Email to the Universe discussion group, week 14

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger 

On My Way Out

both seem far far away

from 

[These two quotes are extracted  from John Higgs’ casual masterpiece The KLF: 

"The interval between the decay of the old and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism."- John C. Calhoun

"A naked man in a city street—the track of a horse in volcanic mud—the mystery of reindeer's ears—a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes—an appalling cherub appears in the sea—Confusions."- Charles Fort/Ken Campbell]

To attempt to answer my own questions from last week and to respond to the opinions of Oz Fritz, Eric Wagner, and Tom Jackson ( the vital repositories of RAW’s spirit in the New World):

We are all increasingly grizzled veterans serving a perpetual tour on the front lines of the Culture War. The sophisticated disguises that communication has adopted during the course of human evolution have caused in increase of psycho-seismic activity. Our society is transforming rapidly and all sorts of cancers metastasize across our screens in the course of weeks, days, or hours. In 2005 there is no way anyone would have believed Donald Trump would be POTUS- I don’t think even RAW could have predicted this outcome. As comedians pointed out in January as fond reminiscences of the Bush years  cropped up in op-eds; Trump is so horrifying we are looking back upon a CIA-trained cokehead who committed genocide (GeeDubs) with fondness. RAW hated Bush and his disdain is clear throughout this book- today we yearn for those years of “sanity.” As the blood in Charlottesville attests, the situation today is beyond appalling.

And that’s why we desperately need the transformative techniques that RAW cheerfully spins into our souls as humorous yarns or passionate polemics. Wilson was a monkey who couldn’t get the stars out of his eyes and died seeing things wrapped up in an infinite net of diamonds. This is what we should aim for in our holy discourse, the brilliance  coded into every sentence; as Branka Tesla pointed out- RAW impregnates every line in this sainted text. This is a cyclical in the school of Perennial Wisdom, composed and preserved by one of our most incomparable philosophers;  Robert Anton Wilson conquered the world in a way that is comparable to Socrates or Blake. This is his goodbye and his greeting- an invitation to travel along so many avenues of thought and a boutique of expertly developed exotic blooms that one cannot help but stop and shudder in admiration.

I remember being fifteen, before I had read RAW, and telling my classmates if my choice was heaven with them or hell with people I admired, I’d prefer the latter.

Higgs, in his more recent opus Stranger Than We Can Imagine, proposes that, after we are faced with the stark reality of improbability and astounding happenstance of the twentieth century, our best choice of mental states is model agnosticism. He never acknowledges RAW by name, which bothered me, but this is clearly the same conclusion our wild-eyed Brooklynite drew early in his life and pursued like a hound nipping at the heals of God.

These are the times that test the soul of man. I am an atheist, thank god, but I still revere the saints who, whilst living, did miraculous things and transformed the garden into which we are all born, to something more beautiful.

Next week: Paul Krassner's afterword, new to the Hilaritas Press edition. 

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week 13

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger 

Federico Fellini

Part IV Q & A

The questions answered in Part IV span 25 years and seven different interviewers. There’s a lot of material in the last section and most of it has already been covered in the book. Taking this into consideration, as well as the fact that our reading group seems to be winding down with the summer, I’ll touch lightly on a couple topics and wait to hear what your thoughts are as we draw near the end.

The fourth part of email to the Universe begins with the overly familiar dying words of the Old Man of the Mountain and another of the other Old Man’s quips preceded by a pronouncement by Federico Fellini. During my undergrad years I was enchanted with Fellini and would stay up late watching 8 ½, Juliet of the Spirits, La Dolce Vita, Amarcord and whatever else I could find. I’ve mentioned I am not a huge film aficionado but Fellini, like Lynch and Ken Russell, is one of the directors who has captured my attention. “Nothing is known. Everything is imagined” make sense in light of fates of his protagonists. I’ve always prefered to think that Guido didn’t commit suicide at the end of 8 ½ but instead found a way into his memories and fantasies, away from drear, demanding reality.

My favorite line of any haiku from the “Old Man” sequence has to be: “caw caw caw Lord Lord.” This is an astounding rendition of how the crow’s call registers to the human ear...I often listen to their croaks and wonder why they make me shudder so.

The first questioned answered is from Neal Wilgus back in the prehistoric year of 1977. In a footnote RAW reflects on the dismal state of the political circus as of 2004 compared to the year when the question was first offered. Eleven years after the Wilgus interview he states on pg. 239 that Reagan has brought more stupidity to the White House than any other person in Wilson’s lifetime.  RAW seems to have had a consistent state of bewildered dismay at the blatant progression of conservatism’s bald-faced goal of despotism. When Clinton is mentioned on pg. 256 Wilson points out the increased scrutiny of President’s private lives by the media (he also acerbically ends his thoughts on the subject that even if it is “open season” on politicians, they deserve it). Like most of the political repartee in email these observations are still evergreen and the situation(s) unresolved.

Wilson discusses his writing influences, his interests, marijuana, conspiracies, mysticism, life extension, and space migration. These subjects are all covered multiple times in different parts of the book; I’ve just finished rereading The Homing Pigeons after the other two volumes of Schroedinger’s Cat and Cosmic Trigger II while we’ve been covering email so I haven’t had many days go by the last month without reading some story involving Pound or Hemmingway, Korzybski or P2. RAW was consistent. Not that these interviews aren’t enjoyable and don’t serve as a refresher of the many different topics covered in this book as well as Wilson’s general corpus, but I really have very little to add.

Between the lot of us at some point in these write ups or comments we’ve shared our thoughts on pretty much everything that is covered in these interviews.

So I’d like to ask those of you who have stuck with me a few questions:

Has your general perception of RAW or any of the ideas discussed altered significantly while going over email to the Universe? Was this anyone’s first time reading email?

Where do you feel email to the Universe fits in RAW’s overall output? Does it compare to collections such as Coincidance or Right Where You Are Sitting Now? Or does it remind you more of the later Cosmic Triggers or TSOG?

Is this a fitting final book for RAW? Is it meant to be a final book? Does the chronology of publication mean anything?

What are some of the differences you noticed between younger and older Bob in the text?

Next week we’ll finish Part V and read Krassner’s afterword.

Note: The formatting for the last paragraphs on pg. 234 and 256 seems to be centered instead of aligned left with the rest of the text.

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week 12

 By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

Sexual Alchemy

It was nearly chic to have an idea about the true meaning of alchemy during the early twentieth century. A surprising amount and varied array of individuals sallied forth with their interpretations from Daumal to Jung to Fulcanelli to Reuss. But alchemy, derived from the Arabic Al-kimmiya,  has never been well-defined, even judged by the standards of occultism with explanations ranging from the get-rich-quick chicanery, to the chemical, psycho-spiritual, or erotic yoga RAW proposes. Most likely it was some combination of these disparate elements and its definition varied from person to person as it does today. Happily this essay is concerned with alchemy solely in the sense of the IX° work of the O.T.O. instead of history and truth. It is as good an essay on the working of sex magic as Crowley’s Energized Enthusiasm and an exciting essay but I will admit I prefer his treatment of the subject in the third and fourth chapters of Sex, Drugs, and Magick (whose contents he does note in the essay).

I’d like to discuss RAW and Louis T. Culling because I read Culling a few years ago after deciding to follow up on Wilson’s footnote in Cosmic Trigger where he declares that Sex Magick teaches Crowleyean methods of Tantra. And boy, does it kinda do that and kinda spins a line of bullshit that had me gaping and occasionally guffawing in sheer incredulity; I’d like to think this is why RAW liked him so much and his recommendation is at least a self-aware instance of existential leg-pulling. For how RAW nearly dismisses Kenneth Grant* as an “oddball magician,” and Grant is pretty consistent in his assertions and elaborations in his admittedly bizarre interpretation of magic, Culling seems to me to be nearly too bombastic as to having been real in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong. I find Louis Culling to be an interesting and inventive fellow whose system of sex magic was adapted from the workings of C. F. Russell, a mathematician and American student of Crowley’s who spent time at the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu before heading stateside to create his own Thelemic order “The Choronzon Club” which later became the the Great Brotherhood of God . (For more on C.F. Russell, his eccentric interpretation of Crowleyean sex magick and Yi Jing please check out Steve Moore’s excellent “Change in a Parallel World.”) So RAW is incorrect insofar as his assertion goes that Culling was taught by Crowley — he never met the man. The version of sex magic presented by Culling in Sex Magick and The Complete Curriculum of th G.’.B.’.G.’. entails three degrees of magical chastity, karezza, and finally the sex magic discussed in this essay with an emphasis upon the bud-will mentioned in Crowley’s Liber Aleph.

For a taste of the delightful absurdity that abounds in Culling’s books I’d like to present the following:

“I have received so many plaints [sic] about getting a suitable partner that I have decided to give a special exemplar. In this case, the husband and wife were incompatible and they had agreed to separate within thirty days. He, being a brother member in a secret magickal order [presumably the G.’.B.’.G.’.], had high aspirations in the Great Work.  Due to his frustration he had an intense desire to have a suitable magickal partner...even though his wife was not a good partner, the very intensity of his desire served much to overcome the incompatibility between them, in assaying to create the Bud-Will Intelligence to have a good partner.

After five congrexes [sic] he was certain that he had given autonomous intelligence to the Bud-Will, and that is where his story begins.

He insisted on writing the story himself, and for the sake of anonymity he even used my name, Lou. I lived near close by and intimately knew all of the principles involved, so well it almost feels like my own experience.

I was driving from Fallbrook with grocery supplies for my place in Rainbow Valley. Halfway home there was a woman thumbing a ride. I never pick up hitchhikers so I did not stop. Suddenly it hit me: there was something about the way we exchanged glances that struck me as a possible sign. I stopped about a hundred yards past her. She disdained another car that had stopped and started to walk rapidly to my car and eagerly entered it.

She said, “I have to get home to San Bernardino to take care of my two kids. Was at a family reunion in San Diego. All of ‘em drunk yesterday and all night and I ain’t had no sleep and nothing to eat. Here I am, chattering like a guinea hen and ain’t even told you my name. Name’s Alice, born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.”

Suddenly her hand dropped heavy on my shoulder and she was asleep. In turning from the main road and going to my place, the jolting of the car woke her.

“Where are we at?” she asked.

I said. “We are going to my place and while you are having some sleep I am going to cook a steak for you and then I’ll buy you a ticket to San Berdou.”

She looked at me through the eyes of 100 per cent woman and said, “Lou, I must be dreaming: you are such a swell guy.”

After eating she flopped on the bed again and was asleep within a minute. When I awakened her she said that she could get the midnight bus. “Kiss me, Lou.” she said.

“Ever since I had titties I have dreamed about being loved by a man like you. Let’s take our clothes off and you just love me. That’s all: no sex.”

But the gods (and the Bud-Will) work in devious ways. She said that it would be soon enought to take the early morning bus. “Crimonetly! Tain’t no good being treated like I was an angel by a man like you that I could worship. I just got to be loved by you, all the way, even if only once. Take me, Lou.”

On the following morning she said, “You’ve taken me up almost to heaven and now I am dropped back down to earth. It hurts like hell to fall so hard. I know you are not for me no more. My old man gets out of jail next week and I have to be with him. But Lou, I am going to do something for you. I am going to give you my sister. Up till two weeks ago she was raised in the Ozarks by Granny. Then she came here to drunken Ma. Only seventeen and nobody to take care of her. And I seen some of those Berdou dudes sniffing around. You are the only man in the whole world I’d trust to have her.”

I was too stunned to say anything. We went to the only store in the valley, Ed’s Grocery and Eatery to wait for the bus. After we had ordered a cup of coffee, Alice went behind the counter and was talking to Ed in a low voice. Then she told me, “I see you’re poke flat for money and I asked him if he would give part-time work to my sister Mabel. He said yes, he needs her.”

Only three days passed before Alice brought Mabel down in a borrowed car. When Alice drove away I said. “Well, that is switch. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but here the Lord is giving something back even better.”

Mabel did not know what I meant but on the morning after the second night she said to me, “The Lord shore gives.” And the Lord gave on many succeeding nights, according to Mabel.

I raised hand-tamed animals on my place and one day a dude from San Diego came to Ed’s place inquiring about the ranch. The dude’s uncle wanted him to put down a deposit on a pair of wolf pups.
Mabel was just getting ready to leave the restaurant to go back to the ranch. She said to the dude, “Lou ain’t in today but he lets me handle his business. Give me $100 for a deposit.”

But the dude was looking her over, with ideas. He said, “I want to see those wolves first.”

“Let’s go,” said Mabel.

The dude whispered to Ed, “I’m going to get some of that stuff.”

At first the dude played it cautious but it was enough to give Mabel suspicions and she planted her legs apart and gave him a taunting laugh.

“I forget what I first said to her,” the dude told Ed. “but she just stared at me with a smile and said ‘I am a one man woman.’ Then I got my arms round her and said ‘Don’t play it coy baby. Gorgeous stuff like you has been had by plenty of men.’ Then she yelped. ‘You hadn’t auta said that!’ and she came up with her leg and gave me the knee right in my knockers- hard. Cripes that hurt.”

Ed laughed in derision. “More ambition than good judgement.”

I think I have the best magickal congrex partner in the world. I married her, but not because I wanted to own her. She was a precious gift which should not be owned.

The reader of this exemplar will do better to trace the workings of the Bud-Will Intelligence for himself than to have it outlined for him. It is clear enough. May this experience inspire others to work for a magickal partner rather than wishing for it, and also to be resourceful and patient enough to train her, and to treasure her when you get her. This is my hope and advice.


Now, I don’t know if what you just read was the worst pulp romance, a testimonial to an obscure sex technique, a country music song, or the occult equivalent of The Room but whoever wrote that was certainly drunk when they jotted out that whopper. Delightful. And this is the man who RAW soberly commends to his audience as an authority. Wilson does write about the importance of finding the right partner for sex magic workings in the essay but not all of us are Bob and Arlene. RAW’s main experiences with sex magic presumably were during the mid-Seventies. “This time, I used the Lily tape and the Crowley invocation again, without drugs, but with prolonged and holy rituals or Tantric sex-trance involving the cooperation of the Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy.” - Cosmic Trigger

The glossary definitions of alchemical code words as well as the example of Valentine’s alchemical doubletalk is derived from the same chapter as the bizarre yarn about Ozark child brides and molesty wolf purchasers. Culling’s interpretation of the Rubaiyat is included in the third Appendix of Sex Magick titled “Sufi Philosophy.” It perhaps endeared RAW to Culling that two of his other appendixes focus on the magical uses of marijuana, champagne, and damiana. Thomas Vaughan, the other alchemist mentioned by RAW in the essay, is a favorite of his who is mentioned throughout his corpus. Also considering that Basil Valentine died two hundred years before Vaughan’s birth they were nowhere near contemporaneous in the sense of human life spans. Unless I’m contemporaneous with Lord Byron or Admiral Nelson.

The alchemical theories of Dr. Israel Regardie are discussed. While we have it from the essay that from no less of an authority than Dr. Regardie himself that Wilson has correctly interpreted his alchemical code it is worth noting that in the one work Regardie published solely concerned with alchemy, The Philosopher’s Stone, that Regardie seems to adopt the psycho-spiritual approach that was favored by Dr. Jung. Or maybe that’s what he wanted you to think. While RAW writes on pg. 213 that Regardie “wrote a series of books which have influenced contemporary American occultism more than the work of any other singly author,” I think by now that title has passed on to the author of the essay. While Wilson never formerly declared himself to be a magician, aside from psychological experiments, he has made an indelible impact on the magical landscape and still serves as a vital beginning of an answer to the question “how can anyone really use this shit?”

The techniques of sex magick did not begin with the Sufis and Hassan-ibn-Sabbah most likely never had a time release capsule of opium, cocaine (considering the coca plant is native to South America), and hashish. Sex magic can best be traced back to the Tamili tantra cults of medieval India; an excellent practical resource on Tantra for westerners was written by Francis X. King (RAW’s favorite “non-insane” occult historian) titled Tantra: The Way of Action. Much of the underlying theory about technique and mechanisms is similar to the Spare-devised sigil magic floating around the interwebs today. King’s book offers a method of practice for either two or one participants. Hey we’re all not lucky enough to have a clearly-fictitious seventeen year old fall into our lap after we fuck her sister, that is more satisfying than the current masturbate-and-wish method that apparently not one of its practitioners is self-aware enough to realize is the perfect commentary on their lives. It also contains some excellent scholarship on J. W. Brodie-Innes, whose damnable silly quote is mentioned on pg. 220, and his contributions to western esotericism.

In the spirit of this collection I’d like to add on my own quote from Blake, taken from the Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and recited by Miss Mao in Illuminatus!:

Prisons are built with stones of Law; brothels with bricks of religion.

*RAW also herein accuses Grant of being obsessed with menstrual magic. Elsewhere I’ve read other authors state that Grant is obsessed with either promoting or suppressing anal sex magic. While I haven’t read anywhere near to his entire output I’ve made a good dint into his Typhonian Trilogies and Nightside Narratives and never felt he discussed sex in a way that was either strikingly peculiar or excessive compared to other writers in the field. Although he does provide gems of ridiculousness as such: “The assumption of god-forms practiced by the Golden Dawn and Austin Spare’s technique of Atavistic Resurgence are magical explorations of Space and Time. They are aspects of ancient sorceries-once performed in Atlantis-that will be developed during the current aeon and will ultimately transcend both Space and Time.” I enjoy such eccentricities. More than anything I’d say Grant’s odd obsessions center more upon Lovecraft and whatever the fuck happened in the Nu-Isis Lodge back in the fifties. For all that he is maligned Grant was an important influence upon RAW during the time he was initially exploring sex magic and to most magicians after the seventies. He certainly is the only reason that the artist-magician Austin Osman Spare is known at all today.

As a post-script I’d like to say while I adore the works of Frances Yates and they filled up a lot of my bibliographies in undergrad- Prospero was clearly based on John Dee, as elaborated upon by the brilliant Alan Moore, and not Bruno. Although the Berowne theory is convincing.

Email to the Universe Discussion Group, Week 11

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

“Law isn’t supposed to make sense. It’s just supposed to make us frightened of the government.” Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II

The Horror on Howth Hill

Howth Castle and environs is famously mentioned in the first line of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, it is mentioned at numerous points throughout the timeless day of Ulysses, I believe it first comes up in “Proteus,” and is also the location of a small fishing village where Bob and Arlene lived for part of their residence in Ireland. Considering the time frame I think we can assume this piece was written during the mid-to-late Eighties.

In one sense this is a primer on the conspiracies that Wilson was most fond of at the time of the writing, including: the Illuminati, Priory of Sion, Knights of Malta, and Discordians, along with the leitmotif of his dissection of the Catholic Church’s Kong-sized phallic obsession in the form of short fiction. Like many of the essays in this book we are re-treading familiar territory but the exploration is being carried out in a different manner. In the same manner we witness the shifting views of Monterey Bay in the haiku sequence, or witness the many versions of Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, we are looking at the “same” set of ideas throughout the collection with RAW in a slightly different space-time and/or stylistic position each time.

Timothy X. Finnegan seems to be a character RAW devised mostly to support the Committee for the Scientific Investigation for the Normal and is heavily based upon the de Selby of Flann O’Brien’s creation. de Selby originates from the novels The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive...perhaps his most famous theory is that night does not exist and is instead caused by an expulsion of dark air from inside the Earth. To give those readers who haven’t made the acquaintance of Mr. O’Brien I’d like to provide an excerpt of one of the footnotes in The Third Policeman:

“Le Fournier, the conservative French commentator (in his De Selby- Lieu ou Homme?) has written exhaustively on the non-scientific aspects of de Selby’s personality and has noticed several failings and weaknesses difficult to reconcile with his dignity and eminence as a physicist, ballistician, philosopher, and psychologist. Though he did not recognise sleep as such, preferring to regard the phenomenon as a series of ‘fits’ and heart-attacks, his habit of falling asleep in public earned for him the enmity of several scientific brains of the inferior calibre. These leeps took place when walking in crowded thoroughfares, at meals and on at least on one occasion in a public lavatory….Another of de Selby’s weaknesses was his inability to distinguish between men and women. After the famous occasion when the Countess Schnapper had been presented to him (her Glauben ueber Ueberalls is still read) he made flattering references to ‘that man,’ ‘that cultured old gentleman,’ ‘craft old boy’ and so on….Du Garbandier (in his extraordinary Historie de Notre Temps) has seized on this pathetic shortcoming to outstep, not the prudent limits of scientific commentary but all known horizons of human decency...It is now commonly accepted that Hatchjaw was convinced that the name ‘du Garbandier’ was merely a pseudonym adopted for his own ends by the shadowy Klaus…”

And so on for seven pages. Le Fournier, du Garbandier, Hatchjaw, and Klaus are just a fragment of the scholars who have made their largely ridiculous careers off of de Selby studies discussed in the inner dialogue of the protagonist of the novel. All this is happening after the protagonist has murdered an old gentleman, is now trapped in a hellishly ridiculous and repetitive dimension, and is mixed up in a case of a missing bicycle. Great fun. (The titles of the books roughly translate as “de Selby- Location or Man?,” “Belief About Everywhere,”  and “History of Our Time.” )

To those of us interested in Crowley it is notable that the murdered subject of The Third Policeman is named Mathers.

De Selby is namechecked on the first page of the essay as the author of Wilson’s Teratological Ontologicum. Although the obvious influences upon this work are Joyce, O’Brien, and Lovecraft I also am able to find another connection of RAW to the gnomic Argentinian fabulist, much beloved of Sixties mystics, Jorge Luis Borges.

The only place I could locate the words teratological and ontologicum together was a book entitled Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 which is a collection of literary essays by Borges. I’ll reproduce the paragraph wherein we find the word teratological which is itself from an essay on Chesterton (When the British science fiction author Michael Moorcock was asked about his meetings with William S. Burroughs and Borges, his primary living literary influences, he replied that Burroughs was what you would expect and Borges was “an old man who liked Chesterton.”)

“Poe and Baudelaire proposed the creation of a world of terror, as did Blake’s tormented Urizen; it is natural for their work to teem with the forms of horror. In my opinion, Chesterton would not have tolerated the imputation of being a contriver of nightmares, a monstrorum artifex (Pliny, XXVIII, 2), but he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations. He asks if perchance a man has three eyes, or a bird three wings; in opposition to the pantheists, he speaks of a man who dies and discovers in paradise that the spirits of the angelic choirs have, every one of them, the same face he has;1 he speaks of a jail of mirrors; of a labyrinth without a center; of a man devoured by metal automatons; of a tree that devours birds and then grows feathers instead of leaves; he imagines (The Man Who Was Thursday, VI) “that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.” He defines the near by the far, and even by the atrocious; if he speaks of eyes*, he uses the words of Ezekiel (1:22) “the terrible crystal”; if of the night, he perfects an ancient horror (Apocalypse 4:6) and calls it a “monster made of eyes.” Equally illustrative is the tale “How I Found the Superman.” Chesterton speaks to the Superman’s parents; when he asks them what the child, who never leaves a dark room, looks like, they remind him that the Superman creates his own law and must be measured by it. On that plane he is more handsome than Apollo; but viewed from the lower plane of the average man, of course—Then they admit that it is not easy to shake hands with him, because of the difference in structure. Indeed, they are not able to state with precision whether he has hair or feathers. After a current of air kills him, several men carry away a coffin that is not of human shape. Chesterton relates this teratological fantasy as a joke.

*Amplifying a thought of Attar (“Everywhere we see only Thy face”), Jalaluddin Rurrri composed some verses that have been translated by Ruckert (Werke, IV, 222), which state that in the heavens, in the sea, and in dreams there is One Alone; that Being is praised for having reduced to oneness the four spirited animals (earth, fire, air, and water) that draw the cart of the worlds. “

I think there’s enough eerie resemblance between this excerpt and “The Horror on Howth Hill” to intrigue the attentive reader: herein we have connections to the violent revolutionary prophetic works of William Blake, the dank recesses of Poe and Baudelaire, the Sufis, and the work The Man Who Was Thursday. The transformation of Professor Finnegan into Abdul Alhazred eventually into Cthulhu is echoed throughout the excerpt.

 A Copy of Chesterton's “The Eye of Apollo” selected by Borges’ “Library of Babel” book series. I’d encourage everyone to check out his other inclusions. 

RAW on Chesterton and marijuana: “ Whether one is transported out of one’s habitual Reality Tunnel to the multiple-choice labyrinth of Virtual Reality by marijuana or Charlie Parker or orgasm or meditation or by Picasso or by King Kong or by the Wicked Witch of the West the experience has a quality of timelessness and liberation about it. One feels less mechanical and seems on the edge of grasping what the mystics meant by “Awakening”; sometimes, especially with Beethoven, one almost feels that one will never forget the “absurd good news” (as Chesterton called it) of that Awakened state.” (Cosmic Trigger II pg. 193-94)

The appearance of ontologicum is found in an essay on Wells. Therein Borges recounts the quote from Oscar Wilde (who RAW was also fond of quoting) that “Wells writes like a scientific Jules Verne” is of interest in particular because of the citation of Verne’s membership in the Priory of Sion on pg 196. The work Jules Verne, initie et initiateur is in fact a real work unlike de Selby’s Teratological Ontologicum. Sense Teratology is the study of physiognomical abnormalities (thanks, Google!) and ontologicum is a form of ontology, the study of reality, we can loosely translate de Selby’s opus as “the deformities of reality.”

Elsewhere in the Borges book, which I have happily been reading, there is a reference to the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Anselm of Canterbury. On pg. 202 there is a repartee between Professor Finnegan and J.R. “Bob” Dobbs where Kong goes from being viewed as a 24 foot gorilla to a Fertility God and consequently his penis grows from a mere two feet to the appropriately divine twelve feet; anyone who is confused by this act of biological to theological feat of logic would be well advised to revisit both of those philosopher’s arguments for the existence of god. So really the patalogical approach (cribbed from absinthe-fiend Alfred Jarry, who was/is incidentally perhaps the first surrealist) suggested by de Selby humorously owes more to the Catholic fathers than it does to French silliness. (Appropriate for the discussion and concluding revelation of this story, no?)

I regret to inform you that the “There was a young lady from Sidney” limerick wasn’t actually written by T. S. Eliot who was a rather dry man.

I should also point out that Professor Sheissenhosen, member of the illustrious board of CSICOP along with James Randi and Carl Sagan, has a name that translates from the German as Professor “shit-pants.”

Thus we are back the Jarry with a humor very similar to his play Ubu Roi. (The first word of the play is “merdre” which loosely translate from the French as “shitter.”) Merde and its uses was another interest of RAW’s that has already been brought up in this collection with the words of General Canbronne. (Which is also used as the name of an “intelligence” agent in RAW’s Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy)

I think after this book we will all be intimately re-familiarized with the dimensions of the holy phallus if nothing else.

The ending of The Horror on Howth Hill follows  a common trope from Lovecraft’s fiction where the up-till-now horrified protagonist accepts and even rejoices in their damnable state is originally derived from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” which I like to argue is the actual archetypical Cthulhu Mythos story instead of the comparatively dull “Call of Cthulhu.” Interestingly while Lovecraft was inextricably entwined into occult consciousness by the works of Kenneth Grant, which greatly affected RAW’s initial understanding of magic, Wilson also notes that he has at times though of “HPL as ‘he poet of materialism’- the man who could really make his readers feel Melville’s ‘colorless allcolor of atheism.’”

For another narrative driven by a mysterious author and a tangle of interpreters I would recommend Roberto Bolano’s 2666 which, along with the macabre elements that invade human life*, focuses on the quest of four academics to find the mysterious German author von Archimboldi.

*reference Cosmic Trigger II pg. 160

Email to the Universe Discussion Group, Week 10

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

Ambrose Bierce

Damnation by Definition

Robert Anton Wilson ever the arch-agnostic, was surprisingly consistent in his themes.  Although he notes that parts of Authority and Submission, an unpublished work written in his early-mid thirties, would be incorporated in Prometheus Rising and Illuminatus! the themes he covers can be found in nearly every other essay in this collection and throughout his oeuvre. The particular term “The Damned Thing” is derived by an Ambrose Bierce short-story that itself seems to have been partially inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s 1880s story “The Horla.” Both stories were an influence on Lovecraft who borrowed an array of themes and terms from Bierce’s stories or from other writers, such as Robert Chambers, who borrowed those terms from Bierce in their turn. The possibly trans-dimensional locations “Carcosa” and “Hali” were both derived from Bierce’s work as well as the name “Hastur” who would be morphed from a gentle shepherd deity to one of the more fearsome of the Great Old Ones. Alan Moore’s recent masterwork of Lovecraftian fiction/scholarship Providence highlights the contributions Bierce made to Lovecraft's fevered universe. Bierce and Chambers are both mentioned in the rising action of The Eye in the Pyramid with the former’s disappearance and the latter’s move to trite romance novels being used as evidence of the Illuminati’s nefarious activities over the years.

But this is mostly a political/social essay concerning the interactions between two possible models: the authoritarian and libertarian. Benjamin Tucker, the nineteenth century American anarchist quoted in the essay as saying “[a]gression is simply another name for government,” is mentioned earlier in the same class of thinkers as Lysander Spooner. I think it is typical of RAW, who is a very American author, to draw his philosophical basis for individualism from American writers instead of the more fashionable, or at least better known, Russian anarchists of the age such as Kropotkin or Bakunin. Although he does mention Tolstoy quite often.

                                                               Benjamin Tucker

I think the paragraph on pg. 184 where the young Wilson waxes into the grandiose language of liberty is beautiful:

“To say that liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist. Authority, by dividing people into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing us all on an equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between people are based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn together. The facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-blind structure of a Game Without End we would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism.”

The following two paragraphs explain much of the political thinking in the nation today as well as they did when the piece was originally written. Perhaps the reasons RAW toyed with the same ideas so often is that it takes humanity as a whole, regardless of information doubling or technology, a long time to move on from certain paradigms. No matter how idiotic or suicidal those ideas may be.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the essay for me was RAW’s correct prediction about the fate of television censorship made in the last line of the essay: “When a more efficient medium [Internet?] arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.” Many critics agree we are living in a Golden Age of scripted television and I am tempted to agree. It seems by moving television primarily onto the Internet, and with all the noise it seems most efforts to censor the Interwebs seemed doomed to failure in the West, the ideas of propriety have been cast away and shows have been allowed to experiment more often. I’d honestly rather watch one of the new seasons of Veep or It’s Always Sunny for their cleverness and character development rather than whatever schlock war film by Eastwood or Gibson or whatever technicolor CGI seizure lowest common denominator trash that dominate the movie box office today. What a run on.

The short essays between “Views of Monterey Bay #18 and #19” are devoted to RAW’s delight in the emerging techno-culture and vitriol against the escalating drug wars of the nineties.  Regrettably, RAW’s prediction that the acidheads would take over the business world seems to have been inaccurate.

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week Nine

 By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

Part III: In Defense of the Damned

"the Damned" is presumably the same group of ideas and phenomena that do not fit into our perceived reality "correctly" and are thus discarded, after those peculiarities that Charles Fort named his famous opus, The Book of the Damned.

I was going to comment on RAW's quotes about the bush administration, but I backspaced after deciding that I've talk way too much about republicans in the White House in these posts. Presumably everyone here has access to the news and is capable of making their own comparisons.

Guns and Dope Party

This is RAW at his most petulantly anti-order which tickles me blue. I realize that my politics are more radical than most of the older readers of this blog, but as I have mentioned before, I am currently a member of the Guns and Dope Party and fully believe in its mission. My political beliefs at this point can be boiled down to "mind your own business" which could have curbed a lot of sacrosanct patriotic bullshit in this country if that had been printed on our currency instead of the absurdly pompous "In God We Trust." RAW points out on pg. 169 that our government does indeed seem to believe that God is on their side or at least want us to believe that they do. I'm gonna trust Bob/Olga over the professional fuckers we reelect year after year so they can keep fleecing us.

The George Washington quote at the beginning of the essay reminds me of a point that Bill Hicks made: no matter how many sub-machines guns and assault rifles a survivalist has, the government has tanks and bombs (and now drones). While I have nothing against gun ownership, I come from a very West Virginian family and even own a pistol, it is a good thing to remember that the average citizen stands no chance against the might of "our" government's armory.

Remember when everyone thought Skull and Bones was an important conspiracy?

The Gadsen flag is an example of a symbol whose context has rapidly changed since the publication of email to the Universe. It is now primarily associated with the Tea Party and such grassroots rightwing sentiments.

For anyone else who was unfamiliar with the term "suidaen" it is the descriptive term for the biological family Suidae whose members include pigs, boars, and hogs. I'd take ostriches over pigs any day.

"If Olga doesn't talk to you, you need more pain medicine, and frankly I don't understand how you've survived three years of Bozo without it." I was in the middle of one of my valiant yet futile attempts to kick my nicotine habit around November 7th 2016- I gave up on the 8th figuring we won't be around long enough now to justify me worrying about it. (I speak partially in jest, knowing how addictions can find infinite reasons for the continuation. For those of you concerned about my health I am currently on another one of my "quitting kicks.")

Damn. Isn't Lysander Spooner's tax plan ingenious? Where I'm from a lot of people love to bitch about Medicare, Medicaid, WIC (damn those money grubbing women, infants, and children) and such being funded from their pockets. I'd much rather pay the minuscule amount of tax that I lose to social programs than the massive amount of my taxes that go to funding Babylon-Washington and the defense of Israel.

Now that the republicans and those damn russians have decided to let bygones by bygones and final become the dream duo of bullshit nationalistic politics, a sizable chunk of our population is revealing their natural love of tsardom.  Of course, as I listen to people's opinions (unasked for) about others drug use, I realize that many of the critters on the planet of the apes believe in regulating what drugs, herbs, compounds, etc. can go into the bodies of the private citizenry. To someone like myself who doesn't believe in victimless "crime," this makes those critters seem hostile and dangerous; far more dangerous that the poor sot injecting heroin in some vaguely imagined trap house. Tsardom, police quotas, and the piss police will all have to be utterly rejected for this to ever be anything resembling "the Land of the Free."

Every man and woman is a tsar. And everyone reading this is a pope. Make your own goddamn rules and govern the one person you actually have a right to govern in the way that seems best to you.

The John Adams quotation on pg. 175 brings up the invaluable legal tactic of jury nullification which RAW writes about extensively elsewhere. I try to educate as many people as possible about the existence and necessity of jury nullification.

RAW's explanation of why Olga is essential serious, scientific, and sincerely surrealist aspects of the Guns and Dope Party is deft and resonates with me. That is why I am always proud to endorse the idea that 33% of Congress really should be changed to ostriches. I'd like to see Congress be productive and civilized someday.

W.C. Fields closes the chapter and I'll insert a non sequitar, my favorite story relating to the old comedian/philosopher:

On his death bed, he supposedly asked his banker, "Do I have enough money to buy all the children of Philadelphia a bike each?" The banker looked at his notes and said yes. Fields stayed quiet for a moment in deep thought and replied "Well fuck 'em!"

RAW and Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

When I re-read "Left and Right: A Non-Euclidian Perspective," I was struck by RAW's comment that that Nietzsche made a "powerful impression" on him and that "I still re-read one or two of his books every year, and get new semantic insights from them."

As I have never read Nietzsche, this raises the question of where to begin.

I pulled out my trusty copy of Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson by Eric Wagner, and sure enough, Eric is on the case, noting that Wilson mentioned Nietzsche in both of his lists of books that everyone needs to read.

One list includes Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. The other lists The Anti-Christ in H.L. Mencken's translation.

When I looked in the Kindle store on Amazon, I found the Mencken translation of Anti-Christ for 99 cents, so I bought it. There were cheap editions of Twilight, too, but I couldn't figure out which translations were good.

I once saw a Gahan Wilson cartoon that showed a man sitting at a bar, with a robot standing next to him. The man with the robot tells another person in the tavern, "He's programmed to take me home when I begin quoting Nietzsche."

Email to the Universe Discussion Group, Week Eight

Ayn Rand, from her Soviet passport photo

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

"Left and Right"

I really wish RAW were alive right now. I really wish we could hear what he has to say about the second decade of the twenty first century when he had thought once that we would be taking immortality tabs and floating around the Legrange point 5. 

I still have a Correct Answer Machine within me. I can't seem to get it out. The thing is, thanks to authors and people such as RAW, I've been trying to exorcise or deprogram that motherfucker for years. I do succeed sometimes, but the damn thing always manages to refine its methodology and I unwittingly begin listening to it again, by another name or lack thereof. 

After years of "disciplining" myself in RAW's "model agnosticism" (a term which I believe is used for the first time in email in this essay), psychosynthesis, magic, and yoga to free my self from myself, I find that my ego is a worthy opponent. I realize in my conscious mind that there are many "mes" playing their various games for various reasons but I unconsciously fall prey to their machinations when I am not looking. (I sound mad.)

So, while I love quoting that "science has shown that the Universe can count above two" and mocking Aristotelian/Euclidean models I have to admit I am probably still, at times, trapped in the Euclidean limbo. 

A game, for anyone who would like to play; Wilson gives us the description existentialist-phenomenologist-operationalist as his, admittedly distasteful, label as long as no term is give more importance than the other two. Off the cuff, what would you use as your, admittedly distasteful, label. 

I think mine would be: libertine-wastrel-fop

And if any of you 2017 Euclideans wants to be so bold as to judge from this essay whether in the terms of today he would be a leftist or a rightist, I'd love to read your thoughts! 

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" 

Oz Fritz posted an excellent rumination on psychedelic experimentation and current ideas in the comment thread for last weeks post. I would recommend everyone who has looked at this essay and haven't read his thoughts to do so. 

It seems a good percentage of those foolhardy enough to play the psychedelic game has an experience that utterly turns them off of a substance. For RAW, it was solanaceous psychedelics, and he wrote about them in such a deliciously camp style in Drugs, Sex, and Magic that I've always loved reading about their usage- witch ointment and all that shit- but have never tried them. My horror stories are from black market LSD, which RAW preaches against and downplays in an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher (Euclidean question- what would RAW have thought of Maher and Yiannoupoulos or his recent scandal?), and robotussin- I was such a fucking stupid kid. Perhaps the closest substance I have ingested to belladonna was datura...the dried leaves of the desert plant that has such erotic smelling blossoms. I learned something and enjoyed myself though. 

The William S. Burroughs story is a favorite party anecdote of mine that no one ever seems to appreciate. It occurs to me I am still a fucking stupid kid. 

Also, if you haven't ever followed up the footnote in the chapter on Solanaceous drugs in Sex, Drugs, and Magic on The Crooked Hinge I would heartily recommend it. It is a brilliant specimen of mid-century detective fiction. Riveting and memorable. 

I would also recommend works such as Psychedelic Shamanism (look beyond the name) and The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide (ditto) for works I have visited in the years after my participation in such chthonic mysteries and found thought provoking. 

"The Relativity of Reality" 

I agree with everything in this essay. (There's that persistence Correct Answer Machine.)

Haldane's quote was used as the title of John Higgs' 2015 explosion of perspective on how we arrived at this point. Another recommendation!  

Here's a charming little video I've used as a remedy for depression for a few years that I think makes a good collorary to RAW's masterful take down of our collective weltanschauungs: 

https://youtu.be/wVC0FcSRxL8?list=LLywjyWsN09hxotMlX0iwk4Q  

"CSICON" 

Dark night: darker thoughts

Perhaps I drank too many linn dubh during my years in Ireland...If you haven't explored the works of Flann O'Brien or Alfred Jarry I would be so bold as to make another set of recommendations. 

This story charms and speaks for itself. I would feel bad about sneaking in four essays this week but considering the pleasant dialogue of this last story I hope you'll all agree it hasn't been too arduous. 

Next Week we will study the political platform of the Guns and Dope Party, of which I am a proud member, pages 159-178. In the meantime Happy Fourth everyone and do something that really flies in the face of tyranny this year.

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week Seven

 

 

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

 

"LSD Dogs and Me"

Concerning RAW's love of our canine friends I thought I'd share a quote from The Universe Next Door (pg. 14-15 Pocket Books Edition):

"There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs. The dogs loved the primates very much, and each species had learned a great deal from mimicking the other. The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics. The domesticated primates had learned to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics."  

On our robotic nature: 

"There is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and reprogram our individual realities." Leary and Wilson, Neuropolitics (quoted on page 89) 

& (from Illuminatus! pg. 402) 

"That's why the Zen Roshis say, 'One who achieves supreme illumination is like an arrow flying straight to hell.' Keep in mind what I said about caution, George. You can release at any moment. It's great up there, and you need a mantra to keep you away from it until you learn how to use it. Here's your mantra, and if you knew the peril you are in you'd brutally burn it into your backside with a branding iron to make sure you'd never forget it: I Am The Robot. Repeat it." 

I will testify that the use of psychedelic substances was a drastic experience that I'll never be the same afterwards. While my intake was nowhere as heroic as RAW's I will say that the world presents a lot more seemingly concrete variables than it ever had before. By the time I had tried LSD I had grown my own psilocybin mushrooms and was familiar with tripping; but lysergic acid diethylamide is an experience unto itself.  The revelation of just how baroque and overwrought our consciousnesses are is enough to keep you wondering...I imagine for the rest of my life. 

(On pg. 110 the name Lobachevsky appears in a different font- I don't have my New Falcon edition with me so I am unable to corroborate if this was intentional or not.) 

Concerning RAW's musings, as someone who recently emerged from being a male between 16-24 I will attest to how frustrating and crazed those years were at times ... now with my generation depending upon our parents well into our thirties I think it could be extrapolated this purgatorial time of societal/hormonal pressure has grown longer. Perhaps this can explain the number of young men making horses asses out of themselves arguing for the alt-right. 

The Provoked Wife was a Restoration-era play that dwelt upon gender relations in marriage. 

"Mary, Mary Quite Contrary" is RAW's conspiracy writing at its most streamlined. He pack a wallop of mysteries in this short essay which is well constructed from beginning to end. Considering the scrutiny that the work of Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh faced (Baigent's name on pg. 123 is also in the odd font) after the release of The Da Vinci Code their work seems to have been mostly discredited...or at least its what "They" want us to think. 

It is a pity that RAW doesn't note Jean Cocteau's work with alchemical symbolism and his magical Orphic Trilogy. It could have helped set the atmosphere a little more. The relationship between Alchemy and Surrealism is documented through the lives and work of Cocteau, Duchamp, Daumal, and Dali...I'm sure there's more links that I just don't know about.

It is also worth noting that frequent commenter on the blog and RAW scholar Eric Wagner edited a poetry journal titled "Noon Blue Apples."  

midnight purple bananas

Next week we'll cover pgs. 129-159 up to "Part III: In Defense of the Damned"

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week Six

James Joyce

 [This week covers pages 85-104 in the Hilaritas Press edition, e.g. the beginning of Part II to "Get Your New York Garbage Online." -- The Mgt.]                                                                                           
By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger                                                                                                                                                                
I'm sure we're all familiar with the quotes that begin Part II of email to the Universe: they seem to be printed on all of Wilson's books.

"Joyce & Daoism" is an excellent little essay that encapsulates a lot of the overarching themes in Wilson's work. Like "The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory" and "Black Magick" this essay would work well as an introduction to RAW's thought. Perhaps the most interesting bit about this piece is the date it was penned; a year before his publication in The Realist (where he would similarly attack the masculine aspects of Western religion). Herein RAW lays out his patrist/matrist dialectic which he develops further in Ishtar Rising, The Illuminati Papers, and Coincidance (the book of essays in which it can easily be argued the highlight would be his even more developed exegesis of Finnegans Wake.) When I first read FW nearly seven years ago I used the Coincidance essays as my Baedeker and enjoyed the novel thoroughly. With Father's Day approaching I think it is worth pointing out the work of Carol Loeb Schloss and Alan Moore which has indicated that Anna Livia Plurabelle was based heavily upon Joyce's daughter Lucia (who is my own daughter's namesake). As Joyce worked on his map of time, space, and consciousness he seemed to believe that by finishing his impossible work he might be able to save his daughter who had already been institutionalized as a schizophrenic.

The most interesting point I think RAW raises in this particular essay is that the acceptance in Ulysses is forced and something that Joyce didn't personally feel or accurately express until Finnegans Wake. So there's still hope that I might actually understand the Dao someday. During an interview with Barry Hughart, the author of the ultra-charming Bridge of Birds he cited the Daoist tradition of hiding their teaching in novels during the Confucian hegemony; if we are to understand Finnegans Wake as RAW wishes in this essay a clear connection can be espied.

Another wonderful quote from Mr. Adams disproving the "Christian" origins of this nation.

The "Movie Haiku" section speaks pretty clearly on its own and considering I haven't watched many of the movies herein I have nothing to add. My favorite was Chimes at Midnight, one of my favorite of Welles' performances.

Giambattista Vico 

"He Who Thunders From On High" concerns Vico's theory that our belief in god derives from our primitive fear of thunder. It also contains another one of RAW's brilliant logic experiments that points out that Abrahamic religions must believe in a donut god. This is comparable to the aforementioned Realist essay where Wilson asked the pressing question: how big is God's dick?

In "Get Your New York Garbage Online" RAW seems to be anticipating the text speak that would develop rapidly over the next few years.

Our next reading goes from pg. 105-116 before "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary."

Email to the Universe discussion group, Week Five!

Alfred Korzybski 

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

[Today's section is pages 79-82 of the print version, e.g. from "Old Man On a Balcony: Views of Monterey Bay #10" to the end of Part I. I forgot to post that at the end of last week's episode. -- Tom]

With these short entries we finish Part 1 of Email to the Universe and begin to move into some more Advanced Head Trips.

Allow me, my friends, a couple of sophistries:

First: If we are to understand ego and perception in the way that RAW intends, we could consider each of us gods who are in complete control or slaves of their own universe. Thus when we speak to each other there is an ontological conflict. Language is the composite that makes our cosmos and also what allows us to build a bridge between our separate universes; infinite care should be allocated to these divine interactions.

Second: I tried explaining Korzybski's "the word is not the thing" to my five year old daughter this week during a discussion about the Great God Pan and Jesus as "the Lord of the Dance." I asked her to lay out her hand and say "I have a ring in my palm." She did and I asked if there was actually a ring in her palm. "No." I then asked her to put out her palm and laid out of my rings in her hand. I asked her to be silent for a stretch and asked her if there was a ring in her hand although she hadn't said anything. I know this is trite but it seemed to be an effective lesson. 

RAW's short jibe at the dishonorable and happily late-of-this-world rev. Falwell made me think of the disaster that is Abrahamic religion and their sick relations amongst themselves. Until humanity can understand that religion is but one way to regard the world around us it will remain as a poison that divides humanity and obscures the truth. Perhaps by understanding that religion should never be a source of morals (decency shouldn't be regulated by a hypothetical old man sitting on a cloud, i.e. rape and murder are generally bad regardless of whose watching) but rather remain as a metaphysical idiom we could declaw its vicious nature.

Sir Arthur Eddington

 
Sir Arthur Eddington, who is quoted twice in the closing parables was an early twentieth century astronomer who would have been considered a "science popularizer" in today's lexicon. Probably what endeared this man's works to RAW was his contribution to explaining the implications of Einstein's relativity to the layman.  I'm going to inflict some haikus upon you that I wrote during a walk in Cooper's Rock National Forest recently:

rivulets of sun

midst the shadows and foliage

there dances kether

everywhere -- fern fronds

reminds me of a white porch

where she hung ferns once

a candy corn slug

no, a petal resembling

a sea cucumber

[Next week: Discussion of Part II begins, pages 83-104 in the print edition, through "Get Your New York Garbage Online" in the ebook. -- The Management.]

Email to the Universe reading group, Week Four!

By Gregory Arnott, guest blogger

So, this week is a doozey. One of the thoughts that has preoccupied me while reading this book is how well it has aged and whether the ideas that RAW introduces are as relevant today as they were a little more than a decade ago. When I first read email to the Universe I was what I would call a RAW-purist and naturally agreed with everything I read- emphatically so. Now that I have changed and am revisiting the text I am finding the reading to be a much more provoking and rewarding experience.

pg 54 In the initial haiku we have a reference to dolphins and their presumably idyllic lifestyle (without money! how nice of an idea) which echoes back to Howard and his compatriots in Illuminatus!

- also, the quote is originally from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (I’ve only read Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions)

The essay Shocking Hidden Facts About Male Non-Violence was an arduous read for me. Not because I outright disagree with RAW but in today’s delightful iteration of the Culture War this little piece is, if anything, more dangerous than at the time of its writing and later publication. The conversation about feminism and masculinity in our society has somehow accelerated and become more of a muddle.

In light of the recreational and medical Heresies mentioned on pg. 55 that had resulted in so many arrests I’d like to link to an article about how Oakland, CA is taking steps to correct this assault.

On page 56 RAW complains about the brutish perception of men in the context of his androphobia. I would like to point out that much of the brutishness and foolish accoutrements of masculinity are not due to the incorrect perspectives of observes but certain malignant programs in our own society concerning the male gender. Toxic and Fragile Masculinity are concepts worth familiarizing yourselves with that help to pinpoint the flaws that help create the more brutish types of male hominids.

I also enjoy the digs at Amy Lowell, an early twentieth century Imagist poet whose work is widely looked down upon, and Hildegarde of Bingen. I’m not quite in the know about the mediaeval mystic and composer’s history but elsewhere in RAW’s work he talks about how “feminist” historians have tried to raise her compositions unfairly about those of the male Beethoven’s.

I would also say that on pg. 57 I’m not sure that bringing up the masculine nature of the “major,” especially the Abrahamic faiths, does much to help RAW’s argument. The decidedly patriarchal systems of these religions has caused undisputable harm to men, women, and all parts of the spectrum of sexuality. Later on page 86 RAW discusses the differences between “matrist” and “patrist” societies and how the former seems preferable. This is one of my favorite paradigms he introduces to the reader and does so eloquently in Ishtar Rising.  

Today’s dialogue has reduced such protests to the stereotypical response of “Not All Men!” which belies a concern for the wellbeing of a male’s reputation over the very real statistics of rape and violence against women. However, RAW’s point in the next essay shows how such reactions are unhelpful to finding a solution. The classic double-bind that RAW mentions on pg. 58 is another example of the irritating and befuddling position that many progressive males find themselves in today. A particularly distressing example is the case of Professor Brett Weinstein at Evergreen College in Oregon who has been confronted with mob justice and forced off campus because he refused to be excluded from the campus by a minority group simply because he happens to be a white male. I’m sure not even RAW could have foreseen the dramatic changes our increasingly noisey world would have upon our world in but a decade but email to the Universe does seem to be a primer for what was going to happen.

On pg. 59 Wilson brings up Andrea Dworkin who was a radical feminist who made all other feminists look terrible. After she decided that pornography was so evil that she was willing to align herself with the rev. Falwell (who we’ll get to read about next week) I feel she lost all respectability or reason to command our attention. Human-hating-radicalism loves human-hating-radicalism and as witnessed by the collusion between Fascists and Soviets circa 1939 and 2016-17.

More so than his predictions of our near-future immortality the last paragraph written by RAW on pg. 60 seems to be a devastatingly optimistic prediction.  We now live in a world where the various parts of society are more weary and spiteful of each other and an anti-Semite holds the President of the United States’ ear.

Our next haiku repeats a motif from the first insofar as it is composed around the image of an animal, this time the free flying gulls. (Remember that RAW will reference the free-flying feel-good Jonathan Livingston Seagull in the third essay this week.)  

Language, Logic, & Lunacy

“The first rule of politics is to use language precisely. Otherwise, no one understands anybody else, and everything falls into Chaos.”  Given the themes of this book and the references to Count Korzybski I think we might all be able to agree that once “politics” is replaced by “life” we have been given a cornerstone approach to this work and the world.

Humorously I can add a personal corollary to his definition of ching ming (“be sure brained turned on before setting mouth and motion”); all my problems are caused by not knowing when to shut my damn mouth.

The difference between the majority of positions of power are held by white men and all men hold a position of power is the cause for much of the current political ire today as it was when RAW initially penned this essay. Today, along with terms like “toxic masculinity” and “fragile masculinity,” we have been introduced to the terminology of privilege. I don’t care to pontificate upon my beliefs here but instead ask if this new aspect of the dialectic would have made any sense to RAW. This also isn’t to say that the idea of white- or male- privilege discounts the argument that is made herein: not all white men live lives of luxury or lives that are necessarily easier or better than their female or minority counterparts. While I cannot agree as whole-heartedly with the slant of these two essays (for example, the mention of “Nazi madness” did not make me think of the irksome narratives of Buzzfeed and radical Academia but the disturbing rise of Richard Spencer and his ilk) I think their ultimate point is fire-hardened by the cognitive dissonance caused by the added nuance of eleven years.

I’m exhausted with my ambiguity. I hope I’m not exhausting you, dear reader.

On pg. 66 RAW robs me of my animal motif or perhaps solidifies it for the triumvirate by causing a reverse Anselm arrangement: the real is crowned by becoming imaginary.

Dreams of Flying

I haven’t read The Dream Illuminati.

In consideration of Jungian archetype that appears in so many Saturday morning cartoons I’d like to recount that at the same time I was reading this essay I was in the middle of a popular history, Rousseau’s Dog by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, and came across the following passage:

“The overall impact of Hume’s fusillade on common sense was, and still, most unsettling. Applying the utmost intellectual rigor, he blows away the ground under our day-to-day assumptions: we are like the cartoon dog that runs in midair until he sees there is no ground under his paws. If that was where Hume’s head had led him, with his heart he was almost apologetic. He did not mean to disorient.”  (pg. 134)

I think this is important because Hume is a name we haven’t heard in email to the Universe but whose works are a pioneer of RAW’s own. (In Masks of the Illuminati RAW writes that part of the difference between Einstein and Joyce was that Einstein “betrayed a greater allegiance to Hume, the Master of Those Who Don’t Know” whereas Joyce “stood foursquare behind Aristotle, the Master of Those Who Know.”) I would heartily recommend “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding” as a supplementary reading to this book. I feel that since Aristotle and his fallacious-yet-pervasive universe play such a vital part in the dialectic of this work (I’m so sorry to use that word twice, I’m not trying to be pretentious, I just can’t think of a better term.) I should recommend one of his works. But I’ll confess ever since my attempt at reading his Politics was the only example of the time writing had lulled me to sleep, I haven’t revisited his work.

Concerning the discussion of Art vs. Science and their respective origins (as well as the origin of Religion) I would not hesitate to point everyone in the direction of Ramsey Duke’s excellent essay S.S.O.T.B.M.E. which was penned during the Seventies but of whose existence I believe RAW was unaware.

The discussion of Stravinsky as a “sound engineer” on pg. 69-70 reminds me of a more modern example: Brian Eno whose scrupulous self-excavating is the stuff of modern legend.

Also on pg. 70 we have RAW’s (to me entirely unfamiliar) definition of “shaman” as “he who walks in the sky.” This does jive with the dramatic sequence in The Teaching of Don Juan where the infamously factitious Man of Knowledge transforms his student into a crow whilst Carlos is under the influence of humidio (a mixture of psychotropic mushrooms and herbs). This is parodied on the Firesign Theater album Everything You Know Is Wrong which is misquoted in Cosmic Trigger.

pg. 71  “of course the universe can count above two” would seem to be a key to the thrust of this tome and a cure to our current stalemate.

pg. 73 I think it is curious that when RAW described 2001 as “the most beautiful, the most haunting” science fiction film I was instead reminded of Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth which draws so heavily upon the Icarian theme.

Gentle reader, please compare the recounted dream on pg. 74-75 and the “absurd good news” with Alan Moore’s account of the night of January 7, 1994 from the essay Unearthing which primarily concerns the goddess of dreams.

“This is it, this is real, this lamp-glow that’s inside the world like torchlight through a choirboy’s cheeks, the mystical experience as Gilbert Chesterton’s absurd good news and it goes on for hours, goes on forever.”

On page 76 we have an interesting discussion of qabalistic concepts. One thing that RAW fails to note is that Elohim is a bisexual term that is perhaps defined as “the gods and goddesses.” It is occasionally described as a feminine plural. Secondly, Crowley never commented on the Middle Pillar Ritual which was developed exclusively by Dr. Israel Regardie. While the quote that RAW provides is derived from the late Eighties work Enochian Sex Magick by Lon Milo Duquette and Christopher S. Hyatt I can't think of or find any direct quotation from Crowley’s work. The closest example I can find is a similar tenor and use of the word “perpendicular” in his Liber O, section 6, which concerns rising on the astral planes.

If we are to “get wise” in the Socratic and hardboiled meaning of the phrase it may be useful to remember the denouement of Socrates’ teaching.

I leave Crowley and RAW the last words. The brilliant Qabalist Will Parfitt once nominated Crowley’s “Introduction” in Magick as the most succinct and potent description of that most secretive Art.