The Sort of Man Who Will Add Stature: The Sex Magicians Chapter Two

 

The AI wouldn't add "HAT."

The Sex Magicians Chapter 2: "Are you drinking the water or the wave?" p. 14-22

The week's chapter's title comes from John Fowles' The Magus, a book that seemed to tap into some of the zeitgeist of the Sixties and which is referenced by Wilson a few times over the course of his corpus. So, even if the line is older than that, I'm betting Fowles' novel is the source. I've never read John Fowles' The Magus because I ended up with a copy of it instead of a copy of Francis Barrett's The Magus, which was a little harder to find in those days, and that really pissed me off. (I did, rest assured, secure a lovely copy of Barrett's The Magus.) Perhaps because the phrase doesn't come up as the old chestnut that gives Chapter 1 its vaguely masturbatory title, I read into this one a little bit more. I think it is a reference to Markoff Chaney's existential fit of pique, of course, but I also think it might be a bit of a message whose transmission seems uncannily timely. But it's been a long day, so I might just be loopy and overly reactive to my fancies. 

Before getting into all that, there are some points about details in the chapter I'd like to cover. Naturally, this chapter has a few instances of language that is no longer acceptable; I'm going to stop making this note after this post as it will get repetitive and I don't have any brilliant commentary that I think would add anything aside from acknowledgement. So bringing this up time and again would be like circulating through a party, saying "hi" to someone and nothing else each time you orbit-pass. If I think of some two cents about something further in the book, you know I'll add it. It is also interesting but ultimately somewhat pointless to ponder over the cross-pollination between this novel and The Illuminatus! Trilogy; are all the similar elements just altered bits borrowed from Illuminatus!'s manuscript or did any of the ideas spring forth here and were then worked into the fabled Trilogy? Wilson always claimed that the book was more-or-less completed by the end of '69 and that he and Shea were forced to cut hundreds of pages before publication, so...who knows? 

It wouldn't be surprising for there to have been pornographic tarot decks floating around during the 70s, but after some light research I couldn't find anything published before 1981. While it is very probable I just didn't look deep enough into the Internet, I can also see where such a tarot deck would have been a very small publishing affair. Michelle Olley talks about how this book itself would have been a small publication and only sold "below the shelf" in what few shops that stocked it, so it is quite possible that there were tarot decks that were gloriously nude, but they might be lost to history, attics or to assiduous collectors. It should also be kept in mind that tarot was nowhere near the industry it is today, where there is a veritable cornucopia of pornographic tarot decks to choose from (although most of them use the Caspar Milquetoast euphemism of "erotic tarot"); even Crowley and Harris' masterwork Thoth Tarot wasn't published until 1969. At first I thought that Wilson was having Markoff Chaney lay out a Tree of Life spread because of his contemporaneous reading habits, but I'm now convinced it was the author giving his character a more expansive tableau. 

Now I'm going to read too much into a character in a porn novel. 

Wilson repeatedly describes Chaney's campaign against the world as "surrealist" and accordingly his second signage assault upon regularity is reminiscent of Andre Breton's placard at the first Surrealist gallery: "DADA IS NOT DEAD. WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT." Markoff Chaney's life sounds miserable- consumed with hatred, in some ways his short stature is a pun on being a "small man." Now Wilson, in a way that can seem both empathetic and stereotypical, has Chaney's considerable chip forming because of the height of his shoulders, and you can see that he has put parts of himself into his antihero. The idea of a world of graphs, regularity, petty authority and bureacracy is incredibly frustrating and the push forward towards a joyless world where people are numbers hasn't been fun, by any stretch. In some ways Chaney's crusade is sympathetic and understandable; it's just how it consumes him makes him a somewhat tragic figure. However, because of his unpleasant aspects, down to his vomitous diet, Chaney spends most of the book as a pathetic if effective character, rather than one who evokes true pathos. 

I don't think I caught it the first time I read the book, because it stood out to me when I was rereading the manuscript before writing my essay, but Wilson humorously lays the chaos of the end of the Sixties and the Seventies at Chaney's feet. His surrealist assault is responsible for riots and bombings...which is eerily reminescent of the joke that has been floating around since 2016 or so that Project Mindfuck has worked a little too well. Amidst the general horrors of war and climate change, our society is churning towards November 5th; the aftermath of which, no matter what happens, will see heated rhetoric and a very good probability of greater social unrest/violence. Our society has had chances to change course and unify, to take it down a notch, but it seems...nothing doin'. At least for the foreseeable future. Is it possible that there the MGT is out there, setting off chain reactions that led to this? (Is it Tom Jackson?) Did Markoff Chaney invent the Internet? Considering Chaney's surrealist bonafides and the rise of theocratic-fascism in my home country, I was reminded of a quote from Alan Moore's recent novel, The Great When: 

"After two hours and another cuppa each, they came to the conclusion that all the surrealism of the 1930s had a lot to answer for, and so had Hitler." 

But, with my own worries turning into bitterness all-too-often, I think I might need to ask myself occasionally whether I'm drinking the water or the wave. I'm still not going to read the fucking misleadingly titled John Fowles novel though.