isthar rising

[Herlu]

robert a wilson 'isthar rising'
http://www.rawilson.com/ishtar.html
Ishtar Rising
or, Why the Goddess Went to Hell
and What to Expect Now That She's Returning
first publication 1973; re-released by Falcon Press in 1989
from the Introduction to the Falcon Press Edition (1989)
Cary Grant was once told, "Every time I see you on the screen, I think, 'I
wish I was Cary Grant.'" He replied, "That's just what I think!"
I've been repeating that story ever since I first heard it, and
it never fails to amuse audiences, all of whom seem to understand it
immediately. Everybody groks that Archie Leach, the poor boy from
Liverpool who became "Cary Grant" never fully believed in "Cary Grant,"
since Cary was, after all, his own invention. On the other hand, here's a
similar story, which I also like to tell, that produces very mixed
reactions, with some people laughing and others looking puzzled or
slightly offended.
An art dealer once went to Pablo Picasso and said, "I have a bunch of
'Picasso' canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them
over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?" Picasso
obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great
Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, "Wait
a minute, Pablo. That's no forgery. I was visiting you the weekend you
painted it." Picasso replied imperturbably, "No matter. I can fake a
Picasso as well as any thief in Europe."
Personally, I find this story not only amusing but profoundly disturbing.
It has caused me to think, every time I finish a piece of writing, "Is
this a real Robert Anton Wilson, or did I just fake a Robert Anton
Wilson?" Sometimes, especially with a long novel, I find it impossible to
convince myself that I know the answer. After all, as Nietzche said,
"there are no facts, only interpretations"......
This book, frankly, got written originally because an editor at Playboy
Press asked me if I could write a whole book on the female breast.
"Sure," I said at once. I would have said the same if he had asked me
if I could write a book on the bull-elephant's toenails. I was broke that
month and would have tried to write anything, if somebody would pay me
for it. When I got the contract and the first half of the advance money, I
sat down and asked myself what the hell I would put in the damned book. I
decided to write a treatise on the relationship of the breast to the rise
and fall of Goddess religions, and -- to keep myself amused, and thereby
speed the writing so I could get the second half of the advance quickly --
combine this with a
basic introduction to Taoist philosophy....
This book contains some churlish grumbling against the Women's Liberation
movement as it was in 1972 (when the book was being written.) I have
revised some passages a bit, but allowed others to remain as historical
curiosities. The early 70s were the days when all the survivors of the
Sixties went a bit nuts, and the Women Lib nuttiness, in retrospect, was
no weirder than the other screwball ideas of the time....The charm of this
book would be spoiled, I think, if I updated it too much, so I have
retained much of my snide humor about the sexism of the alleged
anti-sexists.
The first time I saw a nipple in an American movie, I was jarred. It was
as if I had acquired a part-time schizophrenia which only went into
operation on entering a movie theater. Women, of course, had nipples in
real life, in Playboy, in European movies, in
pornography, in the National Geographic; but in Hollywood, I had been
trained to half-believe, they had all been born with a piece of fabric
that could never be removed, not even by the greatest surgeon in the
cosmos. And yet here they were on the screen; it was Hawaii, and the bare
bosoms were well-justified -- oh, very carefully justified -- by
historical accuracy, and yet I remembered when Cardinal Richelieu had
mysteriously changed to Prime Minister Richeliew (in the Gene Kelly
version of The Three Musketeers ) to avoid offending papist pride, just as
history changed in 1984 to save the party's credibility. (And how many
times had we seen actors who were notorious rakes and actresses who were
renowned for randiness playing Roman or Greek pagans or even pirates yet
still compelled to speak dialogue that had been tailored to sound as if
they had been raised in Catholic convents, as if -- and this was the great
unspoken
myth in all American movies until the mid-1960's -- everybody everywhere
had been raised in convents, and nobody had ever doubted the peculiar
sexual notions of the Council of Cardinals?) And yet there were nipples,
real live nipples on the screen, and I knew that an era had ended. It was
like Roosevelt's death when I was 13; until then, I had half-believed that
there would never be another President. Until those nipples appeared in
Hawaii, I thought I would never see an American movie that wasn't
implicitly a Roman Catholic movie.
Of course, the Catholic Hierarchy had been inteligent (and by their own
lights, right) all along: Repression is never a static process, but must
always be dynamic, either moving forward toward total control or
retreating backward as the floodgates open to that force
which French intellectuals quite correctly capitalize: Desire. Shakespeare
asked how Beauty could survive, being no stronger than a flower, and
Tennessee Williams answered (in Camino Real) that the flowers in the
mountains always break through the rocks. The cry of "Flower Power" in the
1960's might as well have been Nipple Power. Once those gentle buds had
crashed through the rocks of repression, Desire was free and the walls of
the cities began to shake. Real language began to be heard on the screens
of movie houses; other parts of the body, one by one, crept out of the
darkness of shame and concealment; topless clubs appeared with bottomless
clubs soon after; Blacks rebelled against poverty, students against
monotony, even straight citizens raised their voices against a war that
made no sense (but when had straight citizens ever objected to a war on
those grounds before?); the Indians emerged from the depression that had
crushed them since their last defeat at Wounded Knee and began to agitate
again; event
ually there were mutinies in prisons, in armies, on ships, even among Air
Force officers. In Frederick Perl's terminology, people had stopped
harboring their resentments and
began to make demands -- and a large number of them were proclaiming, in
loud voices, that they would use any means necessary to get what they
wanted. By the end of the decade, the Jesus Freaks, the women's
liberationists and the silent majority were all in a panic, trying
desperately to rebuild at least some of the walls of repression which
traditionally have kept civilized humanity from attempting to immanentize
the eschaton. This phrase is from conservative historian Kurt Vogelin and
refers, in technical theological language, to the heresy of the Gnostics,
who wished to produce heaven on this earth instead of postponing it until
after death. Vogelin says this heresy underlies all forms of radicalism
and rebellion, and he is probably right. Modern history is a war between
Authority and Desire, and if Authority must demand submission, Desire will
settle for nothing less than the attainment of its gratification.
In contrast to our deliberately optimistic sketch of the future, the
latest Supreme Court rulings on "obscenity" are a backward swing of the
pendulum, just as cynics have long been predicting. Once again we are told
that parts of our bodies must remain dirty little
secrets and that the state will use its powers of coercion to enforce this
code upon us. To a rationalist, it is as if the hightest court had ruled
that we must all believe, or pretend to believe, in the doctrine of the
Trinity. Some people can believe in a three-in-one divinity, and some can
believe that the human body is foul; others can no more believe these
propositions than they can accept the tenets of the snake-handling cult in
Georgia which we mentioned earlier.
It doesn't matter what rationalists believe; they must not get caught
exercising their disbelief.
The only consolation is that things would be even more absurd if it were
the snake handlers and not the sexophobes who were in power in Washington.
There is, in fact, no reason why the notions of the snake handlers could
not be enforced on the rest of us if they did get their crowd into high
office, for as Mr. Justice Burger said in a recent decision (Paris Adult
Theatre):
But it is argued there is no scientific data which conclusively
demonstrates that exposure to obscene materials adversely effects men and
women or their society. It is urged on behalf of the petitioners that,
absent such a demonstration, any kind of state regulation is
"impermissible." It is not for us to resolve empirical uncertainties
underlying state legislation save in the exceptional case where that
legislation plainly impinges upon rights protected in the Constitution
itself... although there is no conclusive proof of a connection between
anti-social behavior and obscene materials, the legislature of Georgia
could quite reasonably determine that such a connection does or might
exist. In deciding Roth, this Court implicitly accepted that a legislature
could legitimately act on such a conclusion to protect "the social
interest in order and morality".... From the beginning of civilized
societies, legislatures and judges have acted on various unproven
assumptions.
In short, there is no need to prove that an act is harmful to prohibit it.
If the legislators choose to prohibit it, the citizenry must acquiesce --
or go to jail.
As Wayland Young had pointed out:
But it is difficult or even impossible to argue that the accepted limits
of obscenity should themselves be redrawn without actually infringing them
in the process, and having to defend one's argument agains a charge of
obscenity. In this case, one would have to prove affirmatively that a
discussion of the public interest was in the public interest, which is a
startling thing to have to prove in a democracy.
The effect is naturally that the present conception of the public
interest becomes sacrosanct. If I merely say, speaking generally, "We call
too many things obscene, we are too restrictive in our definitions,"
nobody will pay any attention, and our conception of the public good will
remain unchanged. If, on the other hand, I give examples, saying:
"Consider these," and give my reasons for thinking they ought not to be
held obscene, my book may be suppressed for obscenity before anybody has
had time to consider it, and our conception of the public good will still
remain unchanged. Our society has painted itself into a corner... the law
of obscenity has the indirect effect of perpetuating itself. You cannot
argue with it without breaking it. [Italics in original.]
This is all very absurd, because within the criteria used in modern
science and modern semantics the concept of "obscenity" must be regarded
as a delusion. That is, it is a nonoperational concept, one which cannot
be utilized in making measurements of the physical world -- there is no
"obscenometer" which point at a book or painting or a song or a film and
take a reading showing how many ergs or ounces of "obscenity" it has in
it. There is no "obscenity" in any of these things, in fact; the
"obscenity" is in the mind of the person passing judgements. It is, in
Freudian terms, a projection, in which the mind imagines that its own
contents are outside itself in the external universe; or, in semantic
terms, a "confusion of the levels of abstraction," in which the mind's own
machinery is identified with the non-mental things it is attempting to
understand.
The man or woman who believes there is something called "obscenity" out
there in the external world is thus in precisely the same state of
delusion as those who imagine that gods or demons or strange voices out
there are communicating with them.
As psychologist Theodore Schroeder insisted, the belief in external
"obscenity" is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion.

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