Oz Fritz on 'The Walls Came Tumbling Down'

Oz Fritz is hoping someone will step up and make a movie out of The Walls Came Tumbling Down, the Robert Anton Wilson book/film script recently published as a new edition by Hilaritas Press. In the meantime, we have the new book, with RAW's helpful explanation on how to read film scripts, and Oz' new blog post, which offers an insightful and detailed analysis of the book.

For example, Oz correctly notes that "Death, in a variety of forms - literal, metaphorical, symbolic - revolves in and out through the screenplay," and writes in a later paragraph:

"When death comes around, all your walls come down. Might as well get used to it ahead of time. The 'borderless or other-wordly consciousness' his characters frequently stumble into is called the Bardo by Tibetan Buddhists. The Bardo describes the weird territory between lives, the space after death and before rebirth. The first serious scientific effort to map this territory in the West, and enter the Bardo before Extremum Vitae Spiritum Edere (giving up the ghost) gets documented in the The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert who all met at Harvard University - where Michael Ellis works in RAW's film. All three authors get name-checked in a single breath in an allusion to their book. (p.86); Leary becomes a minor character and obvious influence."

For those of you who take the trouble to buy the book and read it, the long Oz Fritz blog post is a nice bonus. 

A couple of places where RAW was right?

A new paper, "Why Did Putin Invade Ukraine? A Theory of Degenerate Autocracy," by Georgy Egorov, a managerial economics professor at Northwestern University, and Konstantin Sonin, a political economist at the University of Chicago, attempts to shed light on why dictators make disastrous decisions, such as Hitler deciding to attack the Soviet Union, or Putin deciding to invade Ukraine. The abstract suggests "an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented ...  the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence."

As I pointed out in the comments when Tyler Cowen posted a link, this seems to be at least partially a restatement of the SNAFU principle in Illuminatus! that communication is only possible between equals. 

Here is another new paper: 'The Counter-Reformation, Science, and Long-Term Growth: A Black Legend?" by Matías Cabello of Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. A posting on Twitter offers a handy summary: "New paper: before the Counter-Reformation, Catholic and Protestant cities had comparable numbers of scientists per capita.  Afterwards, Catholic cities experienced a persistent relative decline. Counter-Reformation's search for heresy was a negative shock to science."

In an interview that I can't give a citation for, because I cannot remember which one it was, Robert Anton Wilson noted that Sigismundo Celine, the hero of his "Historical Illuminatus!" novels, discovers that England is more advanced in many ways than Italy, because it is more free -- it doesn't have an Inquisition.

And although I can't point to  that interview, I can note that Wilson makes much the same point in the introduction to The Walls Came Tumbling Down, which as I noted the other day, has just been reissued by Hilaritas. 

Wilson writes, "After the coming of the Holy Inquisition, nobody discovered any new chemical elements in the Catholic nations of Europe; all the new chemical discoveries, i.e. the majority of the elements now known, came from Protestant nations. (See my Reality Is What You Can Get Away With for more data on this.) 

"Even today,  the effects of the Inquisition linger on, visibly, in the quality of life in most of northern Europe as compared to southern (Catholic) Europe."

'The Walls Came Tumbling Down' is a nice treat for RAW fans

Still getting caught up on my reading after being busy with the Prometheus Award (see yesterday's post), I finally finished the new Hilaritas Press edition of The Walls Came Tumbling Down, Robert Anton Wilson's unproduced screenplay about the Chapel Perilous experience of a college professor. 

It's not a very long book -- I read the bulk of it in the course of one evening -- but while I have no opinion on how well the screenplay would  have worked as a film, I thought it was a good, concentrated dose of RAW, and I enjoyed it. Walls was one of the few RAW books I had not read before. 

The book also includes an interesting introduction by RAW, and RAW also has a piece that explains the directions in a screenplay so that his own script would be easier to read for people not familiar with the film business.

The Hilaritas edition also features an insightful Foreword by Gregory Arnott which points out aspects of the screenplay I had not noticed on my own. There's also a really good afterword by Bobby Campbell, an anecdote about meeting RAW, and a reprint of Alan Moore's moving eulogy for RAW. 

Podcast: Gregory Arnott on 'Walls' and magick

 Gregory Arnott, who wrote the foreword for the new Hilaritas Press edition of Robert Anton Wilson's The Walls Came Tumbling Down, appears as the guest for a bonus edition of the monthly Hilaritas Press podcast, released to promote the book. Mike Gathers, serving again as the host, gets Gregory to talk about a variety of topics. The first half of the podcast concentrates on the book; the second half focuses on magick. There's discussion of my favorite TV show Twin Peaks, Graham Hancock comes up and Gregory has interesting things to say about UFOlogy. It's a good episode.

The official show site has some links, but I want to add a couple of things mentioned on the show: Gregory's essential reading list for people interested in magic, and Gregory's 2018 talk on RAW and magick.  You'll likely be able to find the podcast on your favorite app (I used Podkicker) but the link to the show site has several suggestions. 

Hilaritas releases 'The Walls Came Tumbling Down'

Hilaritas Press has released its new edition of The Walls Came Tumbling Down, Robert Anton Wilson's screenplay, and as usual there are extras to reward RAW fans for buying the new edition. Here is the announcement from Rasa: 

"This month Hilaritas Press has published the new edition of RAW's The Walls Came Tumbling Down, a mind-bending screenplay that seems fitting for our bizarre times. We have also included in this edition a foreword by Gregory Arnott, an enlightening story about "tumbling" from Bobby Campbell, and we were delighted that Alan Moore gave us permission to publish his eulogy for Robert Anton Wilson that he delivered at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, March 2007. Once again, Scott McPherson from amoeba created a dazzling new cover using a special 3D graphic technique called clayrendering.

[Gregory often has written for this blog under the name Apuleius Charlton].

"And now, a lovely excerpt from Alan Moore's eulogy...

“Robert Anton Wilson limped out through the wall into the fire, into the simultaneous party of eternity, into the splendid, timeless funfair of a life that he has somehow managed to survive with thirty-five books weaving his ideas in their spectacular diversity, weaving his luminescent consciousness into the intellectual DNA of our painfully slow-developing society and dancing somewhere with his wife, back when he could still dance and she was still alive...” – Alan Moore, author, occultist, and anarchist

I've already bought my copy; it's one of the few RAW books I haven't read.