Straight Outta Dublin, the
new book about Robert Anton Wilson and James Joyce by Eric Wagner, examines Joyce's influence on Wilson's writing. It includes a long essay by R. Michael Johnson that reinforces Eric's efforts; Michael's knowledge of Wilson's work is impressive and is put to good use.
As Michael is a major contributor to the book, I asked him if he would take a few questions from me, and he agreed. Michael was a bit worried about how long his answers were, so I agreed to take a look at them and cut out anything that was not interesting. But everything seemed interesting to me, so I am sharing what I got, with a couple of links and light editing. The Management.
RAWIllumination.net: How did you get recruited to contribute to Straight Outta Dublin? Why were you interested in the project?
Michael Johnson: In email with Eric, he'd mentioned his Straight Outta Dublin thing and how he was adding to it, and I may have asked some Qs about what he was doing there. I knew Masks of the Illuminati was a hot thing in it, which made me want to read it. To me, Masks and the essays in Coincidance on Joyce are the epicenter of RAW on Joyce. It was a topic that urgently needed addressing. Both Eric and I were bothered by those lines where RAW told some interviewer that the critics seemed to see him as a writer on conspiracy theories, a counterculture writer and friend of Leary who was also a psychonaut, etc, but they never seemed to realize how he was so profoundly influenced by Joyce. Eric Wagner was gonna fix that, and I was glad for it.
As I recall - I'm really, really RILLY bad as remembering the exact words, sequences, dates, etc, so this is a general answer - at some point Eric asked me about my own writing and I said something about "I just gotta get paid for once." I'd written a shit-ton for FREE online, hoping it would lead to something I'd get paid for, but I'd never gotten any gigs, nor been paid a cent. I see loads of dismal stuff every day online that I know someone got paid for writing. I got to feeling like a dupe. I remember telling Eric I think I just don't have the connections or don't belong to any in-group, never got a degree, much less do I wear some special class pin, etc. And at some point he asked me if I'd like to write something for his book that rebuts what he was writing. I said that sounds good, but I need to get paid...something. I'd've taken a sawbuck. He said fine. How much ya want? I asked for a very small amount and he immediately agreed. For me, it was just symbolic more than anything else. A flat fee. And he gave me free rein to write whatever I wanted. He's really a sweetheart of a man, and the kind of fellow-thinker who fosters emotional energy around ideas and intellectual pursuits.
I read his book (to date) and immediately came up with maybe 30-40 pages of commentary on his book. It wasn't so much a rebuttal, as I think he wanted. I really did not disagree with what he was saying, and especially the journal of the plague years stuff and him actually doing the exercizes from Prometheus Rising, his dazzling kabbalistic way of linking everything in his life together into another level of meaning, whether he's struggling with his weight, pondering one of the eternal verities, writing on music, memories of artists and writers he met, etc: What was there to rebut? I had this piece of footnote-y commentary on his book.
But then: Do you know how, when you write something that you think is "not bad" and you accomplished what you set out to do...but something's nagging at you that it's just...not...quite..."right"? I had that. I let the piece simmer then put it up under the heat lamp so it wouldn't go cold but would cool a bit. Sometimes I'm wrong about it not being right. It's okay; I'm just second-guessing myself.
Then, as so often happens with me, a few new ideas about what to write instead come to me. Should I? I spend a week or two just making little notes on scraps of paper: IF I were to write about this or that topic instead, this and that would be fun to address. It's the kind of thing I think about while out riding my bicycle or showering. I'll be pleasantly stoned improvising weirdo blues on my guitar late at night and ideas come to me. It's an alchemy that I'd like to think is fairly common for writers, but I'm not sure. I know at some point I'll just decide: fuck it: the existing piece is good: send it to him, see what he thinks and be done with it.
The "this is not quite right" thing just sunk in. I don't know why - intuition? - but it did, and my answer to this Q is getting too long, so I'll just say I scrapped the non-rebuttal footnotey piece and wrote a series of Weird 'N Amusing Items around Joyce that I thought were fun to read. Stuff like him being suspected of writing in code and spying; comments made by the person who had translated Finnegans Wake into Chinese; Claude Shannon on Finnegans Wake and "semantic compression" and Information Theory, and that weird bit about John Francis Byrne, Joyce's friend who's coded as "Cranly" in Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and who lived with two cousins at 7 Eccles St, where Poldy and Molly lived: Byrne later moved to the US and developed a "chaocipher" - a sort of Enigma Machine - for the US. He challenged Norbert Wiener, and it's really all covered pretty well in the magisterial The Codebreakers, by Kahn. I had some stuff on nanotechnology and microbiology and how Joyce had winnowed his way into those worlds late in the 20th century and into our times.
This was all "Hey Did You Know..?" stuff that I thought was amusing, innarestin' trivia around James Joyce.
Then I thought it was too trivial. At least for Eric's book. Reading on Joyce as suspected spy and stuff like Byrne's story diverted my attention and a veritable flood of ideas and material around RAW and Leary and the counterculture, their influences, and the CIA/FBI and paranoia and the idea of a "useful idiot" and the national security state led me to write about 130 pages (who knows, really?) on this stuff. And of course this was way too long and didn't fit in Straight Outta Dublin. At present it's diffuse, shambolic and besides, who would pay for this? No one.
Increasingly, the idea that Joyce's influence on RAW should be emphasized by me, too, took hold. After all, it was the era of Me Too. Both Eric and I would combine to team-up and superhero-like conquer and hammer home how fairly profound Joyce's influence was on RAW's writing and thinking. So that's what I ended up doing. Perhaps in too clinical a fashion, but hey: I got it off my chest! Finally. I think Eric and I accomplished this goal. No critic can overlook Joyce's extensive influence on RAW now if they're paying attention. Not after this book. Maybe I'm deluded - I often am - but not in this case. I'd like to see writers jump off from what we have in Straight Outta Dublin and take it to some new places, just not the Sunken Place please? Okay, take it there too. Let's see what ya got.
RAWIllumination.net: I know you are perhaps the person who is most well-read in Robert Anton Wilson's work -- you once told me you read him every day -- but how familiar are you with Joyce's work? Do you have a favorite Joyce book?
Michael Johnson: I assume/suspect/imagine/posit that there are a number of readers of RAW who are more adept at reading him than I am. I draw from the dizzying world of Statistics here. It's just that those people haven't made their presences felt to us yet. I hope something like this is true. I don't know what it means to be most well-read with regard to some writer's work. I'd like to think I'm in the game, though. Maybe a banjo-hitting shortstop of a RAW reader, hitting 7th in the lineup, but able to lay down a bunt in the late innings to move the go-ahead runner into scoring position, and I apologize to all my non-American readers for this baseball analogy stuff. I'm a product of my background and resort to the worn-out sports metaphors like the best - or worst - of 'em.
I had a fantastic English professor at Citrus College named David Sundstrand. We didn't read Joyce in any of his classes, but he had name-dropped Joyce as someone who seemed on par with Billy the Shakes. I kept this in mind. At some point in my true education - which is outside the walls of any chartered school - I copped Dubliners or Portrait from the library. I loved this guy. Ireland! I bought used copies of both those books and sorta lived in them. This was in the days of the late 1980s. I had a girlfriend who was committed to Knot's Landing. To each their own. Ah! Yesterday's Seven Thousand years!
Then I looked at Ulysses one day standing in a library aisle. WTactualF? This looked like an Everest worth training and planning for. An expedition. The card catalog - remember those? - told me there had been many who had assayed a summit, and lived to write about it. How awesome an assay their essays! These names took on a weight for me: Harry Levin, Stuart Gilbert, Hugh Kenner...Elders, Wise Men who could lend a piton or carabiner and I'm running out of laughable extensions of the metaphor here. An oxygen tank? Anyway, at some point I tried, then, like Joseph Campbell, I ran into Stephen's interior on the beach, "Proteus" and "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more..." and knew I needed the assistance of those who had Gone Before. I used my library card, that golden ticket.
I have a memory of my first looking into Finnegans Wake. It was right around the time that I was engrossed in James Gleick's Chaos: Making A New Science. Just trying and failing to read it put me into a strong microdose-of-psilocybin headspace. How can such a thing be wrong? The synergy of Chaos and FW was potent and overtook my world for awhile. If the effects of reading on consciousness at this level was wrong I didn't wanna be right, to rip-off an olde song.
When I happened onto Robert Anton Wilson, he poured a jug of gasoline on the local fire hotspot Joyce thing for me. That he saw Joyce as psychedelic also was confirmation of what I'd felt but had not really read in books. Leary had written something along these lines, in, I think, Flashbacks. But RAW made me feel like I wasn't drillin' in a dry hole. And RAW was authoritative on Joyce, even FW! That was among the many things that made me fall for RAW, big-time.
FW still seems to me, to this day, so utterly Other, that I've long given up the idea that we've "read" FW and now it's time to move onto the next book. The linguistic chaos of it defeats that idea. It's now trite to say you never really finish FW. I mean that beyond the literal circular aspect of the book. If Ulysses was Everest, FW is literally being bombarded by cosmic rays, undergoing genetic mutation, sprouting wings, then flying to the center of Consciousness for a nice languid lunch that never ends. Your question: "How familiar are you with Joyce's work?" It doesn't apply after FW. Non computant. I don't know a damned thing. And furthermore, I'm cool with it. I have glosses. We all do, and perhaps that's the main message, but what the fuck do I know?
There now exists extensive online glosses of FW in addition to all the wonderful book-books on it. I'm particularly fond of John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark, but I frame the reading of FW as something different from reading other books. I'm very much influenced by McLuhan and the idea of media and technology as environments. And I see every book as an environment to inhabit. Even The Big Book of Masturbation or Aspects of a Theory of Syntax or Bora Bora Travel Guide: 1993 or Rose of Paracelsus. It's just that FW has more psychedelic effects on me than any other.
One of the daily fallouts from inhabiting FW is the marvel of other readers of it who are obviously way ahead of you. Or their glosses are more potent. A certain feminist will think, Here it comes: the dick measuring! But it really isn't that. The wonder that such a text exists puts me into a sort of cradle of unknowing. I'm a babe in the woods here, folks. I haven't even reached puberty in these respects, so be kind and lay off me here. We're all flailing around inside FW, using our wits and secondary and tertiary sources, tryna make sense of it. There's a passage from very late in FW that RAW wrote about and I addressed in SOD: "My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud..." Oz Fritz noticed while editing that RAW seemed to have memorized this and had truncated the longer passage a bit. I had not noticed this. It's this kind of reader of FW I wonder about. It's people like Peter Quadrino: all those cartographers of the extra-dimensional space in FW who I am in awe of. And they will point to others who have mapped out more, on and on. Derrida had some lines somewhere about how he was in awe of the hardcore Joyceans. I am too. It's really a marvelous Company. Truly. 'Tis.
Is it a "limit text"? I think so. It makes me feel like maybe Chaos does exist inside of all human language, and Language just needed some humanoid nervous systems to evolve on a given planet - perhaps millions of planets - and there it could use its host - us - to flourish. A related idea is that, yoga-like, language and us and our nervous systems are able to support something like what language could do, and FW is in the avant of all that. This seems fanciful, but then I'm a weirdo given to such modes of thought.
Short answer: I'm fairly familiar with Joyce's work.
RAWIllumination.net: I suspect there may be RAW fans who are not particularly into James Joyce. If you are really into RAW, should you go ahead and get this book?
Michael Johnson: It's a tough call. The RAW fanatic has her reasons why they'd rather study one of a million other things over Joyce. Get at it! Take your reading and curiosities seriously but try to have serious fun while doing so, which, I think, makes for a decent enhancement to one's life. That's way more important than some guy saying, "Buy this new book I've written." Presumably, if you're a major RAWphile and yet aren't interested in delving into more Joyce, you have your reasons.
I'd like to think there's enough about Joyce by way of RAW in Straight Outta Dublin to make the RAW reader who hasn't read Joyce a tad more teasingly interested in reading some Joyce. What was it about Joyce that had RAW mentioning him so often? Aren't you piqued? Is it only the "obscenity"? The infinite IQ? Don't let Academia or those dwelling within it scare you off. Joyce wanted to be for everyone. Here Comes Everybody: it's right there in Finnegans Wake. All over the damned place.
Dubliners is very accessible. RAW thought Joyce invented the "slice of life" style in that book which later became very popular in places like The New Yorker. I remember being a bit weirded-out by "An Encounter" when I read it at a young age. I was so naive! I had to figure out what was going on with the old man on the outskirts of town, when the boys had skipped school and trekked out to the Pigeon House. I finally figured it out on my own, then thought I must be reading into it, probably 'cuz I just hadn't run into this sorta scenario when reading "classic" literature. So I checked what some Joyce scholar thought: I was right! This was only a little after I very belatedly learned that homosexuality was an actual thing. And what it entailed. Nature is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine, to paraphrase JBS Haldane. It's true and embarrassing to admit how much of a naif I was up to age 16 or so. You have no idea how naive and dreamy and insulated I was into my late teens. I was not worldly and all I seemed to care about was music, girls, books, and sports. Not in that order. I just was oblivious about some things in a way that I think is almost impossible to be oblivious about today, with the omnipresence of Internet.
Portrait of the Artist, while slightly more "experimental" has nothing like the demands of Ulysses, but it does introduce the character of Stephen Dedalus, who is one of the three main characters in Ulysses, and widely interpreted as a picture of Joyce as a highly educated, troubled, alienated teenager deeply steeped in Aquinas and a thorough Jesuit education. He was the oldest sibling of nine or ten, and they were poor and his dad was an alcoholic. So there's that, too. The concept of epiphany? When something triggers and you suddenly have an insight that makes a difference to you and makes you understand something important on a new, higher level? That's a main theme. Who's not interested in that?
When I first got into Joyce, all I knew of Catholicism was my friends talking about having to quit our basketball game so they can go to catechism, whatever that was, and later, all the sadomasochism - of the nonconsensual, un-fun type - carried out by Nuns and Brothers. I couldn't understand it. At all. None of that made sense, and my intuition strongly told me my friends didn't enjoy this stuff. As that unworldly kid I was once asked if I was a Protestant. I said I didn't know. They asked, "Well, are you a Catholic?" I said no. "Then you're a Protestant!" It's interesting to learn such things about yourself. So later I went home and told my mom I was a Protestant and she laffed her ass off.
Reading Joyce forced me to learn a lot about that world, and I'm a better thinker for it. I studied Catholicism as if an Anthropologist, and indeed my own background in religion was nonexistent; I was brought up in a sort of suburban default pagan way. My parents NEVER made us to go to church and later I decided I had to read the Bible cover to cover on my own just to see what all the shouting was about.
I think studying Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all rewarding things to do, even if you're some sorta pagan Discordian or Cannabis Daoist like myself.
(BTW: if you're reading this and don't know what Discordianism is, then I've got a surprise for ya: you've just been made a Discordian Pope! Yes: YOU! By me. Just now! While you were reading this. We Discordian Popes are allowed dispensation through the Internet! You're now infallible, although all your dogmas are dead and you only have catmas, or relative meta-beliefs. You're welcome! Now go forth and spread the Word, for we Discordians, by Eris, must stick apart. And ye can only know when to sticketh apart when ye knoweth of the Others. And so it went. Do not ask why, for I didn't do it.)
Perhaps a hidden aspect of the question, the part of "not particularly into Joyce..." is the widely understood - notorious, aye - DIFFICULTY of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. An interesting topic: difficulty, esp with digital gadgets militating against old fashioned luxuriating in a dead-tree text and true deep reading - remember that? - and just living there amid the long sentences and opaque references, etc: the cognitive demands are known ahead of time and deemed a bad bet in the mental input/hedonic reward equation. I consider the topic of "difficulty" a separate, rich discourse and I've touched on it all I wanna right here, so will move on...
RAW's advocacy of exploring "reality tunnels" fits here. Far be it for him to urge the study of Catholicism, given his alienation from it, but it served me well to understand what the Jesuits were teaching Joyce and how he took it. There are some history books on the Popes that are pretty damned lurid, if you like your studies tinged with a bit of tabloid tonality. Just beware there are rabid anti-Catholics who, while having their reasons for hating the Church (there really are too many good, solid reasons), might give ya a bum steer. Check the biases! (Easy for me to say.)
If you read Joyce, one of the main things you get into is this: what does it mean to be an Artist? Not exactly a shrinking violet question, that.
Further, if you read McLuhan, he'll blow your mind. A huge fan of Joyce, and especially Finnegans Wake, McLuhan somehow converted to Catholicism at a relatively late age and stayed a hardcore Catholic to his death. Whaaaaaat? Yep! The same guy who met with Timothy Leary - like RAW and Joyce another Irish ex-Catholic - Leary under harassment from political jagoffs like Nixon and Reagan, never forget he spent years in prison and solitary confinement due to possession of cannabis - and there's McLuhan, using his awesome powers studying how media works in the nervous system, who told Leary he needed a good slogan, and so sang as if a Pepsi commercial, "Psychedelics hits the spot/500 micrograms, that's a lot." Hardcore Catholic, that McLuhan. Hard to believe he ever did LSD and I don't think he ever did. He was just weird, like a lot of us. Again: like RAW, why does Joyce keep showing up in McLuhan. Aren't you sorta interested?
Re: the Catholic Church: By all means: don't miss the period of 867-1049: the Saeculum Obscurum: a pornocracy within the Papacy! Rule by prostitutes and strong, aristocratic women who were in it for money, power and the free rein to be ruthless. Whenever the male higher-ups started a power grab, the women let practitioners of the oldest profession in to diffuse the male energies. The History the Church Doesn't Want You To Know! It's in tons of books. A RAW-like Q: why didn't they teach this in our History classes in High School? It wouldda livened things up a bit, eh? Bias? German theologians were the ones who harped on this more than any other, but the Reformation was still 450 years in the offing. So maybe the Germans had a point. Imagine: the most powerful institution in the world taken down by a bunch of self-serving know-nothings with only sociopathic narcissistic aims to enrich themselves, enabled by a corrupt band of Supreme Cardinals who were there only because of the sociopath(s), and the Supreme Cards basically lost most of their power to the family Theophylacti when the latter decided to ignore their judgment. Stretches the imagination, doesn't it? It seems unfathomable. Glad we don't live in those times!
(Although I personally would like to see many more adult women in power - one of those big words that makes us so unhappy - but that's another story entirely.)
In all the Catholic-bashing I've long found interesting allies in the sort of anarchist Catholic Left. I'd like to go back in time and hang out with Dorothy Day for a few weeks. But asceticism, hatred of the body and sex, and the idea of pleasure being anathema is a major turn-off. Like it's one thing to have the balls or ova to try to bring Liberation Theology to the Third World, but can't you kick back and chillax every now and then, Padre? Fer crissakes!
If you're a RAW fan then you'll notice practically all of his heroes are heretics of some sort. And I strongly suggest that we enjoy heresy all the more if we have a fairly strong grip on what and why so-and-so was so considered heretical. Joyce was fascinated by the heretics. RAW's fascination with them was probably of a wider scope. The question of why heresy exists in the first place gets to the core of RAW's thought.
I think the RAW fan should at least make a "go" at Ulysses. Give it the old college try at least. Get stoned and just enjoy the language, maybe. Finnegans Wake seems only for a sort of...genetic caste of mind? I don't know. Just spend 45 minutes with FW and then, if it's not your thing it's not your thing. We understand. Or at least it seems that most of us do.
Your own "Robert Anton Wilson" cannot be avoided: another idea at the core of RAW: you're gonna make your own reality labyrinth anyway, whether you know it or not. Your RAW is not, cannot, be identical to mine. To "know it" was RAW's mission for you. What and how you do it? He only has a ton of suggestions.
RAWIllumination.net: Do you have a book or some other project in the works that you'd like to talk about?
Michael Johnson: I always have a crapload of studies ongoing, but it's for intrinsic reasons, and I don't want to harp on the publishing industry now (esp the "Big Five"), or artists not getting paid, or how completely clueless and averse I am to the business of assuming and promoting one's own "brand" these days. So, nope: no "projects". (Unless: someone's paying?)
Edit to add: It seems wise to not yawp about some writing project before you've actually done it. There was a time when I didn't realize this, what I take as some varietal of wisdom. A lot of people seem to disagree with this, and they have their reasons, and I could be quite wrong about my "wisdom."
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