trigger 3
Herlu
http://www.rawilson.com/trigger3.html
I GOT RUN OVER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
This is not a normal world.
-- Batman
"Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your whole life on, but it's all we've got.
-- Hannah and Her Sisters
According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994 -- George
Washington's birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and
believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called
Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice
mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen other friends had already called
to ask to speak to me, or -- if they still believed in Reliable Sources --
to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered
that news of my tragic end had appeared on Internet, one of the most
popular computer networks, in the form of an obituary from the Los Angeles
Times:
"Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his
home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Wilson, 63,
was discovered by his wife, Arlen. "Mr Wilson was the author of numerous
books....He was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology
and off the wall humor. Mr Wilson is survived by his wife and two
children."
This L.A. Times obit originally got on the net via somebody in Cambridge,
Mass. I thought immediately of the pranksters at M.I.T. -- the Gremlins of
Cyberspace,
as somebody called them. I admired the artistic versimilitude of the
Gremlin who forged that obit. He mis-identified my ouvre. (Only 6 of my 28
books could
possibly get classified as science-fiction, and perhaps 3 more as
science-faction.) He also, more clumsily, stated my age wrong by one year
and the number of my
surviving children wrong by one child. Little touches of incompetence and
ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real,
honest-to-Jesus LA Times article
-- just as creeking chairs, background coughs, overlapping dialogue,
scrupulously "bad" sound quality etc. make the bogus newsreels in Orson
Welles's two greatest
movies, Citizen Kane and F For Fake, seem "just like the real thing." The
forged LA. Times obituary may not rank with Welles's most monumental
hoaxes -- e.g.
his prematurely Deconstructionist "war of the worlds" radio show, where
bland music and increasingly ominous newsbreaks thoroughly confused a mass
audience
about the borderline between "art" and "reality." But the Times forgery,
if not of Wellesian heft, certainly contained a Wellesian blend of art and
magic: in retrospect,
it even reminds me, a little, of the 1923 Surrealist art show, in which
the audience first encountered a taxi-cab in the garden -- a cab which had
rain falling inside but
not outside -- and then confronted a sign telling them gnomically:
DADA IS NOT DEAD
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT
I always think that double dip of guerilla ontology (by Dali and Breton,
respectively) arried the baffled audience beyond surrealism into
post-modernism, i.e. Total Agnosticism and/or terminal bewilderment.
Certainly, art and life, and art and magick, have never gotten clearly
disentangled again to the satisfaction of all observers. In this struggle
to knock down the Iron Curtain between creativity and "reality," I tend to
see the Wellesian men-from-Mars hoax as the second major step after
surrealism and, ahem, I sometimes immodestly consider my own works a third
step. But the Gremlin who killed me on February 22 carried the
"transformation of mind and all that resembles it" (Breton) one quantum
jump further than I ever had. He caused real grief and shock, if not
Wellesian mass panic. One friend told me that the first bulletin he saw,
on Compuserve, just quoted the alleged LA obit and then added, "This is as
bad as learning that Zappa died. I think I'm going to meditate a bit, in
his memory." Another networker, female, keyboarded in a whole chapter of
Ecclesiastes in my memory -- "For everything there is a season, a time
for every matter under the sun: a time to be born, a time to die" etc. --
and then added "Now get out there and PARTY LIKE HE'D WANT YOU TO!" One
bulletin from "The House of Apostles of Eris, San Francisco" said that
"attempts to contact Robert Anton Wilson have been unsuccessful" -- hmmm?
-- but nevertheless reassured all that "RAW is alive and busy with
religious works." I think the author of that bulletin intended to sound
unconvincing, especially to the initiates of my Classic Novels (Erisian
"religious works" consist of mind-fucks or "shocks " in the strict Masonic
sense). He or she certainly cast contagious suspicion on the other denials
being posted on the nets by various friends who had managed to contact me.
Certainly, the conspiracy buffs who have followed my career ever since
Iluminatus will not believe a report that includes the suspicious
admission that nobody could find me .... Many contributions to the
alive-or-dead controversy seemed unsure whether I had died (or hadn't
died) in Los Angeles or San Francisco. The funniest one of all claimed I
survived, but in Howth (County Dublin, Ireland) -- where I lived during
most of the 1980s:
"Contacted at his home in Howth Castle, Wilson said 'The reports of my
death have been slightly exaggerated. I can still totter about a bit and
even crack a weak joke occasionally.'" To which some wit, recognizing the
Joycean jest, replied: "Shouldn't that be Howth Castle and Environs?" The
Howth legend continued to circulate from one net to another, and soon
included the news that I had taken over management of the Committee for
Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) after the death
of its founder, Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan, of Trinity College, Dublin,
and that CSICON still offers $100,000 to any "normalist" who can produce
"a perfectly normal person, place or thing -- or even an ordinary sunset.
Or an average day." Of course, Finnegan and CSICON exist in some sense,
like Howth Castle, as readers of my works know by now -- not quite in the
sense in which the Statue of Liberty exists, but not entirely in the
metaphoric
sense in which the National Debt and the Holy Trinity "exist" eÃther. But
the result of all this was beginning to make me wonder if I only exist in
some semiotic or metaphoric sense myself, sort of like an elderly male
Madonna. I mean, like, man, do I exist the way the Howth Castle in Dublin
exists, or the way the Howth Castle and Environs in Finnegans Wake exists?
I remembered a Spiritualist treatise I had once read. (I skim all sorts of
weird literature, which keeps me from believing totally any of the stuff
we get told as Official Truth by the major media). This ghostly tome
claimed that we poor spectres often do not know we've died until some
medium "contacts" us and explains why people have started treating us so
rudely lately -- e.g., why even our wives and children ignore us outright
unless we knock over the lamps or rap in code on the tables. I had also
read Jonathan Swift's hilarious "pamphlet war" with the astrologer
Partridge about whether Partridge had or had not died on the day predicted
by a rival astrologer, Isaac Bickerstaff. ("Bickerstaff" sounds a lot like
Swift himself, operating behind a Mask as usual, just as Lemuel Gulliver,
the scientific world traveler, also sounded curiously like Swift; we shall
learn much about Reality and Masks in this enquiry.) Although Partridge
insisted vehemently on his continued vitality, Swift's argument, a model
of Celtic subtlety, held that just because a man claims he hasn't died and
may even believe it himself, this does not logically require us to credit
his unsupported testimony. This left poor Partridge floundering -- (never
argue with a Dublin intellectual) -- and now I felt myself floundering a
bit also. Obviously, my testimony on the matter would not convince Swift,
when he decided to play the Scientific Skeptic, and I wondered if it would
convince CSICOP --the group opposing CSICON. CSICOP (Committee for
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) believes that the
"normal" actually exists somewhere, and not just in some Platonic spook
world. They claim it exists everywhere., and that nothing else at all
exists anywhere.
(If you see any of the 10100 not-normal things in this world, they will
claim you had a hallucination.) As a famous bard wrote:
He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus
He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus
I remembered a Phil Dick novel, Ubik, about a bunch of dead people who
don't know they have died and think the universe has slowly started
turning into shit. If that happened to me, I would not and could not know
about it -- by definition. Thoughts like that can really unsettle your
mental architecture, especially if you wasted a lot of your life on
epistemological philosophy, and on cannabis extracts. I, alas, have
indulged both those vices on many occasions, and I fear that I have become
a horrible example of Aggravated Existentialism. Worse yet: I have also
heard Albert Rosenfeld, a distinguished M.D., lecturing on "clinical
death," say, "We have come a long way from the day when Marshall Dillon
lifts the sheet and says, 'He's dead, all right.' Now it takes a committee
to decide." But these ontological doubts got pushed aside when the C.I.A.
entered the Trip, playing the Wrathful Demons of this bardo. Somebody
(signing her/him/itself as "Anon.") logged the following into several
computer bulletin boards:
"THE C.I.A. KILLED ROBERT ANTON WILSON...
"Wilson did not die of natural causes. He was assassinated. Earlier on
that day, Wilson was injected with a time-delay poison based on shellfish
toxin, by agents of the CIA's special UPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD,
using a special microscopic needle made of a plastic which dissolves in
the body without a trace. Wilson's body had immediately been taken and
cremated and the usual step of an autopsy had been bypassed, BY ORDERS
FROM ABOVE.
"It is clear why the power$ that be wanted Wilson dead. Wilson was a
dangerous element; the government can only govern if the majority does not
question the system (whoever currently "rules" does not matter.) The
troublesome minority can be dealt with discreetly, by means of EXECUTIVE
ACTION (assassination), which is what happened with Wilson....
"Earlier the same agencies (CIA, NRO, DEA and CFR/TLC/Bilderberger
BOLSHEVIK SHADOW GOVERNMENT) had LSD advocate Timothy Leary neutralized
with a neurotoxin which DESTROYS THE MIND and ARTIFICIALLY INDUCES A STATE
SIMILAR TO SENILITY...
"Dissemenation of this information is encouraged. MAKE 30 COPIES."
Cute as a shit-house rat, I thought, when I read this. Now, whenever Tim
tells people I haven't died, that will furnish further evidence of his
"senility." Of course, I also enjoyed the idea that somebody, somewhere,
might consider me important enough to terrorize the C.I.A. and call out
their SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD to terminate me. Since
CLASSIFIED represents the rating directly below SECRET in government
security manuals, I wondered how the CLASSIFIED BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD
spends its time -- giving housemaid's knee or genital warts to editorial
cartoonists? Others grew more eldritch:
"Maybe the government has installed a VIRTUAL RAW in his place to allay
people's fears. Oh, sure, he can respond all he wants, but I know it's not
the real RAW."
But my favorite contribution of the Wilson Mythos was logged by somebody
using the monicker, The Green One:
"There is no toxin. There is no needle. You have not heard of a toxin. You
have not heard of a needle. They were not tools of the conspiracy. There
is no conspiracy. The toxin and the needle, which do not exist, played no
part in the conspiracy, which does not exist. Fnord. Repeat after me.
There is no toxin..."
What can I add to that bit of guerilla ontology, except to say "Fnord
indeed?"
happy surf herlu, from hamburg, de; gate to the world
http://members.aol.com/herlu/home/index.htm
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