which then resumed. It all seemed to be linked to the equation from Claude Shannon, of which: this, too, was totally new for me. This was overwhelmingly interesting to me, as it seemed to be writing about how reading occurs. This was one of a few things I found completely fascinating and still do. I've since read a bunch of books on the phenomenology and neurobiology of reading, and RAW was the main impetus.

His hermetic morphing into different types of writers, which he usually pointed out to us - the Investigative Journalist, the Skeptic, the goofy comic writer who filled one page with two "zen telegrams", the piece on Bucky Fuller, etc. - I loved this ironic mercurial "role- playing” by him. 

Also: there seemed to be some codes I couldn't crack, like in-group jokes. I took this as a challenge. Maybe other RAW books would give hints?

After I woke up I read the entire book again. I can't say I understood it, especially the gnomic cut-ups. The essay on Pop Ecology was fascinating, but I tended to disagree with him, though I wasn't exactly sure why. He made me think, which made me brim-over with gratitude. I have never lost that feeling with him. 

Sorry this answer was so long, so I'll wrap it up here: I did what I'd always done: does the library - where I worked at the time - have any other of his books? They didn't. (They had Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words in the reference section at another branch. Nothing to check out.) None. I could get a few via Interlibrary Loan, but at that time I had a job with a regular paycheck and what better things to buy than books? So I hunted down and concocted a bibliography, with notes on which books seemed to be a big deal from him. I put in special orders for four or five of his books. I recall there was something like a "temporarily out of print" deal about his Illuminatus! book, so I had to wait. I'm not kidding: within 3-4 months I'd bought and read the first two Cosmic Triggers, Prometheus Rising, Ishtar Rising, and I forget what others before one day I walked into another bookstore and not far from the front door there was a huge stack - literally on the floor - of the hardback single-volume of Illuminatus!, put out by MJF Books of NY, NY, for like $6.99. You ever see a book and one second later POUNCE on it?

This is what a geek I was and still am: for some reason - hey younger readers? This was WAY before Amazon - the woman who worked in the bookstore who took my special orders for Wilson books had a pronounced lisp over the phone when she called to inform me that "Prometheuth...Ritheeng?" - she said it like a question - had come in for me and was ready to be picked up. Some neurobiologists who study memory call this "flashbulb" memory: a heightened physical state in which you remember everything, like 9/11, or the JFK assassination, or the day they announced New Coke. I had that for Prometheus Rising coming in for me to read. My gawd, it's almost embarrassing to say that!

When I started in on Illuminatus!, it was on some other level of reading. I hadn't read Ulysses yet, though I'd been "meaning" to. My numerous readings in Illuminatus! definitely prepared me for Joyce. And it became obvious - as I hunted for fugitive interviews with him pre-Internet, via databases librarians worked with at that time, that not only was he heavily influenced by Joyce, but consciously used his techniques. Learning how to read the Modern Novel was a step-up for me, and RAW was my best teacher. Aldous Huxley's novels were in the tradition of 19th century novelist George Meredith and the "Novel Of Ideas." I remember Aldous saying somewhere that he thought Joyce's experiments were not a good idea. This made me realize what a departure I'd made since Huxley was my main squeeze. Both Huxley and Wilson were generalist intellectuals, from very different socioeconomic classes, but they are both didactic, which I love. 

Just developing strategies for grappling with and enjoying what I still think of as "experimental" prose techniques was an education in itself. Not long after this, I also developed a serious Pynchon addiction that has never abated. All this was another dimension of reading, and I got a huge buzz from it, which is addicting as all get-out, lemme confess.

bc: I asked Grant Morrison's advice about adapting a classic novel to a new medium and he advised care in maintaining the "original energy" of the book. Illuminatus! seems to be made of pretty stern stuff, in that it survived & thrived after having 500 pages cut at random pre-original publication, and even an adaptation into a 12 hour anarchistic stage play. How would you describe the "original energy" of Illuminatus!? What is it doing literarily that makes it unique?

MJ: Wow. Great question, Bob. Where to start? Okay: all of us at one time or another just sat back dazzled and a tad dizzy with our recent foray into RAW and Shea's book and wondered: how would those extra 500 pages have affected my experience? I've grown into the heresy that it's a goddessend that a lot got cut, because no doubt it added to the "modernistic" structure. 

RAW at times invoked DW Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard and a few others when talking about the structure of these novels and other works of literary modernism: the new and radical (and still "radical", judging by the best-seller lists) thing was collage in Art, montage in film, the ideogrammic method used by Pound in making his revolution in poetry, and stochastic operations originally popularized by surrealists and Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst. RAW had talked about how, for some reason - he has opinions as to why - literature took a long time to catch up to film and painting. A lot of it was due to monied conservatism of publishers, although I think it has more to do with our methods of reading, the neurobiological phenomena of reading, the way we're taught - in certain ways teachers who mean well tend to give the impression that difficulty is to be avoided, probably because their mandate is to produce workers who can communicate lucidly? - and what we assume writing and reading is "for." 

Nota bene RAW's naming of three filmmakers when discussing modernistic structure in literature. Why can a lot of us watch Intolerance, Battleship Potemkin and Breathless and "get it" while our eyes glaze over when we try to sample Ulysses? It's too much for me to get into now, so I'll try to get back to answering your question: RAW (and I don't know how much Shea had to do with this; perhaps more than I thought?) was thoroughly steeped in Pound/Joyce/ Burroughs and other modernist experiments and and structure, and he had linked this to Shannon's literally world-changing equation for Information Theory: the more we can't guess what's going to come next, the more information in a text, and when there's a very high level of information, the reader's consciousness is likely to be altered in ways they haven't experienced with...let's say: best-sellers. In this, the editing of Illuminatus! "is" style, which "is" content. Which “is” energy.

From the beginning, a technique linked to the earliest modernist experiments - Free Indirect Discourse - occurs. Who or what is talking here in the first paragraph of the novel: "For instance, I am not even sure who I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal." This voice allows the writers to tell us stuff while making us unsure about the veracity or status of the speaker. It's now commonplace in certain writers and styles; it all depends what you do with it. Then the narration shifts, shifts again, and there are, very soon in the novel, jump-cuts, and even a few of what we'd think of now as "hip-hop editing": very quick, seemingly too fast cuts from one character or scene to the next. 

The avalanche of information, its density, the play with genres: RAW told Briggs and Apel in an interview that the novel was trying to "be all things at once: detective story, allegory, science fiction, satire, porno, fairy tale, novel of ideas, adventure story, and the literary equivalent of pop art in a sense." This all obviously adds to the destabilization of reading strategies and fosters altered states in the game reader. The space/time shifts, the arcane information delivered by members of one secret society battling with others and you don't know who's pulling another character’s - or your own - leg in order to gain an advantage: all this probably seems a bit much for the ordinary reader. Those who love this are, to paraphrase Pynchon slightly out of context, weirdos on my wavelength. The ones who dismiss it after reading 50 pages are the ones I want to stay away from: nothing good can come from such a person. 

Lastly, you asked what makes it unique. Beside what I say above, I think it's the inclusion of very outré references: to Discordianism (how many had read the Principia beforehand?), scenarios around "Western" tantra, ideas about this character Hassan i Sabbah, allusions to Crowley and 20th century magick, dense allusions to genres and texts that have been largely marginalized in US education, of course “conspiracy theory” was déclassé if not taboo in “serious” education, too. And then there were just lots of things that were sorta "current" around university "hippie" milieux in the roiling late 1960s. The entire book is a bright, blinking hint that the reader might want to take time out and read marginalized discourses, pulp writers, organized crime, anarchist theories, the hermetic tradition, kabbalah, etc. The encyclopedic aspects of this were (and are) a thrill for me. RAW was influenced by the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, who called books like Illuminatus! an “Anatomy.” 

Recently another academic, David Letzler, wrote about “cruft” in fat encyclopedic novels like those of Joyce, Pynchon and Gaddis: cruft is a computer scientist’s term for code that accomplishes what it needed to do, but there was a lot of not-totally-necessary stuff added to the code: “cruft”. And his thesis (in The Cruft of Fiction) is that spotting cruft within the narrative of 700 page novels helps us to more efficiently read our information environments in what I so laffingly think of as “real-life.” It’s an interesting idea. The next time we read Illuminatus!, try to spot the cruft. In a certain sense, cruft is part of the author’s style, so it’s not “trash.” It seems to be the stuff that encourages a lot of readers to quit by page 50, though. 

Also: there still seems a dearth of literature on the Bavarian Illuminati translated into English. 

Now, any time one of us might make an assertion about what is "unique." It's a throw-down challenge to other nerds, geeks, erudites, and other Cool Cats to cite references and say, "Naw man! That was done before by So-and-So: check out Q,X, Z, Y books." So, for example, have we all read The Butterfly Kid (1967) by Chester Anderson? What about Unicorn Girl (1969), by Mike Kurland? Or maybe: T.A. Waters's 1970 novel The Probability Pad? Oh, and talk about that zeitgeist: Brian Aldiss's 1969 novel Barefoot In The Head seems like something RAW and/or Shea might have had next to their bed during the later writing of Illuminatus! I'd say RAW's inclusion of physical science along ideas about, say, astrology or popular gangster myths sets this apart. Again, it's a matter of degrees of uniqueness, I suppose. I mean, Willard effing Gibbs shows up! Who was that for?

bc: (This is more of a conversational question that pertains to what I have on my drawing board at the moment, it's okay if there's nothing to it!)

I noticed that the Bobs seem to go out of their way to refer to "Russia" as opposed to the "Soviet Union." Is this just the genuine parlance of their day? (Like people still referring to "Twitter") Or do you think this is an intentional creative choice?

MJ: I don't know. I don't think I'd really considered this Q. My guess would be that we say "Russia" vs. "the Soviet Union" because it's less syllables. You know, we all have things to do, stuff to "get done." Why waste valuable life-seconds adding four syllables when two was just fine? If you add it all up, I might get more "accomplished" in life than you because you unwisely used six syllables while I conveyed roughly the "same" meaning using only two, and now look at me: billionaire, bon vivant, man-about-town. It's about efficiency, son! Ask any other fascist tech-bro billionaire. (Which is what now? All of 'em?)

Also, when you say "Russia" you get the unvoiced fricative, of the /sh/ sound and it's a minor thrill to push that air through your upper incisors; "Soviet Union" makes your mouth do funny contortions, and the /v/ is a voiced fricative; the /t/ a debuccalized glottalization. Fer crissakes, everyone knows that.

bc: As someone well steeped in Illuminatus! lore, and even the expanded RAW universe, (perhaps Shea's as well?) do you have any favorite hidden details or obscure storylines that might be worth signposting for fellow explorers of the luminous?

MJ: Holy crap there seems to be so very much and personally I've gotten flummoxed and nonplussed over the years with these, so it got to the point where I'm no longer sure what's hidden or obscure.  Illuminatus! is the rabbit hole nonpareil. I’d like to see it get the treatment that Gifford and Seidman gave Ulysses (I mean, who can really begin to grok the “Proteus” or “Scylla and Charybdis” sections without that?), or at least Steven Weisenburger’s delightful A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. 

A few times I've found out that when I'd assumed something had been made-up but it turned out to be true. When I first read Illuminatus! I thought Fernando Poo was a crude joke, like a lot of the other ones. But it's an actual place (now called Bioko) with very rich and real history, and Sir Richard Burton the explorer, writer, translator of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, and influence on Crowley had worked for the British government there? Whoa! Now that's an educational avenue I never would've driven down in high school!  And furthermore, the spy and spy-novelist and bestseller Frederick Forsyth (who RAW has name-checked a few times)  had actually been involved somehow in a coup d'etat there? Equatorial Guinea. Something like that. I forget. If I recall, Forsyth had written novels The Day of the Jackal about the attempted assassination of de Gaulle and The Odessa File, about Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. So you're telling me he wrote Dogs Of War about a coup in Equatorial Guinea that he had a hand in actually trying to pull off in real life? Or did I dream that? That's what a novel like Illuminatus!, with so much info, deception, and layers does to you: I can't remember what's "true" anymore. Sometimes. You follow the information and you end up down in some town you've never visited and you don't know the language, or how you got there. But here's the thing: some of us like that feeling. I assume this all somehow works via Pauli and Jung's synchronicity: RAW pulls "Beethoven was a member of the Illuminati" out of his ass, for a satire on right wingers who feared the Beatles being subversive political figures...and the Beethoven bit turns out to be true? The “Cosmic Giggle Factor.”

Dell paperbacks sat on Illuminatus! for at least three years. That building's at 666 5th Avenue in NY. It was bought by Jared Kushner and then he needed money so he sold it to...the Carlyle Group. Am I making that up?

Genius TV writer Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) came up with a character who got his fake name, not from Illuminatus!, but from how people slurring say "It's all good, man." - Saul Goodman. A mere coincidence. We can relax. Typical Jewish name. Take a deep breath.

I assume a lot of our readers know full well what I'm talking about. To be parsimonious, it could be that when you jam in so many arcane facts and fictional stuff over 800 pages you reach some sort of critical mass in which the info takes on a different life. Fiddle with energy levels and steam congeals into water, water into ice, and pretty soon you’ve got ice cubes poured into your underwear. Something you never bargained for.

Lately I've been marveling at how much "hidden" James Joyce there is in RAW's books. For those who've read some of Joyce, you've seen it, but I suspect most people have no idea how much Joyce is hidden in RAW's work. Sure, a lot of it is explicit. But quite a bit of it would only be seen by a serious Joyce scholar. Maybe not "hidden" at all to a large percentage of RAW fans though? I really admire that rhizome, that tendril, between Simon Moon and his hash-and-tantric-fucking black girlfriend Mary Lou Servix. On p.537,  just before Simon heads off from O’Hare with her in a plane with a copy of Telemachus Sneezed. Especially  starting around p.635, where Simon meets his father Tim and Simon asks him, with joy, "Tell me the Word." Tim tells him "Kether, right here in the middle of Malkuth." Mary Lou then asks Simon who that man was and Simon says it was his father and he might never see him again. We then get a Mary Lou inner monologue, followed by another a few pages later, culminating with a Molly Bloom-like page-long soliloquy that uses "No" where Molly uses "Yes" and illustrates the consciousness of an intelligent African-American woman who has lived a life in racist America. That soliloquy is on p.674. I personally find it very powerful...and odd because there are so many storylines and cuts where you're not sure who's talking; even the best readers shouldn't be ashamed to admit they can't quite keep all the threads together; I noted how often I forgot there were these tones in the book. There's a gaping chasm between capsule paragraph-or-two-long descriptions of the Trilogy out there - "counterculture" "the Lord of the Rings for dope smokers" "every conspiracy theory might be true" "Dillinger, the Dealy Lama, and Hagbard Celine and their philosophies" "1970s countercultural cannabis and late-night dorm-room bull session novel", etc - and those of us who are attempting to become exegetes of the Damned Thing. My gawd Shea and RAW were hot, 1968-71, when the bulk of it was written. Zeitgeist? Aye!

Throughout RAW's fiction the character "Simon Moon" appears in various universes, with little variation, but some. He's largely based on a labor-left-anarchist named Neal Rest, who Shea and RAW knew in Chicago in 1968. Tom Jackson interviewed Neal Rest, who said that Simon Moon was part himself and part Chicago-based surrealist scholar Franklin Rosemont. I remembered reading Rosemont on the surrealist qualities in Bugs Bunny, and that shows up in one or two of Wilson’s books. But Simon's also a lot like Stephen Dedalus, I think. They’re roughly the same age, both Irish. Simon's a working-class intellectual cannabis fiend and even writes FW-like prose in Schrodinger's Cat. So, I’m thinking I don't have to be like Stephen, who Buck Mulligan says "has proved by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" to assert that Simon Moon contains some shards of Joyce too. In his earliest (?) incarnation, in The Sex Magicians, he's "Simeon Luna." 

Let us ponder that for a second, knowing what happened to RAW's family three years after The Sex Magicians... A side Q that will go on forever until you're sick of it: why all the Moons in RAW's work? I'm just goofin' here, but "Celine" is very similar to selanna, from the Greek "moon" and Selanna appears as the Moon Goddess in Pound's Canto #106. In RAW Explains Everything he drops that when he had polio his mother (who battered him) said a novena to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nova=nine, the number for the moon. Bucky Fuller published Nine Chains to the Moon. 

I look at what's written of the relationship between Simon and his dad Tim: working class intellectual Irishman, and see a tenderness that I can't help think was similar to RAW's memories of his own father. Lest we suspect we're leaving out Shea's contribution to Simon Moon, RAW told Neal Wilgus in a (1977?) interview that Simon was "99%" his writing. In Lion of Light the moon is identified with the Age of Isis and oral/matrist Partnership values (which RAW thought were shared by Leopold, Molly and Stephen, by the by...). In The Walls Came Tumbling Down, the protagonist Michael Ellis has a Harvard Psychology Professor friend named Simon Selena, who aside from the obvious parse of Leary, seems a lot like Marcello Truzzi to me. Does this have anything to do with a character from the late 18th/early 19th century, Seamus Muadhen (AKA "James Moon") seeing a meteorite and not being believed by the CSICOPpers of his day? Certainly RAW wanted to thread the Moon family from the 18th century into the 21st, if only things had worked out. I think we got a lot of it...

Simon and Tim: Tim was a Wobbly. (RAW’s father was in the Longshoreman’s Union.) This reminds me of the family and familial descent of Frenesi Gates in Pynchon's Vineland, a novel I've long been obsessed with. Frenesi's parents were Leftists and worked in Hollywood and lived through the Blacklist, and grandpa was a Wobbly, too. Pynchon scholars (and I, too) see a historical through-line in Frenesi's family background to the kinship system that linked the IWW to the blacklist to the 1960s hippies and radicals...which dies in the 1980s by Frenesi's choices and the election of Reagan and Bush. What killed the idealism of the 1960s? Vineland seems to be about that, at least in part. Industrial Left-wing terrorist "Webb Traverse" in Pynchon's Against The Day is Frenesi's mother Sasha's grandfather in Vineland. Why don't we know more about the Industrial Workers of the World? Just a Q...

Frenesi's mistakes in Vineland haunt me, and it has a lot to do with a corrupt SCOTUS that basically said Fuck You to the Founding Fathers on 7/1/2024. Your mileage may vary.

William Cookes pioneered work on element #34: Selenium, then turned to "spiritualism", much to the consternation of the London Royal Society. NB: locoweed is like meth for cows: it leeches selenium from the soil and gets cows all weirded-out. Think of that the next time you see a cow.

Stanford psychologist and sufi and Idries Shah friend Robert Ornstein cites G. William Domhoff (who also studied the richest families in the US and how they intermarry, etc) on his conclusions from a survey on the myth and symbolism of "left" and "right" by noting that “the left is often the area of taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the feminine, the intuition, and the dreamer. And we do find that the symbolism of the two sides of the body is quite often in agreement with these ideas. In myth, the feminine side is most often on the left, the masculine on the right." (Psychology of Consciousness, p.64) q.v. John Higgs, who sees the moon's effects on consciousness in history: Stranger Than We Can Imagine, pp.165-166.

Maybe it's all a coincidance and I'm a just-a-readin' into it. But does this idea in any way favor Objective Reality a tad too much and does it put Poetic Imagination out on the street? This I refuse to allow. I'll give Poetic Imagination a bed and a shower and two scrambled eggs any day. Least I could do.

I really could - you damned well know I could - go on and on with this, but I can see I'm boring y'all. Does it have something to do with Nietzsche and sun-Apollonian vs. moon-Dionysian thought? Is the moon the right hemisphere, metaphorically? Are metaphors generated in the right hemisphere? Is the linear computer-coded "reason" the reason we're in a shit-ton of trouble now, nationally and globally? Do we need more "moon": poetic thought and "female" wisdom? I haven't seen any literary critics wax on about this. Why? (No doubt I've missed out somewhere...) What do I seem to be arguing for here?

Do we get much more “moon” from reading books rather than on our digital gadgets?

I can't go on...I will go on: Is RAW only a recent writer in a long long looooong line of writers coding for "moon"? Is there some sort of Poetic Conspiracy going on? Tom Robbins has a hilarious shaggy dog bit about moon rocks and cheese, moon power and females in Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, pp.59-60. In Robbins's Still Life With Woodpecker the Unabomber-like Woodpecker, an outlaw, has a very strong affinity for the moon. Robbins was interviewed by the FBI when they were trying to track down Kaczynski, or is that common knowledge? On p.77 of Still Life, the "essential insanities" are linked to the moon; the inessential ones are linked to herd-mentality values, and are "solar."

I'm not sure if I answered?...where was I? Oh. 

I'd say pick a section and then go off and break it down. Have you taken the conning spiel Mama Sutra gives Danny Pricefixer (pp.519-537) out for a spinning chase-down-the-references whirl? You could get lost there. It's so much easier to look up "Carcosa" nowadays; when I was first reading Illuminatus! I wasn't yet on Internet.  I guess I use Internet for a lot of fact-checking, but then get lost tracing down some other weird tidbit. My physical books beckon. 

Aside from my essential inanities around "Moon" here (hey! I'm just typing!, I didn't do it!), a good example of what anyone could get lost in is what Erik Davis did with that memo from Pat, in which the source was Teenset magazine. Simon Moon wrote that?... Wha? Ohhh yea! (???): Adam Weishaupt's motto was Ewige Blumenkraft! : "eternal flower power." Simon clearly is fucking with someone, as is his wont. But Erik Davis found that Internet websites were repeating this "fact" about the Illuminati. What's weirder is Simon's origin story for the Justified Ancients of Mumu (Kick out the JAMS, brothers 'n sistuhs!). Simon tells us it originates with the Babylonians, but Davis traces this back to Von Juntz's Unaussprechlichen Kulten ("unspeakable cults"), which was a part of Weird Tales and a sampler of the Cthulhu Mythos gathered and assembled by Conan-creator Robert E. Howard. 

There are "puzzles to be solved" and then there are "puzzles without end" which are "inexhaustible", a term RAW used for his favorite books.

I recall a few years ago I accidentally happened upon why "Robert Pearson" in Illuminatus! is there. It was an accident on my part. An agent provocateur who worked for...Jerry Rubin? Really? 

Who really originated the All-Seeing Eye? And what was this guy all about? How does he relate to RAW?

Note to any readers left: RAW said he wanted to help us overcome paranoia. I think he was serious. 

bc: During his eulogy for RAW, Alan Moore remarked that Illuminatus! changed paranoia from an illness into an illuminating game, and that certain contemporary conspiracy theorists had switched it back again. How is it that Illuminatus! was able to deal with such toxic subject matter, but alchemically transform it into a clarion call for hope and optimism?

MJ: Well, on a certain level, it was one long Shaggy Dog story, eh? I mean it's a comic novel. We’re supposed to go from paranoia into metanoia, glee, and a delightful pixelation. The first time I read it I thought: what a cool device to see the characters suddenly realize they were in a book (one of RAW's favorite tropes), only to then wonder what kind of a book! This seems to be the answer: what kind of book are you in these days, reader? I ain't talkin’ about book-books but your own world as a metaphor for a book. 

I found out that Tristram Shandy knew he was in a book, but then, even earlier than that, in Don Quixote, some guys came to Quixote's house and saw some Cervantes on the shelf and made untoward remarks, if I recall correctly. It's an olde fiction device, but it still works for me, being something of a simpleton. Gimme a broken fourth (or fifth?) wall any day and I'm in!

It's this hilaritas in Illuminatus! that allows us to be engaged with the text as if it's a "serious world" (or set of worlds); meanwhile, in another circuit of our brain, we also know the thing is a huge put-on. Are there secret societies duking it out? Yea, but RAW says it's "normal mammalian behavior." The ugly disaster we see going on now is, I think, basically, due to an illiterate society that thinks it's literate. To me, that's a fucking nightmare. When I read the Washington Post, I'm quickly in a horror novel, gotta say. I really never bargained for men and women buying that - not Donald Trump and his dead pal Epstein, but "the dumbocrats" - are child molesters. Hey, they do it mostly for fun because they're bad people! And that's what bad, evil people do. It's like 25% of the 30 year olds out there have the mentality of a four-year old preschool bully. Has "modern life" got ya down, friend? Lash out! And furthermore these big-money neoliberals are after the chilluns' adrenochrome in order to live longer. 

I just...never saw that coming. Any one of us might go on from there, but please don't...

Jeeez. A lot of us have spent the last eight years (at least) pondering this Q you pose to me here. I siriusly doubt I have a better answer than anyone else reading this. But I will say this, and Eric Wagner also states this in his forthcoming Straight Outta Dublin: I prefer actual books to reading on the Internet. And I agree with him on this. Why?

There's a lot that we need to consider in the way we are primates who are really good at seeing patterns "out there." If we don't see them, we'll make ourselves recognize patterns pretty soon. It was a fantastic survival mechanism for 99% of the time we walked upright as primates, but now? Not so much. We are suffused with “information” and material wealth, safety, and we apparently don’t know how to manage this very well. It’s quite unlikely a large animal will eat you, but our brains evolved to avoid that situation. Now, it’s a traffic jam, boredom, how other people are ruining your lives with the way they think. (There seems to be something to this, but it seems few can figure out who’s causing actual harm or why.) And these patterns: they...can lead us astray and hypnotize us into thinking we know WTF is going on when we (ahem!) really might not. Not even close. I often think of pareidolia: we see faces in the grill of a car, that kind of thing. And I think it's neurologically linked to our wired-in pattern recognition. Someone once said "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves." Another weirdo once said something like, "Only the madman is absolutely certain." Something like that...

Although there's quite a bit of research on how comprehension is freakishly higher in studies when children read the same text in a book vs. online, I've been trying to figure this out. At this point I can coldly cite a bunch of studies and passages in books about the neurobiology of reading, but the "physical thing" of a book seems to attenuate the shit-for-brains dealio that people get when they read online, all the live-long day. The quality of potential distractions - reading books vs. being online - seems a different kettle of fish, for one. RAW often talked about Zen being mostly “attention.” And obviously, the online worlds have not fostered this sort of attention. Quite the contrary.

I recently watched a marvelous and sumptuous, 5th-circuity documentary, The Book Makers (2020 James Kennard). The portability of books, the thingification of information packaged that way - the codex book and tactility of paper, the way books smell - seems to go back to a very ancient past in which we manipulated things with our hands. We do not manipulate all that info that's on our screens. It's a different embodied, physical process. I think this has something to do with it, though I'm not sure how much. Certainly, if you're unhappy right now, one hint of advice I could give you is: have as little to do with your smartphone or computer as possible; the data backs me up here. Read books instead. Read old books. If they have a coating of dust on them, they might be lookin' for you. I don't know. 

The neurobiologist Maryanne Wolf - in her Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World - has a lot to say about laying down circuits for reading and comprehension, thinking and creativity from an early age. If you don't get your kids to read BOOKS early on...you get Trump elected, I guess. No, but seriously: I think she's got a great point and there's a long passage near the beginning of the book that gets pretty wonky with neural circuitry and certain lobes and our perceptual apparatuses and... I read it stoned and got a major buzz off it. Reading stoned: we all know of a certain author who was the Greatest of All-Time at this. (But he laid the circuitry down WAY before other media, although there is that anecdote about being terrified at SURRENDER DOROTHY being written in the sky. Do I digress? Maybe it's all the weed.)

Books could snap us out of our misery, though clearly it's somewhat unclear how and yet very ultra-clearly some people - especially men - in history have read some book and it helped make them go insane and commit violent acts. Look at the Bible, Q'uran, The Turner Diaries, Catcher In The Rye, etc. If McLuhan is right: Gutenberg's press fostered nationalism (reading, alone, in your language, not some filthy French-person's or some creepy weirdo Italian's - who can read that?), which might be the worst religion invented yet. 

Of thine own online being: stay away, friends...unless you're typing out answers to Qs from a bruthuh from anuthuh muthuh living in...Pennsylvania, is it? [Just over the bridge in NJ, actually! - bc] (I must add: They have no idea how to handle the Internet and social media; You need to cut way back on your online consumption; I am just fine and have learned how to be Iron Man when it comes to all the toxic hoo-ha. Which is a joke...) Chomsky once said in an interview, and I think he's right: the highly educated class consume huge amounts of Kwality Info; they think they can suss out the BS, but they're wrong: they fall for idiotic ideas all the time. And then are positive they're "right" about them. It's not an easy Q you've posed here. Not easy por moi, at all, at all.

No but seriously: how addicted are we to all this? Only we can answer that for our own selves, but I will say that, on the days when I only check email and look up some fact/factoid/factoidish thing on Wikipedia, I'm happier. 

Another entree into this murk: I remember when I was getting ready to graduate from HS. I was hanging out with some older guys a lot, and my aunt, who wasn't that much older than me, like 10 years older. And I kept getting the feeling that they had gotten much better educations in HS (and I went to a school in a rich area) than my cohort did. They graduated in the 1960s or early 1970s. Me? 1979 (cue:Smashing Pumpkins). And RAW had a conspiracy theory about education being dumbed down, and I don't think he was drilling in a dry hole. I'm not sure about the mechanics of this plot, though. But what do I mean about "education"? Well, I mean mostly: critical thinking and seeing how much BULLSHIT there is out there and not only calling it out, but analyzing why it's there. Look, I'm sure there are 16 year olds right now who are way smarter than I was at 18 and getting ready to graduate, but I tend to think that, all-in-all, education has failed us. And teachers should get paid more, but also: the Socrates Problem (corrupting the youth of Athens by making 'em smart and willing to doubt authority by asking Qs) today seems to have a lot to do with the digitally-addled parents, who want to storm the School Board Meetings and STOP ALL LEARNING THAT DOESN'T FIT MY WORLD VIEW (Which was formed by AM talk radio, Fox News, CNN, Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and the deluge of "leftist" New Age claptrap so endemic now.) 

A Drag Queen reading a storybook to kids in a school will turn 'em GAY! Gender nonconformity wasn't a thing until...certain school books? And these people marched down the row to "Pomp and Circumstance," all proud they made it through. (Myself? I dropped out. Tired of the never-ending Lord of the Flies scene. I couldn’t wait to go to the local community college.)

To go further - and I'm sorry, I realize this answer seems beastly dull, but I'm trying! - I recently got around to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, and in there she made one of those points that, in some level, in the back of my mind, I "knew" and was operating with, but I don't think I ever made a big-time-forefront-of-consciousness connexion: you will learn a LOT about conspiracy theories if you have a grasp of capitalism on some substantial level. Just get well-acquainted with how it really works. If it changes you, okay. But no matter your politics, get to the point where you could teach a relatively unbiased version of how Capitalism works to a group of bright high schoolers, warts 'n all. And I don't think it's easy to get this: you pretty much have to have a library card, although inside the dizzyingly overwhelming welter of films out there, there are some that can help. Think The Corporation (2003 Jennifer Abbot and Mark Achbar). But mostly: just delve into this for yourself. I'm not saying "become a Leftist if you weren't one before" or "Be like me!": if you develop a well-rounded theory of how capitalism works and still "believe" in it, you'll see a lot of conspiracy theories will go away and you'll think: "Well, that's the way markets are working right now. It's no conspiracy!" “Look at how Google outplayed Apple on that bit.” “Well, the Supremes did fuck us with the ‘money is speech’ thing.” Klein's right, I think when she cites Abram Leon, who researched how antisemitism had been used by capitalists to divert attention from their crimes for hundreds of years. Leon did his research underground, but the Nazis got him at Auschwitz. Now that is a horrifying "novel" that happens to be true.

By the way: the "economically" based conspiracy theories were the ones RAW took seriously. Naomi Klein - who I confess to being in love with - pointed out the "true" conspiracy around Covid vaccinations: that we, the rich people of the Global North got boosters, while the markets weren't never quite right for the Poor of the world. Jeez. She's so much tougher than I am! It was so easy for us to laff at the hideous horrified who talked about 5G and "tracking devices" and say, knowingly, "Wait till they find out about their phones." She actually followed Steve Bannon's “War Room” show, and not only because of Naomi Wolf, her doppleganger, who, I learned, subscribed to the idea that people who were vaccinated were "shedding" all kinds of stuff that makes your mind and affect go blank. Ya gotta wonder. I should pay more attention to...the Q-Anon ideas but Naomi Klein and many of you readers are made of much sterner stuff than I. All that really does give me the willies. I remember when the right wing-fusion with "wellness gurus" New Age stuff really got going, and it was a lot like the last time I visited Las Vegas: Wow! This is both amusing and garish as all get-out! Look at all the lights and beautiful sexy people and there's so much food and entertainment and isn't this all amazing...then…suddenly: get me the fuck outta here! I never want to see Vegas again! This is insane! 

No but seriously: try the veal at Circus Circus.

I use the term "capitalism" but there is no such thing: there are only people acting with intent, within a system. And obviously, there are "socialistic" aspects always going on: look at the Pentagon's budget. Look at Medicare. I personally have major problems with the first and think the second is a beacon of decency in our country. (So the billionaires will have to wreck it somehow?) Whether "capitalism" or "socialism": the details are all that matter. Is it a shareholder's world right now? I think it is, and that's not good, but aún aprendo, as Aldous Huxley used to write. "Still learning."

bc: Given RAW’s penchant for emphasizing the multiplicity of reality, when Illuminatus! gives us conflicting reports about events in the book, from different characters’ perspectives, ala Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, do you think the novel has a true deep reality, where questions like “what really happened in Fernando Poo?” or “Did F.U.C.K.U.P. generate the entire story?” are answerable? Or is it designed to remain forever in the maybe state?

MJ: When I first saw this Q I thought of RAW's friend from the Berkeley Physics-Consciousness Research Group, Nick Herbert, who said, "There is no 'deep reality.'" 

Illuminatus!, that Damned Thing, seems to scream "Maybe" to me, over and over and over. Did RAW and Shea have certain political leanings they hoped might infect some readers? No doubt. They both flew the Black Flag of one shade or another. When I discovered them for myself, I was already learning that way anyway. My anarchism was closer to Simon Moon's than Hagbard's, but I started to see the merits in Hagbard's ideas. Those pirate-smugglers who went around the State and provided, say, that rather large forest of weed I smoked over the decades before it magically became legal medicine? Bless those libertarian-anarchists. Or I'll call 'em whatever they prefer to be called…but stop stealing my lighters. 

Subscribing to one and one only fairly hardcore program for politics seems insane to me. I forget which philosopher said this, but if you're going to travel to a foreign land for personal interest or "vacation" or to just be a tourist, be a good one, but why in the fuck would you buy the Package Tour, where someone already decides ahead of time where you'll go, where and when to eat, when you get back on the boat or bus, etc. That's not a responsible "adult" decision! Be creative, investigate the weird areas, get lost, leave some stuff to chance. I think we need some of that spirit in our political ideas about How We Want Things To Go. Inject some "Maybe" into your tourism. And your tours among political ideas. Yes, you have deeply felt values. Still, there's probably more wiggle-room than you thought.

I knew an American-born guy and his partner. They both graduated from UCLA with degrees in Anthropology and lived and worked in Tokyo, spoke fluent Japanese, and they were proud to call themselves "tourists." I stayed with them in Tokyo and then we all flew to Kathmandu for a couple weeks. They saw it as a fine skill, tourism. That's stayed with me, although these days, approaching my dotage, I just want to stay home and laze around all day and scratch where it itches, watch baseball and 1940s films, and read Ulysses yet again. My tourism days are over. See how long it took me to digress? No wonder I loved Tristram Shandy when I first read it! My version was around 600 pages and it wasn't until page 200 or so that the main character was born. Why not just...take your damned time as you please, if you can? (Uncle Toby!)

One of the things this Illuminatus! novel and RAW's work in general helped me with was in jettisoning the need to have final answers or even final vocabularies. Just before I found RAW I had been trying to crack all the "French theory" that was raging in academia. One of the terms that came up a lot was aporia:  a fundamental undecidability between forces within a text. All those paradoxes that blew our minds when we first encountered them! There are so many. I remember taking a Logic class in college and Zeno's Paradox came up. The idea that Achilles gives the Tortoise a head start in a race, but can't catch the Tortoise, ever, because he must first cover X amount of ground, but then he first must cover half that distance, but first must cover half of that, ad infinitum, poor Achilles probably wanted to go back and sulk in his tent because he couldn't even move!: I soon figured out the catch, but I see all these things - the barber who only shaves those who don't shave themselves, so does he shave himself? - and so many others, as certain kinds of delightful tricks of language and mind. But eventually I began to appreciate all these classic paradoxes along aesthetic lines, as little works of "thought-art." Very close to Poetry. Wilson covered a lot of this stuff when he wrote about the Metaprogramming Circuit, which I long ago decided should be the 6th Circuit in Leary's 8 Circuit Brain Model, but I don't want to fight about it. I tend to think of ideas about the structure of the nervous system and its operations along these terms.

An idea that wasn't prominent in RAW, but one I think is along Metaprogramming Circuit lines: Mysterianism. This philosophical take on phenomena (EX: "consciousness") says that maybe we're wired in such a way that it turns out we can figure out how quantum mechanics works: it works just fine; it's the most successful physical theory ever, you wouldn't be reading this without it because it's a fundamental part of computers/Internet, etc...but it's been 98 years now since 1926, when Heisenberg and Schrodinger basically completed the quantum theory and we can't agree on what it means about the nature of "reality", much less Einstein's greatest scientific desideratum: a Grand Unified Theory of quantum mechanics and Relativity. A little equation that humbly described a Theory of Everything that could be written on a piece of paper you could carry around in your wallet, and whip out and admire every now and then: 

"Isn't it just the most purty thing ya ever done seen, Clem?" 

"Yep. I reckon you're right, Chet! We did it. We human beans. Sets one to feelin' mighty proud, don't it? Pass that Everclear, will ya, son?"

 A million super-brilliant minds working long overtime hours for 98 years and...not only bupkis, but things just seemed to get Weirder! Maybe - just maybe -  we are wired in such a way that we can't figure it out? Certainly, those readers who've wanted "consciousness" nailed down once and for all either have way more Faith than I do, or they are just really really RILLY patient. I, for one, have read the ideas about qualia and they make total sense to me. Other thinkers who seem smarter than me deny qualia is a thing. But a lot of the "consciousness" problem for me hinges on qualia. Again, one's emotional response to these ideas are really interesting to me. I want people to not only be clear on the facts and ideas, but be willing to entertain all the Maybes, babies. Just an opinion of mine, but you should be able to not only give an unbiased account of a stance you disagree with, but be willing to have a decent laff about your own stance. Or - my intuition says - you don't "get it." (Maybe?) 

(Oh yea: those of you who have read Philip Goff and see links between the new Panpsychism and RAW's ideas there - and there is quite a lot in RAW: I'm with you. This assumption about what consciousness "is" seems on a whole Other Level. Qualia seems to pale in this argument, and I'm cool with it. Let us have qualia AND panpsychism! But just get us home in time for those thick, juicy steaks, okay? Back to the scheduled program...)

The paradoxes have no good "solution" until you haul in certain thinkers, who help you take apart the thing. I liked Korzybski's "levels" of abstraction. Running a race is one thing; the number system and "infinity" is quite another, but if you don't know any of this stuff and are at an aporia? Well, then, for me, it's a test of someone's mettle. Those who, in general, get angry, or dismiss these paradoxes as a buncha college-kid bullshit, and so "grow the fuck up and get a real job, college-boy!"? They tend to lack something I call "fun." I prefer the ones who are amused, or even laff at this stuff. Did you ever look at Cantor's Proof for some Infinite Sets being larger than other Infinite Sets? It's absurd, but gorgeous. A real work of thought-art. Poetic.

I tend to see most of Illuminatus! as leaving us in an aporia, or, less academically, a “maybe” state. Maybe states seem to cover a lot more ground, including a function in Four-Value Logic: True/False/Indeterminate (AKA “Maybe”)/Meaningless. RAW often used examples like "Sophia Loren is more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe." It's meaningless, because there is no way to measure Beauty. The only way to make this statement non-meaningless is to tweak it into something operational like "Sophia seems even more beautiful than Marilyn to me." Now it's an opinion, so it makes sense. However, scientists have been working on something like a Pulchritude-ometer, which works on measuring symmetry in the features of the face, and the body. These are fine ratios that roughly correlate with mass opinions about beauty. Google Dr. Kendra Schmid for more about this. It will all shake out into some sort of Pulchritude-ometer, but for me: academic. Because personally, I like some asymmetry. I have been really attracted to women with big honking noses. In a dated joke that I still steal, Woody Allen said he was attracted to "a nice vaccination scar." I get it. 

Also: take a gorgeous person, man or woman. But either one is kinda shallow and boring to talk to. And neither are particularly kind or considerate. Gimme the uglier person who's read poetry or mathematics, and who makes me laugh and is nice to strangers, 'cuz they're much more "attractive" to me than the physical knock-out. I remember my wife was walking through a scene where a fence was being replaced, and as she walked through a hole in the fence, she didn't see a nail sticking out near eye level and cut herself really badly. My gawd: I had to rush her to one of those Urgent Care places while towels and rags hastily assembled got blood-soaked as I drove way over the speed limit. If I didn't have something to do, urgently - get her to a doc, stat! - I might've passed out, it was so gross and I'm hemophobic. If I get a paper cut I get woozy, my ears start to ring, I begin sweating, and I will ask, "Can I lie down over there in the corner and cry?"  Anyway, I got her to Urgent Care and there was a Chinese female doctor there to stitch my wife up. This woman was stunning, just drop-dead gorgeous. She was ridiculously pretty. Tall, everything. If I saw her on the street and someone said "she's a model" I would believe it. And I talked to her afterward - shakily - and she was really pleasant and had a sense of humor. As we drove home I said to my wife, “That…doctor that stitched you up?...” And looked at me, knowingly: Yea: stunning. Crazy pretty. It was awesome. My gawd, people like that actually exist! (See: Clooney, George)

But I was supposed to address aporia or “maybe” or indeterminate situations. So now, in July 2024, theoretically, there is a Planet 9 or "Planet X" in our solar system. It's far beyond Pluto, has the mass of Neptune, and its orbit is so elongated it takes something like 20,000 Earth years to orbit the sun once, which, if you lived there, would keep ya young: no birthdays! But we haven't found it. Using all the complex math it should be there. But we haven't found it. Yet. The existence of Planet X is in a Maybe state, just like the coin you just flipped - still in the air - to see who has to clean grandma's bedpan before lights out. That coin landed heads, has ceased to be in a Maybe state and make sure you rinse it out before putting it back, okay? Better luck next time, suckuh! I'm off to smoke a bowl.

Did the computer FUCKUP write the novel? I like to play with that idea. But I can't prove anything, within the game-rules of fiction. Likewise with the Fernando Poo storyline, if I recall. Was there a second Oswald? Yea: Kerry Thornley. (Certainly: Dillinger did not die, and there are at least five Dillinger look-alikes. I will not brook any dissension on this one.) But was Kerry Wendell Thornley being used by some intelligence operatives to muck up the JFK hit? I don't know. I tend to doubt it, but...Maybe. Indeterminate. How exceedingly weird that a book was written about Oswald before Nov. 22nd, 1963! I remember hearing about that and thinking it was a put-on. Another Discordian put-on. 

I've gradually come to realize that most things are in a Maybe state. What ultimately causes the state vector to collapse into Yes/No, Live/Dead, Exists/Doesn't Exist, etc? Here's where I start to feel a little bit high, even if I hadn't been smoking a joint AKA "burnin' a bugle": When things do collapse into some "stable" state, what caused the cause? And what caused that? Everything seems to have caused everything else, and now I sound like a maniac. But really: think about it. 

Of course, look at all the interpretations of what the Schrodinger's Wave Equation implies about the "nature" of '"reality": when Hugh C. Everett came up with what's now called the "Many Worlds" interpretation in 1957, it was seen as too influenced by science fiction, or "ridiculous." Every time a particle decays, a new universe is born? Now, it's simply assumed to be the most parsimonious interpretation of the Wave Equation, so PhDs in Physics find it the best model. Sean M. Carroll of CalTech/Santa Fe Institute is an adherent and defends Many-Worlds with aplomb. According to one survey, more than half of living physicists who are engaged with quantum theory thought Many-Worlds was the best interpretation, and that was around 2015 or so when I read that. However many think this, it's liberating for someone like me - some inveterate book-reader - to realize this. 

If entanglement is correct, and it seems to be, then all the particles in our universe were cooked up during the Big Bang. They were all entangled, and we're made of that same stuff, so we're not only entangled with everything and everyone, but this seems to imply another interpretation of quantum mechanics: Superdeterminism. Which...can't be right, can it? There never was any Free Will, ever. Everything was already determined, even Hitler, Hiroshima, Trump, and the popularity of The Bachelor? C'mon! Weisman and Cavalcanti thought Super-D was about as appealing as the paranoid’s alien mind control ideas. Still: it’s taken seriously. 

Have you ever read about sexual reproduction in humans? At some point - and it's almost as complex as quantum mechanics to me - every embryo is female. Then, certain things occur that make some embryos turn out male. Getting down to the microscopically fine points here - around seven weeks after fertilization - the SRY gene's presence and the presence or absence of the Y chromosome - this is vastly oversimplifying it, but anyway - you turn out to “be” "male" or "female." I like to put quotes around those terms out of respect for all the non-binary folks out there. Hey, it "seems" a lot of us think we're "normal" (that term imported from the Chilly Realms of statistics) and that we're "totally" "straight" (from the slightly warmer realms of Euclidean geometry) women or men. But that's the common picture. And at this point, I will just say I think it shouldn't be common, much less accurate, because Nature is WAY too creative and playful to be hardcore Binary when it comes to the total field of all this stuff. 

The point is: what the hell happened during certain moments - seconds, parts of an hour? - during our seventh week that made us "dudes"? Seems kinda like a crapshoot to me. You're knocked up? Cool! Do you know if it's a boy or girl yet? No. Why? We can't tell until around 10 weeks. You wanted, what? A girl? And there's not much we can do about it now. Or is there? 

There is: we have preimplantation genetic selection, where we use IVF to create a batch or embryos (although I doubt the fine technicians use the term "batch" as if they’re toll house cookies), and then genetically test each one until we see the desired sex. Is that playing "god"? Yea, but we all play "god" every day. Tell a five year old to not play jump-rope on the expressway. Anytime we use our intellects to do something to correct Nature - think of soy, cotton, sugar, milk, and corn: most of it is genetically modified these days. People with Type 1 diabetes need insulin, and genetically modified bacteria tweaked with the human gene for insulin keeps all these folks having a fairly normal life. The prices should be LOWERED for them, though…

People with Type 1 diabetes were destined for a tightrope-walking life of measuring blood sugar levels, but when things go wrong, your blood turns into acid without insulin. We figured it out. We played "god." And good thing...There was a point where the hypothesis of using bacteria cultures infused with the gene for human's insulin was "Maybe" that would work. A lot of science and technology is like that. Some stuff just looks on the drawing board like it will work (Yes!), but then we found it was more complicated (No), but if we save this and this and tweak that and that, then Maybe...

Will we die this week? Maybe. Statistically: probably not. But it's not a 100% No on death this week for any of us. Shit happens. So go out there and - to coin a phrase - "Have a good one."

I hope this all cleared up the one true meaning of Illuminatus! once and for damned all.

EW: I first read Illuminatus! in the summer of 1982 after having read and loved the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy. I bought the three Illuminatus! paperbacks at the Book Mark in Tucson in the science fiction section. I took one volume with me on a trip to New York in August. I remember reading a comment about Washington Square Park around the time I walked through the park. I had just begun paying attention to coincidences. 

Reading Schroedinger's Cat and Illuminatus! I began to become obsessed by Wilson. I next started Masks of the Illuminati in the beginning of September, and stopped after a few pages. I had a sense that if I continued reading it, my life would change radically. I decided to continue, and my life took a left turn. At that point I considered Robert Heinlein my favorite author. I majored in math in college and I had worked three summers at IBM, planning to work for them after I graduated. I ended up changing my major to English and have spent much of my life teaching English.

Could you maybe give us an overview of what it means to travel through the Tree of Life in this manner? What did the Bobs intend the reader to experience on this journey?

EW: Robert Anton Wilson's approach to the Kabbalah derives greatly from Aleister Crowley. Israel Regardie's books helped Bob to delve into the Kabbalah and Crowley's worldview. 777 proved a very useful book for understanding Wilson, Crowley, and Regardie. In 1990 I began a procedure I called Nanokabballah where I would spend a week on each Hebrew letter/tarot trump. Each day I would go through the correspondences in 777 for that letter/trump, sometimes reading supporting passages from Magick in Theory and Practice and The Book of Thoth. I found that practice so rewarding that I did it again, this time spending 23 days on each letter/trump.

When I wrote Insider's Guide, I did something similar. I went through all the correspondences for Kether each day while working on the Kether section of Illuminatus!, all the Chokmah correspondences each day while working on the Chokmah section, etc. When I reached the appendices of Illuminatus!, I used my Nanokabbalah procedures for the appropriate letter/trump. I gave the appendices in my book the letters for the missing appendices from Illuminatus!

I suspect the Bobs wanted the reader to reimprint their third circuit reality tunnels through reading the book. Crowley insisted that memorizing the basic Kabbalistic correspondences seemed foundational for understanding the tarot. On the other hand, I now find myself trying to unlearn some of this material. I think I did reimprint my third circuit, but now I would like to reimprint it again with a non-Crowley worldview. This has proved difficult for me.

bc: As someone who enjoyed a decades-long personal correspondence with Bob Wilson, do you have any favorite apocryphal details about Illuminatus! and/or its sequels and prequels, both realized and unrealized, that never made their way to the printed page, but that might help broaden and enliven that fantastic fictional world?

bc: Similarly, as someone who has exhaustively chronicled the timeline of Illuminatus!, and elucidated so many of the nooks and crannies of character and plot details, do you have any favorite unanswered questions or mysteries that still persist even after over 40 years of study?

bc: Also, just as an aside, I have a weird question that is probably a dead end, but I've asked two people so far and got somewhat conflicting responses:

I noticed that the Bobs seem to go out of their way to refer to "Russia" as opposed to the "Soviet Union." Is this just the genuine parlance of their day? (Like people still referring to "Twitter") Or do you think this is an intentional creative choice?

EW: Many people referred to the USSR as Russia in the US in the seventies. I did it myself. 

EW: Alan Moore seems to have focused on doing things in comics one cannot do in other media. This seems part of the reason he seems so little interested in film adaptations of his works. Comics do allow an extension of the ideogrammatic method, although I don't know how much this has actually happened. I loved your piece on Moore and Grant Morrison. They have both done interesting work on suggesting a secret London in From Hell and The Invisibles. I like how comics can provide maps and diagrams to help people inhabit imaginary worlds, from Marvel's diagrams of the Baxter Building to the maps of Paris in the Proust comics.

                                    ALL WILL BE REVEALED JULY 23RD

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Simulation: a representation or imitation of a real-world process, system, or situation. It involves creating a model or virtual environment that behaves similarly to the actual system it is simulating. Simulations are often used to… predict outcomes.

Are we living in a simulation?

We now know that we invest an awful lot of mental resources into creating and maintaining mental models of the world in order to make predictions on the future. These predictions seem to have the effect of satisfying the anxieties of a human nervous system in the face of information overload and an enormous amount of uncertainty. These mental models, or belief systems, seem to develop on top of earlier layers of epigenetic imprints taken from critical pre-verbal developmental experiences involving early childhood relationships to our caregivers. These epigenetic imprints can be thought of as our operating system. Our belief systems run on top of this pre-verbal OS and taken together, they may be thought of as our own personal reality tunnel, or simulation, unique to us and us alone.

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

We each live in our own Matrix, interpreting the world and our relationship to it based on our early childhood experiences. Our path as mutants of developing and evolving species on a developing and evolving planet seems to involve waking up to our unconscious unawareness of our Matrix, unplugging from our Matrix, and becoming more and more fully, authentically ourselves. 

In understanding our Matrix, we can break these layers of programming down into four dimensions of ‘mind’ based on four stages of development. (With the usage of ‘mind’ here, one might substitute ‘consciousness’ or ‘psyche,’ and the quotes indicate that we are dealing with something ephemeral and difficult to define precisely. The four subcategories below represent dimensions of a larger gestalt of ‘mind.’)

As an infant, we cry out in the middle of the night to be fed, with an underlying need to feel safe and loved. The response we receive and the interactions involved shape how we learn to move through the world in search of a sense of safety and security, and shape how we cope with the psychological terror of feeling hungry, alone, and unloved.

As toddlers, we assert ourselves in the world, most famously through the world, “No!” in a quest for a sense of self, with boundaries of “me” and “not-me”, in a dance of relational attachments and dynamics along with all the wonderful emotions that come along with that relational dance. At the extreme ends of this we discover shame, a greatly diminished sense of self, and ego, an over-inflated sense of self. Seen and recognized.

As we develop further and begin our acquisition of language, we concurrently develop complex conceptual models, or belief systems, of ourselves in relation to our environment. Our pre-verbal experiences as infants and toddlers deeply influence the limitations and adaptability of these models. Later on, with constrained, inflexible models to work with, we shape novel, non-ordinary perceptions to fit the basic assumptions and preconceptions built into our models. We manipulate or throw out data that does not conform to our view of the world and our self in it. We do this in order to keep things safe and predictable and maintain our baseline self-concept or identity.. Repressed “shadow” aspects of ourselves which we exclude from our self-concept are disowned and projected onto others.

We create the simulation we want, ignoring the real experience right in front of us. 

Neo: I thought it wasn't real.

Morpheus: Your mind makes it real.

With adolescence and a transition from childhood into adulthood, our social needs to belong, to relate. to a group, a tribe, a society and culture, constrain our desires for full autonomy, freedom and independence of expression. Even the “out-group” forms a subculture with rules and norms for belonging. Through this need to belong, a domestication process further shapes how we perceive and express ourselves through our relationship with our tribes and communities. We tend to form judgements about those that don’t fit in with our rules for belonging and social connection. Ultimately, we seek our own distinct role in the village.

Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real. What if you were unable to wake from that dream. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

Epigenetic Imprints taken on during these four stages of development shape four dimensions of mind that make up our own personal Matrix or reality tunnel that shapes how we relate to the world around us. 

Agent Smith: But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.

Sooner or later, we run into our own personal limitations. We took on the programs of our simulation starting at a time when we were helpless. They kept us protected when we were completely dependent on others. However, the unconscious, habitual nature of these programs severely restricts our relationship to the world and can only take us so far. 

Temet Nosce

The Oracle: You know what that means? It's Latin. Means `Know thyself'.

We must wake up and unplug. To unplug from this automatic, habitual programming, we must develop and continually deepen our awareness of this programming and the simulation we’ve created for ourselves.

Morpheus: You have to let it all go, Neo, fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.

Given that our simulation develops through relationships, one might reasonably speculate that we can use relationships as a vehicle for waking up and unplugging. We can free our mind through engaging with present moment relationships in a more direct manner. Through this courageous engagement, we can come face to face with our fears, doubts, and disbeliefs, learn to let go of them, move through the feelings associated with them, and integrate repressed, denied, and disowned parts of ourselves into a more complete, more whole psyche capable of more fully relating to the world..

We can free our mind through the immediacy of relationship with another, discover and unpack our judgements, our beliefs and projections, our shames, and our fears, and come to a more direct and engaged experience of relationship with every-moment existence. We created the Matrix through our early relationships, and we can unplug from the Matrix and override the simulation through direct engagement in relationships right here, right now.

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Spiritual practices give us another path in which to wake up to and unplug from the Matrix. Various esoteric mystical practices, including the intentional use of psychedelic catalysts, can lead to, among other things, experiences of non-ordinary dimensions of mind. These non-ordinary states of consciousness can open us up to new possibilities *and* expose our limitations, challenging the programming wrapped around our fears, doubts, and disbeliefs. 

We might find that the four dimensions of ‘mind’ discussed above, the ‘soulful’ dimensions shaped by developmental stages, each have a corresponding ‘spiritual’ dimension associated with them, and that the relationship between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ dimensions has a particular dynamic to it.

Imagine feeling so loved and held; so safe, secure and at peace in the physical existence of one’s body that suddenly a profound sense of joy spontaneously erupts upward from deep in one’s core. Such an ecstatic experience awakens one to a reality outside the everyday suffering of physical existence, and exposes one to their limitations around feeling held, loved, and perfectly safe, if one is willing to listen.

In other non-ordinary states of mind, one can attune to finer energies within and without, establishing a direct sense of one’s energetic body and the energy of one’s environment. This state of enhanced sensitivity and intuition signals a more direct experience of the world underneath the simulation and can open one to a sense of freedom from the conceptual models and belief systems that form the programming of the Matrix. This sense of (((uncertainty) freedom from belief can expose limitations in the development of our sense-of-self. Without clear boundaries of self, and not-self, we struggle to distinguish the finer energy of self (me) from environment (not-me) and confuse the two. 

We must become more fully ourselves in order to more fully lose ourselves.

From a deeper relationship to our body and our nervous system, one can start to experience a deeper relationship of connectedness to one’s environment. This connection can deepen as one stays separate-but-connected, but eventually one’s separateness begins to dissolve into the experience of unity as one drops one’s identity and self concept. These experiences of connection and unity tend to expose the rigidity of our self-concept and highlight our repressed, disowned aspects of self concept that we project onto others..

As we move through these non-ordinary states, the lines that separate and distinguish them from each other become more and more difficult to define. From embodied bliss to attuned felt-sense to connectedness with all… our separateness completely dissolves further and further until one loses all identity and becomes part of everything, and then everything and nothing at the same time. Mind moves beyond the linearity of time-space into something far, far stranger that we can imagine. This shocking experience of the impermanence of space-time itself can expose us to limitations of our sense of community and our relationship with it. A strong identity of our role-in-the-village can provide the anchor within ordinary experience of space time that allows for the non-ordinary experience beyond space-time, and vice versa. 

We find that experiences of these various spiritual dimensions of ‘mind’ offer windows outside of our Matrix into a more direct experience of being. Through spiritual highs, they offer a glimpse of what’s possible, and they can expose the depths of our soul and its limitations. With both our potentials and limitations exposed, we can use that awareness to unplug a little further and live a little fuller. The choice is up to us. We cannot change our environment, but we can change our relationship to it.

Morpheus: Do you believe in fate, Neo?

Neo: No.

Morpheus: Why not?

Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.

Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

The call to adventure lives in all of us, whether we are ready to hear it or not. Are you ready to unplug? If you are reading this, you have begun the process of waking up. How far are you willing to go? How much are you willing to risk? Are you ready to feel the depth of it all in order to experience the liberation that may come? 

Trinity: …I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us mad. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.

Neo: What is the Matrix?

Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo. It's looking for you. And it will find you, if you want it to.

 "Unprepared young burdened with records"
– Canto CXVI

Behold a blast from the past!

Way back in 2008, a group of Maybe Logic Academy alumni endeavored to produce a print publication, spinning off from the web based Maybe Logic Quarterly, which ran for 14 issues from Winter 2004 to Spring 2008.

Presented here in digital form for the first time:
MAYBE ZINE (2008) [PDF]

Featuring work by Toby Philpott, Prop Anon, Steve Fly, Eric Wagner, Mike Gathers, Bobby Campbell, Eva David, Borsky, Sean Rovaldi, Minja, Frater KDB, and published by Chris Veleniki.

Most of whom can still be seen collaborating on various Maybe Logical pursuits :)))

 A second Laws of Form conference will start shortly.   August 3 - 6th.  Find a registration form by scrolling down on their Home Page.

It does not cost to attend, although they do invite contributions.

For reference, we have posted about LoF in the past, so for some context, please check out the old posts, through the attached Label:  Laws of Form

"The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or cut apart"

Member of the NEW TRAJECTORIES WEBRING

• An incomplete history of the MLA - some details on all the courses...
• A brief memoire of the times, on the Hilaritas Press site - interacting, processing
• A page in development of other RAW syllabi on a rejuvenated R A Wilson fans website

•  The Earth Will Shake
•  Email to the Universe
•  Cosmic Trigger
•  Coincidance: A Head Test
•  Illuminatus!
•  Masks of the Illuminati
•  Quantum Psychology,

"A secret look into the early MC5 at the infamous Belle Isle Love-In!
"This happened a lot when we played at big, highly charged public events," recalls Wayne Kramer, noting the notorious Belle Isle police riot of April 30, 1967, a free concert that Detroit media cast as "Love-In Turns to Hate".
The MC5's original photographer and first tour manager Emil Bacilla shot this rare footage of the band on Wayne Kramer's 19th birthday, April 30th, 1967.
With commentary recorded in 2004 by Wayne Kramer, Dennis "Machine Gun" Thompson , and Michael Davis.
Footage remastered by Margaret Saadi Kramer and William Olivas, 2019.