Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Friday, July 6, 2018

RAW's guided meditation and piece on Proudhon



Martin Wagner's Robert Anton Wilson Archives site has uncovered a guided meditation that RAW wrote. In the piece, published in The Witches‘ Almanac: Aries 1976 to Pisces 1977, Wilson suggests recording the piece and then playing it back while sitting "relaxed but alert." I'll record it and give it a try.

Martin also has uncovered an earlier piece, "Proudhon’s Economics: Socialism without Tyranny." Proudhon is mentioned in the appendix of Illuminatus! The firat paragraph:

Benjamin Tucker considered The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century Proudhon’s best book—“the most wonderful of all the wonderful books of Proudhon”—and he may well have been right in that judgment. Like many of the greatest works of the last century this “most wonderful book” comes to us from a prison cell: a fact which is probably far from insignificant. It is not without cause that the letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Nietzsche’s Antichrist, the best poems of Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh’s two or three greatest canvases, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and several other of the most significant cultural products of this age, were produced by men who were at the time unwilling “guests of the State.” Nor is it idle to note that some time has been served (unproductively, alas!) by Ford Madox Ford, Nijinsky, Seymour Krim, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jim Peck, and almost everybody else worth a damn as a serious thinker or artist. It is getting to the point where, as Eustace Mullins noted in his biography of Ezra Pound, lack of a police or psychiatric record is looked on, by avante garde, as a sign that a man has sold out.

According to Martin, this was published in" Way Out" in September 1962. It must have been about the time Wilson was arrested and briefly jailed in a civil rights protest in Antioch, an incident he describes is Cosmic Trigger II.

3 comments:

Martin Wagner said...

That was about the time, but before the first sit-in:

On April 25, 1963 picketing is employed as a means of putting additional pressure on Gegner, the community and informing additional people. Two days later the first sit-in is employed.

Civil Rights Protest at Yellow Springs Barbershop, 1964

Jesse said...

The Proudhon piece was also published as the preface to Gordon Press's 1972 reprint of GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION.

Eric Wagner said...

Thank you Martin and Tom.