RIP RAW by PLW
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[A little out-of-date, but I missed it when it was timely.--DC]
http://underminedeology.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html
Robert Anton Wilson: Author The Illuminatus! Trilogy & Cosmic Trigger,
Dies at 74
Originally published in Fifth Estate.
by Peter Lamborn Wilson
For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive
basis -- i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness -- we
decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves
connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk
Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel
experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology
(including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was
Wilson) never materialized -- although we did collaborate in editing
Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.
There’s no doubt Bob was some sort of anarchist. His earliest interests
and experiences (the School of Living, for example) involved connections
with old-time American Philosophical or Individualist Anarchism of the
Spooner/Tucker variety, and, in fact, this shared background firmed the
basis of our friendship.
When Bob was on the road a lot in the 80s and 90s doing “stand-up
philosophy” in cities across the US, he visited New York often and after
his lectures he drank with anarchists, libertarians and ceremonial
magicians -- his fan base, as it were -- although he used to say he
could never join the Libertarian Party because he couldn’t bring himself
to hate poor people enough. He called Libertarians, “Republicans who
smoke dope.”
Bob was a Futurist and I am a Luddite, but after a long series of
letters back and forth we agreed to disagree on the subject of
technology, since neither of us wanted to put ideology in the place of
camaraderie.
We got too much enjoyment out of our shared interests: the Propaganda
Due, Freemasonic Conspiracy, science fiction, “Irish Facts,” as Bob
called his favorite Celtic paradoxes and tall tales, occult and lost
history, pirates, strange science and Fortean phenomena, the Discordian
Church (co-founded with anarcho-taoist Kerry Thornley of the “Universal
Rent Strike,” r.i.p.) in which he appointed me Pope -- because all
Discordians are Popes. (But Bob was The Pope -- also his title in the
Church of the SubGenius.) Bob was one of the great pub talkers, probably
a lot like Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas (he somewhat resembled both of
them physically).
Liquor and weed for him were bardic fuel.
I’m proud to say I appear -- under several guises, alter egos and noms
de plume -- in one of Bob’s last books, Everything Is Under Control
(1998), a sort of encyclopedia of his favorite conspiracies. Unlike some
of his admirers, Bob never believed in any one conspiracy as more (or
less) real than another. He simply took a chaote’s delight in humanity’s
occasional talent for genuine mystery; and for him, Imagination was a
form of reality. Was he playing or was he serious? Exactly.
In later years, when he cut down on his grueling dada vaudeville
speaking tours and retired to California, we lost touch because Bob
decided to colonize the Internet and I decided not to. Our mutual friend
Eddie Nix kept us linked with warm greetings back and forth. Eddie sent
me print-outs of Bob’s most recent web-page, the Guns & Dope Party
(“because that way we have a majority”) -- one of his best stunts or japes.
Founding a political party may not seem a doctrinaire anarchist sort of
thing to do, but Bob was first and deepest a post-Nietzchean homo
ludens, playful man, perpetrator of the lusus seriosus, the “serious
joke.” In his best writing, the Illuminatus! books (starting in 1975,
co-created with the late Bob Shea) for example, R.A.W. approached his
idol James Joyce in sheer ludic intensity, and his other idol Flann
O’Brien in number of laughs per page.
Certainly his works belong to the literature of anarchy, like say Alfred
Jarry’s or Oscar Wilde’s, if not to the literature of anarchism.
Despite a good deal of suffering in life (his childhood polio and the
long sickness of his wife Arlen; the murder of his daughter; and his
dying broke), Bob always appeared cheerful, which is either very good
advertising for Neuro-Linguistic Programming (a theory he developed with
Tim Leary, but which I never quite understood), or else for the
therapeutic virtues of cannabis. For instance, some years back a rumor
was spread maliciously on the Internet that Bob was dead. Instead of
getting annoyed, he had great fun doing the
Reports-of-my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated routine.
I see in R.A.W.’s Wikipedia obituary (sent to me by carrier pigeon from
Fifth Estate’s southern HDQ) -- an otherwise lackluster text -- that Bob
was equally amused the second and final time as well, telling his
correspondents, “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death
seriously. It seems absurd.”
He died five days later.
Tombeau for R.A.W.
Poem & pomology -- false etymology
or proto-Indo-European ha-ha?
The small-k kabbalist relishes
a poemogranate from the garden
in Grenada. N.E. Vavilov (later
denounced by Lysenko, dies in Gulag)
discovers Eden somewhere in Kazakhstan
not far from the genetic epicenter of hemp.
Noon blue apples. The Discordian Pope
throws out the first ball of the season
over the fence into the Hesperides
or Tir na Nog the island of
Irish Facts. Turn down gents
your jiggers of Jameson’s.
—P.L.W
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
RMJon23
> Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
> in charge on this island?
> Professor: Why, no one.
> Skipper: No one?
> Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
> -- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
Wow. Thanks for finding and posting this, Clore. My favorite obit for
RAW (died 2yrs ago, minus 4 days).
I'd love to read the PLW-RAW correspondence! Anyone out there got a
line on this?
Weirdly related: I'm a fan of PLW/Hakim Bey, and have tried to acquire
all of his stuff (lucunae, still); but tangentially I became
interested in Guy Davenport's writings via his friendship/affinity
with Hugh Kenner, 'cuz both guys are interested and write exceedingly
well about RAWstuff like Joyce, Pound, Bucky Fuller, and a few other
things.
Then I saw that Guy Davenport had died one day. There was his obit.
Early 2005.
About a month later I found a PLW book at half.com that I didn't have,
and it was a really good deal. _Escape From The Nineteenth Century And
Other Essays_, (1998). It has a really nifty psychedelic cover with
portraits of Fourier, Marx, Proudhon, and Nietzsche.
I received it in the mail a week or so later, and it was inscribed on
the title page, "To Guy Davenport from Peter Lamborn Wilson, April 21,
'04"
Davenport died on Jan 4, '05. Was it "real"? Who knows.
A line (a goof?) from Davenport's Wiki I just now read:
"Davenport bought Oscar Mayer bologna, fried it, and ate it with
Campbell's soup[12]."
RIP: RAW and Davenport.
I see this msg is also going to the Chomsky group. Well, Robert Anton
Wilson thought Chomsky's critique of US power was tremendously great,
but he thought Noam's linguistics were, as he told me, "preposterous."
RAW would've been keenly interested in George Lakoff's latest work,
and would've seen it within an anti-Cartesian, pro-Vico line of
thinking about how language REALLY works in minds and societies.
[Ramble off]
-Michael of Berkeley
Frater Frizzle Frack, 69th Degree
> Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
> in charge on this island?
> Professor: Why, no one.
> Skipper: No one?
> Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
> -- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
We miss you Bob. Every time I fiddle jigs and reels, or drink Jameson,
it shall be in thine memory. [hiccup]
He's not gone. He's with the fairies and 'little peoplee' that abduct
me in the night and teach me new tunes to fiddle. Seamus O'Satori, the
kick in the drunken eye, go rabh maith agat.