The possibly suppressed first edition.
While not as humorous as the Preface to the 2000 Edition, Wilson's 1987 Preface is a valuable addition to the text. As it seems that the New Falcon edition of the text was the first that would be widely available, Wilson adds some much needed context to the book and reveals the secrets of its composition that he was unable to in 1972 when it was published under the title Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits.
The anecdote about what Hefner supposedly said about Wilson's original title for the book, Sex, Drugs & the Occult, has always managed to elicit a chuckle and is one of the main things I think about when I think about Hefner. That and the scene from The Sex Magicians where the Hugh Hefner stand-in receives a blowjob while conferencing with one of his editors about how much he hates Spiro Agnew. As Wilson notes, the real Hugh Hefner was hard to pin down, as he was hidden behind an aura of the sophisticated lothario who shielded himself at the heart of his media empire. Over the years Hefner became a figure who reaped laughing accolades for maintaining his libidinous lifestyle until the end of his nonagenarian life. In the information-rich dissipative structure of the year 2022 E.V., a new docuseries supposedly reveals more salacious details about the publisher, including allegations of rape and bestiality. The myth continues to spawn questions, and now that the man is five years dead, it is unlikely we'll ever get to know much about the "real" Hugh Hefner. He is now firmly in the company of the imaginary rabbits listed by Wilson, although he casts a distinctly more sinister shadow.
Wilson's Greater Feast proceeded his former employer's by a decade and Wilson seems to have never met with Hef in the flesh, so less can be revealed about the potential suppression of Sex and Drugs during the Seventies. Wilson points out how rare the original edition of the book was, even for those who were seeking the title, and links its scarcity with the cessation of much of the underground press and a possible conspiracy on the part of the counter-revolution of that chaotic decade. I didn't live through the counter-revolution, but Wilson's books have made me fear a perhaps-imaginary period of American life where the vestiges of the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties were savaged by Nixon's dogs. My own hunch is the book was extremely niche and was most likely forgotten about; perhaps a few cases of the title were never distributed and pulped, but I'd imagine the original print of the book wasn't that expansive. If anything, the perhaps-imagined quote from Hefner would indicate that the title was simply published by the wrong company. If Hefner truly said that, well, that indicates that was how he was feeling on that particular day, but a mythical quote still indicates a general ethos in the Playboy realm against such unsophisticated shit as occultism. I could see the title having sold better under the auspices of Llewellyn, which contemporaneously released Louis T. Culling's A Manual of Sex Magick and The Complete Magickal Curriculum of the G.'.B.'.G.'., each of which will be mentioned in the forthcoming pages.
On a personal note, I do think Wilson's quick addendum about cocaine usage is why I never got into that drug and I thank him for that. Having seen a relationship and a friendship dissipate due to the increased usage of what are today called "party drugs," I deplore the effect that powders white and deadly can have on the course of life. I consider coke particularly pernicious because of the effect it has on Latin American countries who are terrorized by cartels and would bring up the karmic debt of a drug whose granules are disproportionately small compared to the blood each it is weighed against. This blood is obviously also on the hands of the United States government which fucked around with these countries and the drug's supply in a seeming bid to be as terrible as absolutely possible. Today, like Wilson says about sex in the era of AIDS, I would also urge any users, causal or habitual, to consider that using any powder without a testing kit in the era of fentanyl is like playing Russian roulette.
Wilson's entire oeuvre has a charming consistency, but his early work has an even clearer overlap of sources, favored anecdotes/examples and quotes. The original Introduction is prefaced with a quote form the Firesign Theater, albeit from a different album than the quote which prefaces Cosmic Trigger, and the 1987 introduction repeats Crowley's stunning introduction to Liber O which was used as an epigraph for Cosmic Trigger. Wilson's reasoning for considering cocaine "particularly pernicious" is the drug's linkages to the CIA/Vatican Bank conspiracy that fascinated Bob during the latter half of the eighties and early nineties and appears in his books, interviews and lectures.
After his rote, if apropos, discussion of American puritanism and pharmaceutical hypocrisy, Wilson spends a few pages defending the new title of the work, Sex, Drugs and Magick. Wilson's apologia for his interest in occultism is all too familiar to me as Wilson, I believe, is one of the greatest defenders of the non-faith's worthiness of study and has become the basis of my own arguments. I am even known to happily trot out that beaten horse from Hamlet, beloved of occultists from the 19th Century onward, that Wilson closes his original Introduction with. Wilson's preference for the usage of "magick" as opposed to "occultism" is salient, as is Moore's preference for "magic" as opposed to "magick" which influenced my own naming preference. If this point seems tedious to you, remember magic is a disease of language and naming things is very important in our symbol-language-viral load. The remainder of Wilson's preface is concerned with a discussion of Illya Prigogine's dissipative structures and his evangelism of optimism. While I typically would group such words as "evangelism" and "proselytize" in a distinctly different bubble than "Robert Anton Wilson," I do believe it is inarguable that our author was an irascible optimist, determined to spread the glad news until he shed his mortal coil.
My "fashionable pessimism" does want to scream out when Wilson inserts "(intelligent?)" between "information-rich" and "forms [of society]." To bring out my favorite whipping boy, I believe that we are living in an objectively information-rich world which is demonstrably unable to cope and is quite stupid. However, I agree with Wilson that the results are not in yet and there is still time for that damned horse to learn to fly. Amidst the farcical pageant of politics and cultural discourse, there are bastions of momentum that are trying to propel humanity forward towards a more courageous, creative and intelligent world.
Sex, Drugs and Magick: Introduction
After reading the thoughts of 1987 and 2000 Wilson, 1972 Bob doesn't seem as revolutionary as he should. It is unfair he has to appear on stage following those two warm up acts as he seems to be repeating their words. Yet, if one begins here, we return to the burgeoning, romantic figure of the Seventies Wilson who was much more radical than he gives himself credit for. There was a radicalism in maintaining an unusual but cohesive family structure while exposing himself to the furthest realms of thought he could project himself into. And there is the basic radicalism of the insidious nature of the thoughts that Wilson is feeding to his reader, subtly reprogramming their mind to question more and more of their basic precepts about society and reality.
Wilson also deplores radicals during one part of his introduction when he says that the idea that we shape much of our reality through perception would be offensive to "radicals" as it would seemingly imply that "poor people" could think themselves out of poverty instead of needing government assistance. Perhaps this is the lapsed libertarian or ever-present socialist tendencies in me but I rolled my eyes at this barb. Perhaps it is simply the tribalistic inability to take criticism of your impressions seriously, but my experience working with lower socioeconomic families does indicate that government assistance is necessary to help people move out of poverty. Indeed, a large part of that upwards momentum is due to attitude change and setting higher goals, but for those parts to be in place, basic needs must be met. In the words of Bertolt Brecht:
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on
So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
Not that Wilson was ever a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type of guy- he writes very bitterly about the necessity of social safety nets and those who would deny those systems in Cosmic Trigger. Nor was he ever the type of moralist that Brecht targeted in this song, and it is very necessary for those stuck in “the cycle” to disabuse notions of learned helplessness, but in this case, I believe the radicals would be right to be annoyed. Besides, the notion of “learned helplessness” only being applied to the poor is also ridiculous. The amount of learned helplessness in all levels of our society is astounding. Remember, in The Time Machine by perspicacious and farsighted Wells, that the Eloi with the withered arms are the descendants of the posh.
Furthermore, poor 1972 RAW, now robbed of his radicalism, is subject to silent editing by Wilson, as is 87’s Wilson, which leads to a couple bits of anachronism. In his 1987 Preface, Wilson notes that Ken Starr’s career is a perfect illustration of Menken’s definition of “puritanism.” While Starr had been a federal judge and Bush the Elder’s Solicitor General, I could find little about his career during those years. In my ignorance, Wilson must then be referencing the Starr Report, which left that barmy Christian bitch’s dubious mark on history. Starr is a particularly odious man who defended rich ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Trump during 45’s first impeachment. This was after Trump had described the man as “a lunatic,” “terrible” and “a disaster” back when he was friends with the Clintons in the late-nineties. I wish I had Trump’s ability to make allies out of people I had previously disparaged. Capping off Starr’s litany of skeeviness is his shameful resignation from Baylor where he seems to have covered up sexual assault. A good, Christian man indeed.
The second anachronism can be found in the Introduction where Wilson cites “our current President” as an example of behavioral evidence that men enjoy fellatio. Wilson did love to speculate about the sex lives of world leaders; in Illuminatus! he memorably describes the sexual habits of the leaders of the United States, Soviet Union and China identically as having been impotent with their wives for nearly ten years yet being able to achieve “orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes." While Nixon was certainly the model of the President in Illuminatus!, and the man certainly was a cocksucker, I don’t recall him being as notorious for his enjoyment of oral sex as Bill Clinton, ergo the President Wilson would have been referencing in 2000. These “anachronisms” are trite observations, but I found them interesting.
In each Preface and the Introduction, Wilson encourages his reader to keep an open-enough mind to hear his arguments and try the experiments as well as to have hope for their and the world’s betterment. I am happy to follow the well retrodden footsteps of our staunch opponent of entropy. Perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth after all.
Apuleius, you decided to name this post “That Paleolithic Sentiment”. The expression appears on the first page of the ‘87 preface about what Hef might or might not have said. But the on the last page of this same preface, we have: “perhaps the powers of the human brain have never fully been released in the paleolithic, neolithic, feudal, capitalist or socialist games.” I feel like this could imply that in Bob’s mind, not only humanity is far from having used its potential, but also that sombunall never even evolved much in the past 15,000 years. On that regard, I can only agree with Oz Fritz’ sally about war last week.
ReplyDelete“Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?”
The description of how internal affairs were dealt with at Playboy seems like another iteration of the SNAFU principle. It seems to me that RAW is also here subtly rejecting Objectivism. Ayn Rand is named on the first page, in one example of the principle. Later on, he goes on to debunking at length the idea of “objective reality”.
On page 20: “breaking free of mechanical consciousness […] can only be accomplished by one person at a time, and [...] trying to liberate the whole world is impossible and counter-productive.” I suspect that the more tranquil approach of simply writing books about this stuff might be a reason why RAW never “landed in the cell next to Dr. Leary and Charlie Manson”, while Leary on the other hand did try to bring about a “revolutionary force for social change” through his “poor usage of the first amendment”.
Seen in this light, the breakdown on p.21 of why one should be optimistic can be interpreted as a clarification of what it could mean to become a ‘Wonderist’, as Cat Vincent calls them. “Perhaps a sociological chain reaction can still be set in action if enough people learn how to transcend fashionable self-pity and make an effort to become happier and more efficient”, “so it is worth the gamble of experimentally breaking the group hypnosis of defeatism”. If it has to be one person at a time, at least we can support and inspire each other on this “journey beyond limits”.
I am not sure what John Lennon’s assassination in 1980 is doing in a paragraph about “the early 1970’s”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmbXza1MHNE
The Nixon counter-revolution makes me think of Pynchon's Vineland.
ReplyDeleteCool music video. Thanks for the post. RAW complained about the availability of his books when I saw him lecture sometime in the latter half of the 80's. In the Q & A segment I asked him why Timothy Leary's book s seemed so hard to find? He answered, "what about my books?!" And he was right, his books were difficult to find . I remember finding three of them at one time in Weisers at its 24th & Lexington location (NY). It felt like I'd struck gold such was my surprise and joy! I think they were the first two Historical Illuminatus books and a non fiction one, maybe Right Where You Are Sitting Now.
ReplyDeleteOn p. 20 RAW expresses his proclivity for wishing to liberate the world. I wrote an essay about his desire without knowing this particular reference in 2020.
My father was a physicist who got asked to meet with groups to help guide them through Prigogine's book Order out of Chaos not long after it came out.
A typo appears on p. 29 Hilaritas edition toward the bottom in brackets - "Got forbid" should likely read "God forbid."
@Spookah, I agree with Oz, You and Gurdjieff that fairness and decency is a lot to expect when we're this way. But I'm still gonna. Honestly, I wanted to name this post "Only Housewives' and F*gs," but people don't know me well enough to do that.
ReplyDeleteI think Wilson, at least elsewhere, was pretty obvious about his disdain for Objectivism so perhaps I just always feel his sardonic sentiment dripping through whenever he brings up Rand.
I think you make some ripe observations about Wilson vs. Leary/Manson as well as the one-by-one evacuation. Great catch about Lennon! And even greater song choice- I don't think I've listened to Cromagnon since Magic Transistor went down.
@Oz- I'm sorry I'm infrequent. I'm glad you liked Bobbie and Donovan. I'm lucky to have been born in the age of the internet insofar as I've been spoiled by title availability, even when I had to dig.
Your father being a physicist makes sense. I thought Wilson was trying to speak German there.
Cocaine plays a significant role in Schrodinger's Cat perhaps due to the fairly new prevalence of the drug at the time of writing. It seemed everywhere in the 80's. Not necessarily portrayed in a positive light, the main coked up character, and the one providing it at parties = Marvin Gardens. This name seems based on Martin Gardner, a somewhat dogmatic materialist I don't think RAW particularly cared for. Applying Joycean phonetic/sound association, Marvin Gardens resembles "mar in the garden." Garden recalls the Garden of Eden, the vision of paradise as perceived by C6 and C7, maybe. One esoteric interpretation holds that we never left this metaphorical paradise, that the Fall signifies one of perception, a fall from perception. From this view then, the habitual use of cocaine may mar higher perceptions. One user of it I knew, also adept at lucid dreaming and astral voyaging, told me that when he did coke, it blocked those kinds of experience.
ReplyDeleteOn p. 271 of SC, Gardens eats a "heavy slice of hash-candy" instead of snorting coke. What follows describes an experience very similar to one I had in the floatation tank about a week in to the current war:
"... and for a minute he had a crazy religious vision that WE HAVE TO STOP THE KILLING there is no other way and it is too late for another alternative it is exactly that simple and you can even repeat it in italics we have to stop the killing and he was so excited at the sudden clarity of it that he could see his whole future as nonstop witnessing to the truth of this vision." (SC p. 272)
My vision expressed as "we have to stop the war." It did arrive with sudden clarity and with the sense of "it is exactly that simple" to open a dialogue with Putin and find out what he needs to stop the aggression. Retrospectively, that seems the "crazy" part. I felt a strong urge to evangelize this vision - that seems the religious part.
The King of Marvin Gardens is a classic, if somehow a bit forgotten, 1972 film typical of the New Hollywood era, featuring Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.
ReplyDeleteApuleius, another song fitting this topic could be this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSoW8p6G3PY
Like the Watchmen comic book, this dates from 1986. And still seems relevant.
I wondered about the John Lennon assassination mistake, too, but I see Spookah spotted it already.
ReplyDeleteThe claim that the underground press died out because record companies stopped buying ads in them is interesting, but when I Googled around to try to confirm that, I couldn't find anything. Does anyone else know something about this?
What RAW says about cocaine also sounds descriptive of the big meth wave that washed through Oklahoma years ago. Once when I was getting my hair cut by a young woman, she described how her husband (I think it was a former husband) had lost everything because of his bad habits. I asked if it was methamphetamines and she said, "How did you know?"
I love the optimism of sentences such as "Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change."
As for Hefner, I did attempt to obtain an interview with him before he died; I was going to ask about "Illuminatus!" and Wilson, for this blog, and ask other questions, for an article that would appear in my newspaper. But my request for an interview was ignored.
I've finally read the Introduction. I don't see a discussion of sex and cannabis very often in the mainstream media, but here is a recent article in the New York Times:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/well/live/marijuana-sex.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DJDm4biPsYB4zH_0bTaO1mbsEy3SmSQtYEK7I_Avxuy-sVd2pcdz6VmLrW0pIUP3dy7oupQmI925-KVuxhqjK2MDf8eLchlPjisRyKdWjrC_DA2XYkIQ80p5VndVj7ymVIkvmeapN909F62_YmD5loF3xXNGTR4a6eW1gpM86Gbxrc9gAwR-lbPDrQlteW4L8DGx5AXROEFDgspDZht64PfY8fL639LBU_ecbhgbx3CWRgLYahApVZVJHIaAHkq3t-pdcoxKt3XUaN&smid=url-share
It seems the Lennon assassination made a strong impression on RAW, it inspired a modified version of it in Schrodinger's Cat, p. 333 - 336. In this epic novel, Cagliostro, like Lennon, gets shot outside his Central Park West apartment. Both Lennon and Cagliostro's killers fired 5 bullets into their victims. RAW conflates this assassination with both Kennedy and Lincolns. RAW places Cagliostro's murder on December 24th, Christmas Eve, which suggests the archetypal killing of the Divine King that both RAW and Bob Dylan connect with JFK's assassination.
ReplyDeleteCagliostro's senseless killing can get viewed as a prognosis of current times: Cagliostro = Hugh Crane = Ukraine.
I forgot to mention that Vlad the Impaler appears in Cagliostro's (Hugh Crane) bardo in the assassination scene.
ReplyDelete20 pages later the next book The Homing Pigeons begins. Part One is called "Who's Zelenka?" I immediately had the same question, it made me think of Zelensky. It refers to the baroque composer Jan Zelenka who Frank Dashwood happens to hear his music, then name on the radio leading him to think "Who the hell was Zelenka? Same period as Bach, I'm sure." p. 360 And for some quantum randomity chance operation or reason, it becomes the title of Part One. Below that title he's put three, humorously paradoxical quotes