Tag: RAW

Robert Anton Wilson. Your inhumble narrator’s single greatest literary and epistemontological influence.

The Handshake

THE UBER DRIVER’S HAND was warm and calloused, but its electric charge was unexpected.

It shouldn’t have been, though, since for the past forty-five minutes we had free-associated on topics that don’t lend themselves to easy or uncomplicated conversation: God, mind, the uselessness of AI, Self-realization (not a typo) and ego-death, gurus, the constancy of change, the Indian fashion-industry, meditation, capitalism, health and healing, life’s unpredictability, Hindu holyman Ramana Maharshi.

His car was a late-model Tesla – ironically, since we also agreed we shouldn’t colonize Mars – enroute to a faraway hospital, where my copilot was undergoing heart surgery. I told him this toward the end of the ride, and he reached back a ringed and metal-braceleted hand to take one of mine.

“Aw, man,” he said. “Blessings come from God.”

That was when something unexpected passed between us.

“For her,” he said with earnest intensity.

We conversed a bit more before pulling up to the hospital.

“Thank you,” I told him as I got out. “And thank you for your blessing.”

“Aw, man,” he said. “Blessings come from God.”

“Yes,” I replied. “But thank you for being the conduit.”

A few minutes later I stood next to my copilot’s bed. She had just come out of surgery, pale and weak-voiced and pained of expression. Her escape from the Beyond had been a close one, but her doctors were skilled. With a why-not-it-couldn’t-hurt shrug, I touched her leg with the hand the driver had grasped. Nothing unexpected this time, just a loving gesture of comfort.

Mind you, I am a skeptic in the original sense of the word: an open-minded soul who doesn’t chase after explanations of the inexplicable. And really, earnest handshakes are common enough. But over the next few hours, as she went from colorless and tentative to walking with me about the cardio unit, beaming a delighted smile at everything we passed, I wondered.

Perhaps that’s the way her sort of surgery is supposed to work. I like to think it does.

But on the other hand, every little bit helps.

Minute Mitzvah: ALL ONE ALL ONE OK OK!!!

Today’s Task: Know that “God” is One.

My dead psychic twin Sputnik, who rediscovered his natal Christian faith around the same time I came back to Judaism, was fond of saying, “Monotheism is not for wimps.” By that he meant that if you subscribe to the nondual one-Source-for-everything paradigm, you have to take the bad with the good: earthquakes and aurorae, wars and wonderment, convicted felons and patriots. In other words, if you believe that “God” is only responsible for the stuff you like, and is not to be found in the stuff you don’t, you might be spiritually hobbling yourself. Since the potential for every particle of existence emerged from the Big Bang, we are ALL connected; even to the people and things we despise. That can be a hard concept to swallow — but it can also be worth the chew.

Exercise: Flex those soul-jaws by trying to digest the idea that someone or something you find objectionable, or even loathsome, also partakes of the Divine. That doesn’t mean you have to condone or agree with them or it – an important distinction! – only that you acknowledge the connection. (Or, as Robert Anton Wilson writes, “Everyone has the Buddha-nature, but some poor bastards just don’t realize it yet.”)

Audiomobile

“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…”

So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent on “fringe.”)

My initiation into this three-part sonic conspiracy – which included “Mr. Bird” and “Zoro X.R. Troll” – came about on receiving from Zoro a postage-stamped 60-minute cassette tape with no explanatory note save “PLAY ME” written on its label. Curious, I popped it into my boombox and pressed “Play.” My ears were happily assaulted (in machine-gun succession and no particular order) by excerpts from: Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, The Grateful Dead, Firesign Theater, a straitlaced radio preacher, Mr. Bird’s paranoid brother, Tom Robbins, Zoro’s favorite inspirational readings, The Beatles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and various other audial offerings now hazed by time and headspace, as well as Zoro’s drawled invitation to add to, subtract from, or otherwise mess with “this here tape” before sending it either back to him or on to Mr. Bird.

The process was simple:

1- Wire up two cassette recorder/players from output to input (this also works just as well, if not better, if you have one two-bay cassette player/recorder).
2- Load output player with whatever you like: music, spoken narrative or poetry, movie/tv soundtrack, sound effects, live microphone, &c., as limited only by imagination and source material.
3- Load a cassette into the input recorder, press “Record,” and engage the Pause button.
4- Play a section of the output tape.
5- Disengage input ‘s Pause button to record as much output as you want, then re-engage.
6- Switch output sources, the more incongruous and/or thematic the better.
7- Repeat process until you lose interest. (WARNING! It’s addictive.)

To simple, mad minds like ours, the results were vastly entertaining, and inadequately depicted in writing: “output1 (click) OUTPUT2! (click) OuTpUt3? (click) oUtPuT4…” ad infinitum.

After it was exchanged for a while, the tape had mutated into something very odd and layered indeed. One surrealistic iteration included dialog between myself and elements of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Another had Mr. Bird and Zoro calling out each others’ names in weird voices and at unexpected intervals. Yet a third featured Jim Morrison repeating the lyric “learn to forget” over and over and over.

For whatever reasons, we three eventually drifted away from this collaborative creation. Yet I still have a copy of the original tape kicking around here somewhere, plus one which I slowly built up over a period of nearly 20 years, always meaning to send it on to my colleagues.

Perhaps, one day, I will.

5 Thoughts: How I Spent My College Intuition

1. THEY SAY THAT IF YOU can remember certain events or associated places, it means you were never there; space-time knots whose experience is colored by the hazy circumstances of the experiencer. Case in point: the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College, c. 1980-83ish.

2. NPS-DVC was the singular creation of “Chief Druid Zoro X.R. Troll” (who knows who he is but may not want you to): a seriously amiable poet attending Pleasant Hill’s then tuition-free community college with an eye toward finding kindred spirits. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: How I Spent My College Intuition”

ORL Interview: Ivan Stang

INTERVIEWING ONE’S CULTURAL HEROES IS one of the greatest thrills of a career in journalism — even of amateur journalism. Such was the position in which I found myself while working for Obscure Research Labs in the early-to-mid-1990s. It gave me an insider’s excuse to pester thinker and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and granted equal access to Church of the SubGenius co-founder Ivan Stang. Herewith this interview, conducted through the mail and slightly edited for clarity and length, which first appeared in Far Corner v1n7, c. 1993. Kick back, slack off and enjoy this longest-by-far of The Metaphorager’s 800+ posts. Continue reading “ORL Interview: Ivan Stang”

Why I Love: Robert Anton Wilson

IT’S THE WAY HE BLOWS my mind. It’s the way he mixes conviction with doubt. It’s his searingly funny prose. It’s his search for Ultimate Relativity. It’s that he taught me some important Latin phrases, like “Cui bono?” and “Non illegitimati carborundum” (look ’em up). It’s how he manages to make everything he writes sound like a personal communication to the reader. It’s the little phrase-gems he drops off-handedly like “reality-tunnel,” “domesticated primates,” or “guerrilla ontology.” It’s his nimble skipping from neuroscience to neuropoetry to neuroanalysis to neuropolitics. (It’s also that “neuro-” is his favorite prefix.) Continue reading “Why I Love: Robert Anton Wilson”

First Graf: Ulysses

THERE’S NOT MUCH ELSE TO say about James Joyce’s magnum opus (although some would apply that descriptor to Finnegans Wake) that hasn’t been said, and by greater and more erudite scholars than this reporter: takes place over 24 hours in 1904 Dublin? Check. Semi-autobiographical? Check. Jewish protagonist? Check. A map of Odysseus’ voyage home from Troy to Ithaca? Check. Source of the annual Bloomsday celebration? Check. Bedeviler of censors and Mrs. Grundys the world over? Oh, most definitely check.
Continue reading “First Graf: Ulysses”

First Graf: The Illuminati Papers

THE LATE ROBERT ANTON WILSON is perhaps the greatest influence on my life and thought since even before Rabbi Akiva. His spirit is sprinkled here and there throughout this blog like raisins in a cake. A prolific author, RAW (as he’s known) wore many literary caps: conspiracy chaser, little-L libertarian, mind-expansionist, novelist, futurist, comedian, neophile, mystic, poet, prophet. Continue reading “First Graf: The Illuminati Papers”

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