First time on the Internet: A really good interview of RAW

Robert Anton Wilson and D. Scott Apel. Photo  from the Hilaritas Press page for Apel's Beyond Chaos and Beyond. 

"I’m awfully opinionated tonight."

I think I have something pretty cool to offer today: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson that has never been available on the Internet. 

One of my all-time favorite interviews of RAW is one that has only been available in book form. It's an interview with RAW conducted in 1977, by  D. Scott Apel and his friend, the late Kevin Briggs. Apel and Briggs had embarked upon a book project, a collection of interviews of science fiction writers. The book was finally published years later as Science Fiction: An Oral History. The Apel-Briggs 1977 interview of RAW also appears in Beyond Chaos and Beyond, available from Hilaritas Press. 

Apparently pleased at my recent efforts on this blog to boost  his path to becoming an international literary phenomena (see the new "D. Scott Apel Resources" section on the right side of this page, with its link to the only reasonably complete Apel bibliography available), Scott has now given me permission to reprint this interview on this blog and has asked me to include this citation: 

Copyright Notice: Excerpted from the book Science Fiction: An Oral History, copyright 1977 by D. Scott Apel

I should mention that Science Fiction: An Oral History is a book that many of you might be interested in, aside from the Wilson interview. There is a really good interview with Philip K. Dick, and also interviews with Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazny, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Norman Spinrad. The paperback is only $10, the Kindle ebook is 99 cents. I am particularly a fan of Roger Zelazny, and the interview is really interesting. 

As for Beyond Chaos and Beyond, it's a good-sized volume of RAW material unavailable anywhere else, plus there's also a candid, long biographical essay that Apel wrote about RAW. 

About Kevin Briggs: "Kevin C. Briggs (1952-2007) was a friend, collaborator and ex-roommate from our college days and a couple years after. " -- Apel. More here. 

He appears as one of the characters in Apel's novel, The Uncertainty Principle?, as does Robert Anton Wilson,  Arlen Riley Wilson, Philip K. Dick and Apel himself (as a bookstore clerk). 

Note: A link to this interview is available  under "D. Scott Apel Resources" at the right side of this page. 

ROBERT ANTON WILSON 

Interview conducted at his home in Berkeley, CA January 12, 1977 

“Robert Anton Wilson” was born Robert Edward Wilson in Brooklyn, New York, on January 18, 1932. He attended Catholic grammar school and Brooklyn Technical High School, then studied Engineering at New York University. A childhood bout with polio and its cure by the controversial Sister Kenny method informed much of his personality and attitude throughout his life. 

Like so many budding writers, Wilson worked a number of jobs early in his career, including ambulance driver, engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter. Early in his writing career, he integrated his maternal grandfather’s name, Anton, into his own as his nom de plume. In 1965, he became an associate editor at Playboy magazine, where he met Robert Shea. Together they began work on the epic picaresque comic sci-fi novel (and “fairy tale for paranoids”), Illuminatus!, which was published in 1975. 

In 1958, Wilson married Arlen Riley, a poet and writer (who had worked with Orson Welles, one of Wilson’s cult heroes) and adopted her three children from a previous marriage. Throughout their forty year marriage they moved frequently, including residences in Ohio, Chicago, Berkeley, San Francisco, Dublin, and Los Angeles before finally settling in Capitola-by-the-Sea, California, on the Monterey Bay.

Although perhaps best known as the co-author of The Illuminatus Trilogy, “RAW” (as he was known among his devotees) developed a worldwide cult following mainly for his non-fiction books. During the ‘80s and '90s, he was a frequent lecturer and public speaker in numerous U.S. and European cities. By 2005, he had published 35 books, including several novels, plays, screenplays, and numerous nonfiction volumes of what he eventually refered to as “quantum psychology,” his synergetic synthesis of General Semantics, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Jungian depth psychology, occult research (as documented by Aleister Crowley, among others), and mental reprogramming as detailed by John Lilly and RAW’s close friend, Dr. Timothy Leary. Quantum psychology was an attempt to assist readers in expanding their consciousness by breaking out of their “reality tunnels” defined by language and preconceived beliefs, and to develop critical observation and independent thought. Other significant influences on Wilson include James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Beethoven, and Orson Welles, all of whose works are referenced frequently in his writing.

Given his wide range of interests, it is difficult to pigeonhole a writer like Wilson. Among the many labels that have been applied to him, we could include: stand-up philosopher, psychologist, futurist, essayist, cult figure, editor, playwright, poet, civil libertarian, Promethean, Discordian saint, and (as he described himself) “agnostic mystic.” As a popularizer and synthesizer of bleeding edge discoveries in psychology and physics, Wilson developed a large cult following among alternative intelligentsia and great respect among the foremost figures of the consciousness expansion movement. As a satirist, Wilson’s aggressive humor was engineered to offend the closed-minded and challenged readers to question authority and examine their unconscious (“programmed”) beliefs. He was a well-known expert on conspiracy theories—documenting the reality of some and debunking others—and in his later years he founded the “Guns and Dope” political party and publcally promoted the use of medical marijuana, which he found effective in treating the symptoms of the Post-Polio Syndrome that plagued him during his final decade of his life. 

Post-Polio Syndrome reduced Wilson’s mobility in the early 2000s, confining him to a wheelchair and eventually to his bed. He died on January 11, 2007 — a week shy of his 75th birthday — at his home in Capitola. Readers interested in more biographical details of the man who was “either a genius or Jesus” (Sounds magazine, London) are encouraged to seek out the documentary film Maybe Logic or Wilson’s own semi-autobiographical works, Cosmic Trigger Vols. 1, 2, and 3. 

ROBERT ANTON WILSON 

Apel: Professional Showtime, with Robert Anton Wilson, Take One! I’d like to start out by turning the tables on you, and applying one of your own tricks to you. I’d like you to do the Theravada Buddhist exercise “What brought me here tonight?” on yourself—two or three paragraphs of biographical information describing how you find yourself in this particular space-time nexus. 

Wilson: I had polio when I was a year and a half old, and I had it again when I was two and a half years old. I think that gave me a basic imprint that the universe was a mean mother, and that you have to fight like hell to make it, to survive. Also, I was born right in the middle of the Depression into a working class family. I think between polio and the Great Depression of the 1930s I developed a Faustian spirit which escalated over the years until the point where I was taking on the whole universe. You know, “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the Valley.” At that point, the only choices were to go mad or become a science fiction writer. I’m definitely an anti-theist rather than an atheist, and I’ve often wondered how I got that way. I think the polio and the Depression are a big explanation. Thanks for making me think about this. 

Apel: You worked as an associate editor at Playboy for five years, and you were writing long before that. How many articles have you published? 

Wilson: I don’t know. Over a thousand, let’s say. 

Apel: What are your working habits, now that you freelance for a living? Do you have set times or amounts to produce, or do you just work when inspiration strikes? 

Wilson: I think I average around ten pages a day. I often get bursts of twenty or thirty pages... The biggest burst I can remember was one where I did seventy pages in a day and a half. Without cocaine, if you’ll believe that. It was an article for a magazine called Cheetah, and they published it in three parts.

Briggs: Illuminatus! was done in collaboration with Robert Shea, and you and Timothy Leary have also produced some collaborative efforts. Do you enjoy collaborative efforts?

Wilson: Yeah. Very much so...with the right people. Shea was very good to collaborate with. Leary is also very good to collaborate with. We listen to each other. We don’t argue. 

Apel: Would you say that you had the major hand in writing Illuminatus!?

Wilson: I think so. But the basic plot is Shea’s: the yellow submarine, the rock festival, and things like that. 

Apel: Could you give us a quick breakdown of what parts were his and which were yours? 

Wilson: Oh, Christ, it’s awfully hard to disentangle it. The libertarian, mind-your-own-business politics is both of us. I would say that the actual words are about seventy percent me and thirty percent Shea. That’s a guess; somewhere around there. It gets complicated, because some of the incidents we both wrote. We wrote them over several times, taking turns rewriting. The book went through several drafts. So it’s hard to say on some pages whether this is me or Shea. There are some pages where it’s just pure Shea and some pages where it’s pure me. Atlantis is all by Shea; Simon Moon, Markoff Chaney, the Dealy Lama, and Robert Putney Drake are all by me. But otherwise there are a lot of pages that are very ambiguous. A page that’s otherwise all me may have had a single word changed because Shea kept insisting, “That doesn’t look right,” and I’d finally realize, “I guess you’re right, Bob.” And on pages that are almost pure Shea you’ll find a word that I put in; I’d say “Your word isn’t right there,” and he’d agree. 

Apel: Are your relationships with publishers generally favorable? 

Wilson: Well, by and large, I am not madly in love with publishers. Publishers are businessmen, and businessmen are really not my favorite type of human beings. James Joyce went into business briefly, and after a while he said to Italo Svevo, “You know, I think my partners are cheating me.” Svevo said, “You only think they’re cheating you? Joyce, you are an artist!”

I worked for seven years for an engineering corporation that had nothing to do with publishing. The rest of my working career was all in books and magazines—the whole publishing field—and I wrote advertising for brief periods. From what I’ve seen of businessmen, I would say that they have no more morals than a scorpion. 

There are two types of predators. There are predators who just go out and grab what they want and take their chances on getting caught. If they spend a little time in jail, that’s all part of the game. They lose a few points. As soon as they get out they try to win again, at the same primitive level. And then there is the second type of predator, the type who has figured out that you can do all that grabbing without risking jail. There’s a great novel about this: JR, by William Gaddis. It’s one of my favorite books. JR keeps saying that anybody who steals is a fool; you can get as rich as you want in this country by using the laws creatively. Businessmen are people who know that. They’ve got the same mentality as pirates. When they think they can get away with it, they break the law as boldly as thieves.

As Gene Fowler once said, “Every publisher should have a pimp as an older brother, so he’d have somebody to look up to.” At this point, nothing a publisher does would amaze me. If a publisher came in the door and shit on the table and said, “You’ve got to accept that because I’m a publisher and you’re a writer,” I’d be awed, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing they could do would startle me at this point. If a publisher was caught the way Nixon was caught it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, I wonder why none of them have been caught yet. Sometimes I puzzle about things like the Clifford Irving case. I don’t know how guilty Irving was, but certainly the whole ambiance of the publishing business is to incite people to behave that way. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the publishers were ten times guiltier than Irving himself.

I guess I sound uncharitable or unforgiving... (raucous laughter) but as you go around interviewing writers, you’ll hear this from all of them. This is what writers always talk about when they get together. I’m not really bitter, because I realize the way things are is the order of nature. You can’t get yourself too emotionally wrought up over it; that’s the kind of primitive planet we’re living on. These mammalian types, the alpha-baboons, are still running the herd. Stupidity and rapacity have been around for so long they must have an evolutionary function. Far be it from me to challenge evolutionarily stable behavior that dates from the Permian Era.

Briggs: The other side of the publisher coin would be to talk about your relationship with your fans.

Wilson: I love them. I adore them. I worship them. 

Briggs: Even when they cluster around you at conventions? 

Wilson: I think conventions are vitally important in the science fiction world. It’s just about the only gratification most writers in that disadvantaged neighborhood of Literaturopolis ever get. I do lots of different kinds of writing; I’m not limited to the science fiction ghetto. But I think the conventions are necessary, or the full-time science fiction writers would all give up. They never make much money; they’re all poor. I think without the conventions they’d all throw away their typewriters and become shoe salesmen or something. But at the conventions, the writers are allowed periodically to see these adoring faces of their fans, and that gives them the incentive to go on and write some more, even though they’re getting paid less than a sewer cleaner. 

Briggs: It’s interesting to hear you claim that you’re not limited to science fiction. When Dell published Illuminatus! they published it as “science fiction.” Do you think that limited your audience?

Wilson: Does a bear shit in the woods? I think if Illuminatus! had been published in hardcover, and promoted as a major American satire—which several critics now claim it is—it would have gotten reviewed in the New York Times, and the New York Times Review of Books, and it would have been an intellectual “must.” Everybody claiming to be an intellectual would have had to read it. Bookstores would have featured it. But putting it out in paperback as a science fiction pulp limited the audience. Bookstores buried it in the back shelves. I think it definitely harmed the book. I think that the twelve-hour stage version of Illuminatus! at the National Theatre in London being such a whopping success has begun to reverse all that. 

Apel: Why did Dell take five years to publish it? 

Wilson: Dell cursed the book every way they could. Not through malice, just through brutal ignorance. I have several reviews in the files where the reviewer has commented, “It looks like Dell doesn’t know what they have here.” They’re businessmen, and businessmen can’t tell literature from sausages. They said, “Cut out five hundred pages.” They have no concept that a work of literature, like a painting or a symphony, has a structure; that there are integral rhythms, and so on. They buy it by the pound, like potatoes or something. “We want five hundred potatoes less.” 

Apel: Why did you put up with that? 

Wilson: Why did I put up with that? Why did I do it? Well, by that point, after five years of struggle and having gotten to the point where we were living on Welfare with four kids and all that, I just collapsed. I couldn’t struggle anymore. I said, “OK, I’ll give up on this battle; I’ll win the next battle.” Basically, I decided I’d rather have a mutilated Illuminatus! published in 1975 than no Illuminatus! published in 1975. I just couldn’t wait another year. You see, even if we got another publisher right away, the next month, (which wasn’t likely), it would still take another year before the goddamn book would come out. And it wasn’t possible we’d get another publisher within a month, y’know? New York publishing moves no faster than the Great Canadian Glacier. I was just defeated; I was ground down. The eight missing appendices were among the five hundred pages that were cut. There were eight more appendices on various subjects, such as the Illuminati interpretation of the Tarot, and the Discordian interpretation of the Tarot, and a lot of other things like that. 

Apel: Will those ever be published? 

Wilson: Yeah, I think so.

 [Note: This prediction turned out to be accurate; in 1980, Berkeley’s And/Or Press published The Illuminati Papers, which included much of the 500 pages of material cut from the original manuscript of the Illuminatus! trilogy.] 

Apel: What’s your opinion of people like Vonnegut and Pynchon, who write what is easily recognizable as science fiction and yet claim that it’s not science fiction, it’s mainstream? 

Wilson: Well, Vonnegut had a long, uphill fight to establish that. He kept getting classified as science fiction, and the New York Times kept ignoring his books. He went through decades of poverty, because of the “sci-fi” label and its dire financial consequences. I don’t know how Pynchon escaped it; he got around them somehow. He had the good luck that his publishers didn’t promote his first book as science fiction, and so it was recognized as a work of literature. I don’t mind the label, aside from its monetary disadvantages. Some of my favorite books are science fiction.

Briggs: Do you read much science fiction? If so, who do you like?

Wilson: Well, in the first place, I don’t read as much as I used to. I was an omnivorous reader in my youth, a monster of erudition, but I find I’m reading less and less. When you become a full-time writer, you’re using your eyes so mucking fuch that you look for something else instead of reading as relaxation. You want to rest your eyes. So I’m reading less every year, and walking in the woods more. I’ve got an agreement with myself that when I have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, I’m going to stop writing for six months and just catch up on my reading. Aside from that, my favorite science fiction writers have long been Stapledon, Heinlein, Clarke, and Sturgeon. 

Apel: That’s easy to understand, I think. They’re all very imaginative writers, and all idealists, in their own peculiar ways. What else about them that appeals to you?

Wilson: I agree with the Oriental teachers who say it’s very important to be careful what you feed into your nervous system. I prefer to feed my nervous system on images of heroic things that human beings have accomplished, or could accomplish. I like to read biographies of people of great courage and people of wisdom and so on. I would much rather program myself with things that give me an idea that we can all be sublime creatures, which I think we can, rather than with the programming that we are merely the most vicious beasts loose on the planet. Mark Twain, by the way, said the same thing as I’ve just said. He said, “Don’t associate with people who have a low view of humanity; it’ll give you a low view of yourself.” Associate only with people who are heroic and striving. I agree with that.

Apel: I’d add to “heroic” and “striving” people with a good sense of humor. 

Wilson: Yeah. Ezra Pound in the later Cantos keeps repeating over and over phrases about the virtue of hilaritas. Scotus Erigena counted hilaritas as one of the supreme virtues: the ability to have a hearty sense of humor. I think cheerfulness is one of the most important and least appreciated virtues in the world. Anybody can bring the room down by sitting around bitching and griping, but it takes real creativity to bring the whole room up. 

Briggs: Is that why your books have such a strong comic sense? Are you consciously being comic?

Wilson: Yes and no. I’m consciously being comic part of the time now, since my long-time fans expect it of me. But also it’s my basic nature to see the humorous aspect in things. The Cosmic Giggle Factor, the SNAFU principle, Murphy’s Law, and so on.

Briggs: The thing that springs to my mind is one of the great comic devices of Illuminatus!, the Stan Laurel-Oliver Hardy analogy of human relationships: “Now look what you made me do!”

Wilson: That’s part of my assault on class snobbery in literature. I am deliberately trying to elevate Laurel and Hardy to the level of metaphysics. I think anybody with basic Zen savvy can see what I’m doing there, but most of the literary intelligentsia still believe in those great dichotomies between the serious and the trivial, high art and low art, and all that bullshit. 

Apel: Who influenced you as a writer? In Illuminatus! you mentioned Faulkner, Lovecraft, Chandler, as well as strong tribute to James Joyce. Who else would you add to that list as being a significant influence?

Wilson: First of all, I think everybody you read influences you. Every writer I’ve ever read has left some trace on me. And I think that’s true of every reader, since what you feed your nervous system today becomes your reality tomorrow. Every time a writer is reading, he’s always thinking, “What can I rip off here?” That’s not original with me, that was Shakespeare’s attitude. What was Virgil’s response to The Odyssey? His response was “Howmuch of this can I rip off?” and then he wrote an imitation Odyssey. 

You’re always looking for what you can learn from everybody. I’ve learned something from every writer I’ve ever read. The strongest influences are certainly Joyce, the blind man who saw, and Ezra Pound, the crazy man who understood. And Raymond Chandler, and H. L. Mencken, and Faulkner, and Mailer... Well, you see, I could go on and on; after you get past the first three, you could just keep adding on and on. The major influences are definitely Pound, Joyce and William Burroughs. Burroughs definitely comes in third, after Pound and Joyce. I’m much more influenced by people in this century than in previous centuries. There’s no doubt whatsoever that I’ve stolen a hell of a lot from Shakespeare. But what I purloined from Shakespeare really comes through a filter, so to speak.

Apel: A twentieth century filter?

Wilson: Right. People like Pound and Joyce are practically my contemporaries. Pound died only a couple years ago, actually; Joyce died in 1940. But he’s still the central twentieth century novelist. Nobody has found a way yet to surpass Joyce in cosmic, mythic, epic scope, or in sheer crazy humor.

Apel: You do something which I’ve rarely seen in another work, which is not only imitate the style of other writers, but indicate that you’re imitating their style. You’ll say, “Here comes a nice run of Joycean prose,” and then do a nice run of Joycean prose. 

Wilson: I don’t do that all the time. There are a lot of people in Illuminatus!, for instance, who aren’t directly acknowledged. There’s a lot of Chandler in the style, but nobody says, “Here comes another Chandler metaphor.” 

Briggs: I thought it was interesting that you added a review of Illuminatus! within the body of the book itself. I was wondering if that was done to respond to criticisms people might level against the book before they had a chance. 

Wilson: No, it was a groping attempt at something I’m doing much better in my new book— 

Apel and Briggs (in unison): You mean Schrödinger’s Cat? (Laughter) 

Wilson: —which is incorporating self-reflexiveness into the novel.

Briggs: What kind of reviews did you get for Illuminatus!?

Wilson: They were delightful. 

Briggs: I loved the review in Playboy; it said Illuminatus! would do for paranoids what Lord of the Rings did for schizophrenics. I thought that was a good analogy. 

Wilson: Most of the reviews were extremely heartwarming. There were a lot of very nice things said about the book. Out of around thirty reviews so far, there were only two negative reviews. And I was delighted to see—just like I had predicted in the book—that the two negative reviews were by people who admitted they hadn’t read the whole book. Both said they quit around page fifty. 

Apel: Dell, when they published Illuminatus!, called it science fiction. Hagbard Celine, the main character, says the events they’re living through, when put in the form of a novel, are a tragedy. Joe Malik, another character, looks at what’s going on and says, “We’re characters in a book, and it’s low camp.” What is your view of the book, looking at it from your universe? 

Wilson: Well, one of the main points is that all those views are simultaneously correct. Actually, the book is doing all sorts of things, but in one dimension I am continuing something that Joyce started, which is breaking down this artificial distinction between high art and low art, between great literature and folk literature. I can’t emphasize too strongly how much I despise class distinctions in literature. One of the things Illuminatus! is trying to do is be all things at once. Detective story, allegory, science fiction, satire, porno, fairy tale, novel of ideas, adventure story and the literary equivalent of pop art in a sense. 

There’s no scientific instrument that you can point at a work of art that will give you an objective reading of how many mega-Michelangelos of genius it contains, or how many kilo-Homers of genuine poetry it has in it. These are all subjective judgments, and it’s pre-scientific to pretend that you’re talking objectively when you’re arguing about how good a book is. All you’re really talking about is how your own nervous system responds to it. I write criticism myself, but I always try to make it clear that my opinion is the way my nervous system is perceiving this thing. I don’t think there are any absolute judgments about what’s better or worse in literature. And I don’t think this semantic confusion is a minor symptom. That state of mind that believes in those class distinctions in literature is the state of mind of the willfully stupid. Such people have decided to be narrow, have decided to remain Medieval, have decided to ignore three hundred years of science and post-Cartesian philosophy. It’s the philosophical equivalent of Fundamentalism in religion. 

Apel: How does the Robert Anton Wilson nervous system perceive Illuminatus! ? 

Wilson: Nobody can judge his or her own work. T. S. Eliot said, “That’s not our business; that’s not our affair.” It’s up to the future to decide whether a thing is going to last or not. If people go on liking it, it’ll go on for centuries, or millennia, like Homer. Or it may be a flash in the pan. I don’t know. I’m one of the two people in the world least able to form an objective judgment about Illuminatus! My private personal feeling at times has been that this is the greatest mock-epic since Don Quixote. And then I figure that’s just my own artistic ego massaging itself. 

Apel: Hagbard speaks of Orwell’s 1984 as “not a fantasy of the future, but a parable of the present.” Does that sum up how we could characterize Illuminatus! ? 

Wilson: Exactly. Everybody on the planet has been brainwashed. That’s the real joke that the book revolves around. Everybody has been brainwashed, but the attempt to find the brainwashers is rather fruitless, because everybody is in on the conspiracy, the victims most of all. 

Briggs: Sort of a negative Parliament of Birds—everybody gets together and they discover “Ah! Collectively, we’re the brainwasher!”

Wilson: Absolutely. As Emerson said, “Every society is a conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members.” Or the womanhood. Every society is a tacit conspiracy to prevent the intelligence of the next generation from functioning freely—to condition, train, limit, and castrate the intelligence so that it repeats the patterns of the past generation. That’s known in anthropology as acculturation. 

Apel: Let’s talk a bit about your style. You are probably the only person writing science fiction who uses scientific principles as part of the structure of a novel, in addition to the scientific content. Your books integrate many of the findings of modern physics into the very structure of the plot, into the rhythms and harmonies of the book itself. You were talking about quantum wobble in Schrödinger’s Cat, in the form of alternate beginnings, middles, and endings, so that the reader can put them together in many ways, for instance. A good example of quantum wobble illustrated in Illuminatus! is Hagbard and Malik at the Ingolstadt concert, where there are two specific, yet diametrically opposed scenes of Joe confronting Hagbard. In one potential reality, Joe shoots him dead; in one other, he doesn’t shoot him at all. 

 I also noticed your using relativity as well: Adam Weishaupt’s concept of the “Tomorrow-today-yesterday world,” for instance. And the people in your book are constantly traveling through time; continually popping in and out of scenes they won’t live through for months or years. There’s a scene in Chicago, for example, where the characters start remembering the event before it happens. 

Another physics principle I picked out was the principle of complementarity, where no single answer will explain the whole truth. You need two equal and opposite answers, at least. That was used as an old occult principle—“opposites are equal”—and it was used within the book as a major and pervasive part of the structure. 

Wilson: Well, Bohr, of course, saw that symbolized in the yin/yang. He had the yin/yang put into his coat of arms when the Swedish court granted him a knighthood. In Illuminatus! it appears as the Sacred Chao, with the Pentagon in the yang and the apple in the yin, which is Greg Hill’s emblem of Bohr’s principle of complementarity. 

Apel: Within the structure of the novel it appears again as the Illuminati seem both good and bad; the two opposite viewpoints integrating into a third thing. 

Wilson: I decided it had to have some kind of resolution, so basically, they are the bad guys. But in The Sex Magicians, a little-known novel I did that was published before Illuminatus! (although written after) the Illuminati are definitely the good guys. Very few people have realized that aspect of Illuminatus!, and I’m delighted that you recognize it. I’ve found people who were vaguely aware of something like that, but they haven’t caught it as precisely as you did. I figure that’s because I didn’t make it explicit enough. Nothing in Illuminatus! is merely bizarre. It’s a precise rendering of findings in quantum physics and neurology. The scientific thing that’s most integral to Illuminatus! is the multi-model approach. 

Apel: Right—the interpenetration of universes.

Wilson: That’s a little bit more than Bohr’s complementarity. It’s the idea that not only is there no one “correct” model, but that we can learn a lot by using several models. Bohr was talking about two opposite models, but the idea of using several different models weighs very heavily in Illuminatus!. That idea comes out of Marshall McLuhan, and Korzybski, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group. And Joyce. 

Apel: Yeah. If you consider an entire universe as a model, I can see that happening in Illuminatus!, since the events in that book demonstrably do not take place in our universe. Nixon, Agnew, and Jane Fonda have all been assassinated; Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University is an actual location where characters go to look up books, and so on. It’s not our universe.

Wilson: There are other clues. The road from Dayton to New Lebanon in Ohio is going in the wrong direction, for instance. 

Briggs: And cigarette commercials appear on television years after they’ve been banned here. 

Wilson: That one was a happy accident, in the Zen tradition. Shea wrote the cigarette commercial and I pointed out to him that this novel was set after they were made illegal. He said, “Oh, I’ll change it,” and I said, “No, don’t. I’ve got an idea—that’s one more clue that we’re in a parallel universe.” 

Apel: If that’s the case, then when Joe Malik discovers that he’s nothing but a character in a book he would be correct if he were living in our universe. But since he’s not, he’s hopelessly insane about his conclusion.

Wilson: No, Joe is right, actually. They are all in a book, and the proof is just pick up a copy and you’ll find them all in there. 

Apel: Discussing your book and your influences leads us right into something else, a quote that I’d like to read from Illuminatus! During the process where Hagbard is creating the Eris figure, there are two men who come in daily and discuss opposing sides of great social issues or meaningless absurdities, like the merits of socialism versus capitalism, or, if you wear shoes are you a foot fetishist. This constant debate ends with the sentence: “All categories collapsed, including the all-important distinction, which they had never argued, between science fiction and serious literature.” Would you like to argue this all-important distinction? 

Wilson: That’s a lucky accident again. I had no idea Illuminatus! was going to be published as science fiction when I wrote that. It sounds like we’re defending ourselves in advance, but I have no idea why I wrote that sentence. I can’t remember my state of mind when I put that in. I guess I had just read a science fiction novel that I liked a lot, and I got an illumination that the distinction between science fiction and serious literature was as illusory as all those other great oppositions which all mystical schools try to transcend.

Apel: I wondered if that might be another illustration of your desire to break down class distinctions.

Wilson: You betta you ass, amigo. I’m very definitely an anarchist and an enemy of class systems of all sorts. If there were any truth in any of the justifications that conservatives have come up with for the class system, I wouldn’t exist. I’m supposed to be a day-laborer or something like that, coming from the working class background I came from. And yet I’ve had dinner with the Rothschilds; I hobnobbed with the gentry at Hefner’s mansion for five years. I’ve also seen enough of the middle class, God knows, because they’re everywhere, and you can’t get away from them. I just don’t believe there’s any genetic basis for class distinctions. It’s all artificial; an organized form of brainwashing. I think without a class structure the increase in planetary intelligence would positively blind everybody with the dazzling light given off. 

Take my brother. My brother would be considered, economically, a member of the proletariat. He never was anything else. He was a mechanic all his life. Yet he read things as diverse as Freud and Walt Whitman and was heavy into Spiritualism at the end of his life. He was so deep into astronomy that he built his own telescope. He built his own ham radio. His intellectual interests were wider than those of a lot of liberal arts graduates I’ve known. My brother was interested in science and literature and mysticism and you-name-it.

I don’t think stupidity is a natural product. I think the class system deliberately stunts the intellectual growth of most of society. I don’t mean there’s a conscious conspiracy behind it; I mean that our kind of society just can’t operate unless people are stunted to the mammalian level where it’s possible to regiment them and herd them around like a bunch of cows and get them to do the stupid jobs at which most people spend their lives. If their intelligence was allowed to grow naturally, nobody would put up with that crap, going eight hours a day to do something utterly ridiculous to get rewarded every week or two with a piece of paper that entitles you to get the necessities you need to survive. B.F. Skinner’s robot-psychology is perfectly true, within the context of authoritarian society.

Apel: That’s one of the things we’re interested in doing in this book; breaking down at least one more wall, which is the brick wall between science fiction and “serious literature.” 

Wilson: The people who erected that wall, the literary intelligentsia, comparatively speaking, are among the least likely to survive. When it comes down to knowledge that can be measured and demonstrated, they’ve got less of it than anybody. An ordinary factory worker has more intelligence than most of them.

The one thing literati really have in large quantities is narcissism. And they’re usually wrong. They’re not always wrong; even a stopped clock is right twice a day. But they’re wrong so damn much of the time. What I mean by “wrong” is that insofar as you can measure anything in a subjective field like literature, their fads come and go and have very little effect on what actually lasts. And that’s the only way you can measure objectively if something has real value—if it pleases more than a year, it’s more than a passing fad. The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic in some sense, in that it’s lasted over a hundred years. For over a hundred years, people have still gotten excited over reading it. I doubt Mickey Spillane will last that long. He just mirrored a particular mentality of paranoia that was around in the fifties and sixties. Of course, I could be wrong; maybe there is more in Spillane. I think Homer has lasted over three thousand years because he’s so damned good, in every way. You look at the fads among the literary intelligentsia and what they were praising to the skies twenty years ago is forgotten already.

Apel: One of the things that interests me in science fiction is that it seems to be the branch of literature with the best tools. The archetypes of the collective unconscious, for instance. Science fiction, virtually since its inception, has been an archetypal literature. 

Wilson: I don’t know who first said, “Science fiction is the mythology of our time.” An increasing number of occultists are realizing this and are incorporating science fiction into their rituals. Science fiction is the natural mythology of our time, as Jesus and Hermes were the natural mythologies of another time. To try to build up a faith in the metaphysics of Christianity or pop Hinduism is, I think, a deliberate stupidity. You can’t do it, except through a process of stunting your own intellectual growth at around 1600 AD and deliberately deceiving yourself. Science fiction is the only mythology we can believe, and is the only mythology that is possible. We can’t believe “God” knocked up a Jewish girl two thousand years ago, but we can believe, with Sir Francis Crick, that Higher Intelligence, in some form, designed the DNA code. Science fiction can give us models for that Higher Intelligence. 

Briggs: Illuminatus! seems to be a conscious manipulation not just of archetypal mythology, but also of cultural mythology: the Kennedy assassination, Dillinger, and so on. 

Wilson: Well again, this is part of my attack on the class definitions of literature. Lovecraft is very low-class, according to the certified saints of the sanctified lit-crit establishment. And yet I think Lovecraft is a hell of a lot more important an artist than Saul Bellow, for instance. When Pat Hurley got made a general, General Stilwell—who was one of the few generals I’ve ever really liked—wrote in his diary, “For Christ’s sakes, couldn’t they get Shirley Temple?” When they gave the Nobel Prize to Saul Bellow I thought of that quote.

Olaf Stapledon, I think, has done better modern mythos than anybody else. Stapledon’s mythology, as a matter of fact, I do believe in, at least half the time. More than half the time. I don’t think Stapledon really invented a damn thing. I think he turned on spontaneously, the same way a lot of great mystics of the past have done. Having his kind of scientific education he was able to put the experience into the metaphors of modern science. But it’s the same basic experience, I think, that Buddha had, or Dante. But the metaphors of Buddha and Dante are out of date, and Stapledon’s are still alive. 

Apel: He described these far-reaching concepts with the best words available to him in his time and place, and with the best science available to him.

Wilson: And they’re still the best we’ve got. Nobody since Stapledon has done better. I don’t want to put Arthur C. Clarke down; I admire him tremendously. But he’s the only one who comes close, and he doesn’t do it; he hasn’t yet done as well as Stapledon. 

Apel: I was incredibly disappointed in his description of going through the Stargate in his novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as “sort of a Grand Central Station to the stars.” I read that line and thought, “Well, you’ve just completely missed the point there, Arthur. You’ve chosen the most mundane metaphor possible to describe the film’s most mindbending segment. What’s the use of writing the damn book if you don’t understand it?” 

Wilson: Yeah, Clarke has strange limitations. Of course, we all do. I think it’s droll that he’s so hostile to psychedelics. Intelligently used, psychedelics would help him to understand his own work better and he’d be a more intelligent writer. That’s a prediction: if somebody can get that moralistic Englishman to turn on, he will understand his own work better, and write better books than he ever has.

I would like to add, in spite of everything I’ve said already, I think some of the traditional occult models are quite useful still. I think Kabbala is still a marvelous system. I think there’s still a helluva lot in Kabbala. Kabbala was a thousand years ahead of its time when it was created. As a matter of fact, I know at least two physicists and one mathematician who are heavy into Kabbala. 

Apel: Saul-Paul Sirag and Fred Wolf I know are... 

Wilson: Yeah. And Mike Mohlé is the mathematician. I’m heavy into Kabbala myself. There’s a hell of a lot of Kabbala in Illuminatus!

Briggs: If nothing else, the chapter headings are taken directly from the Tree of Life.

Wilson: The way it’s organized is all based on Kabbala. I was just thinking how this would sound to some of the Hudson Review-type of literary critics. Through the first half of this interview I’m continually saying “up science” and downing the humanities department, then all of a sudden here I am talking about magic so casually. Both are terra incognita to literary types—so how can I get the science and the magic together? 

 Apel: Through the principle of complementarity!

 Wilson: Exactly! 

 Apel: It’s the only way. Equal opposites. You need both of them.

Wilson: My basic idea is from Aleister Crowley: “We place no reliance / On Virgin or Pigeon; / Our method is Science, / Our aim is Religion.”

That dualism shows up again in the characters in Illuminatus!. For example, Hagbard and the Dealy Lama represent the basic conflict between the two schools of mystics. There have always been these two schools; the one which sees the Cosmic Joke and drops out, or goes off to enjoy Samadhi in a corner, and the ones who say, “Well, let’s do something about it.” Buddhism and Taoism are the extreme forms of the “dropout,” and Christianity and Sufism are the extreme forms of “Let’s do something about it.” Especially Quaker Christianity, which is my favorite type of Christianity. If I had to be a Christian, I’d be a Quaker. Thank God I don’t have to be a Christian. (General laughter) Anyway, Hagbard represents the Sufi or Gnostic Christian viewpoint, and Dealy Lama represents the Buddhist or Taoist viewpoint.

Apel: What is the Robert Anton Wilson standpoint? 

Wilson: My position is undecided. The Dealy Lama speaks from the center of my being. I’m not at all sure that he’s wrong, but I’m temperamentally on the side of the activists. As Gurdjieff said, “My way is against God and against nature.” This is the rough sketch of a universe; it’s our job to complete it and improve it, as freemasons in the true sense. 

Briggs: Do you think that the border between the empirical sciences and mysticism is dissolving?

Wilson: Definitely. I think the importance of LSD historically will turn out to be that it opened the door to empirical experimental scientific mysticism. One of the things that Timothy Leary is going to be remembered for—and he’s going to be remembered for a hell of a lot—is that he was the first one to see that. They’d been experimenting with LSD for about fourteen years, I think, when Leary came on the scene. He was the first one to see that this was our chance for experimental theology.

Briggs: Yeah, applied theology. 

Wilson: And it’s not just LSD; there are lots of other approaches. But LSD was the gate by which Leary made that discovery. Biofeedback and direct brain stimulation and a lot of other things are going to be playing a big role, too. Self-metaprogramming, in Lilly’s term. We’re living in science fiction. That came to me last year, in a blinding flash. I had just come back from Vancouver where I spent a week lobbying for the U.N. to recognize space migration as the answer to our energy problems—which is a theme out of the science fiction I was reading twenty years ago. And as soon as I got back here I was immediately involved again with Sirag and Sarfatti, who are trying to put parapsychology on a physical basis by creating quantum models to explain ESP and PK. Then I was involved again with Leary and his S.M.I2. L.E. scenario—Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension—which is pure science fiction—and suddenly it hit me: “I’m living in science fiction!” 

Then I got a new insight into what I had done in Illuminatus! —we’re all living in a novel, and we’ve got a choice as to which kind of novel we’re living in. I’m dreadfully sorry for the people who are living in naturalistic novels in the James T. Farrell tradition; you know, where everything comes to a bad end, and all there is injustice and stupidity in the world. People are living in that tunnel-reality because artists created it for them. And they were good artists, in that they were strong, they were powerful, they were influential, and so there are millions of people living in that reality. Then there are people who are living in the heroic Hemingway tunnel-reality still, and there are a lot of timid academic people living in a T.S. Eliot tunnel-reality. Most of the country is living in a television tube-reality. I’m delighted to be living in science fiction. It’s one of the more open and exciting tunnel-realities to live in. 

That was one of Joyce’s great discoveries, that everybody is living in a novel. That’s why Ulysses is an anthology of novels. It’s a novel in the form of an anthology, and each of the characters is living in a separate tunnel-reality that’s a mirror of the literature that’s been programmed into their neurological circuits. Marshall McLuhan learned everything about media from Joyce. 

Apel: This sounds like what Aldous Huxley said: “For better or worse, we all become our favorite character in fiction.” 

Wilson: I’m awfully opinionated tonight.

Briggs: Oh, that’s all right. 

Apel: That’s what we want. Is there anything we haven’t asked you that you’d like to talk about? This is your free speech minute... 

Wilson: Okay. I think the most important decision confronting humanity is life or death. Norman O. Brown’s book Life Against Death came out in the sixties, and I think he really pinpointed the most important issue of our times. On the one hand, we will soon have the potential for immortality. And on the other hand, we have a good chance for ending life on this planet, or ending human life. 

To me the two most important ideas around are pacifism and cryonics. Pacifism is saying, “No, we won’t kill for you,” and cryonics is saying, “No,we won’t die for you.” I favor total rebellion against death. This has never been presented favorably in the popular press; almost all the programming has been to accept death, and of course there’s been tremendous brainwashing for centuries to accept death and war as our natural lot. I think the pacifism of the sixties was just an overture to a general rebellion against death. I think we’re very close to scientific breakthrough which will put an end to programmed senescence, aging and death, and we should be putting all our energies into that. As Alan Harrington says in The Immortalist, we should “hire the scientists, spend the money, and hunt down death like an outlaw.” The fact that we’re putting so goddam much time, money, and energy into creating bigger and better weapons with a greater and greater likelihood of killing all of us off is the major dummheit of our time. I think if there’s one thing I’m trying to do in all of my writings—in my novels, in my articles, my poetry; every damn thing I do—it’s saying yes to life and no to death.

Death and taxation are supposedly the two inevitabilities. Well, I reject them both.

Apel: Immortalist anarchist.

Wilson: Prometheanism sort of sums it up. 

Apel: Thank you, Robert Anton Wilson.