Over at the Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton has finished the online discussion group for the Hilaritas Press edition of The Sex Magicians with a final blog post, "Afterwords and Afterthoughts: wrapping up The Sex Magicians."
For the final post, two folks were invited to write pieces for the post on the book's afterword. I wrote one piece and Adie wrote another. I thought Adie's piece was better than mine, but maybe read them both.
The Jechidah blog has posted a flurry a new writing.
"Ethics for Aliens" is a kind of magickal autobiography.
"Either way, magic is full of indignities, it is a parade of hunchbacks and soldiers, the crew that never rest. Sometimes, it is heartwarming in its absurdity. I went so far into my lifestyle fantasy that, at one point, between hauling in the cardboard boxes of Crowley, Wilson, Moore, Blake and sundry, I complained to my father that the second bedroom of my new apartment was too small. Knowing of my proclivity at the time to keep my second bedroom as a ritual space, he responded: 'guess you’ll have to sacrifice smaller cats.' Do what thou wilt."
There are also two new entries at Jechidah for the ongoing Sex Magicians reading group, for Chapter 13 and for Chapter 14.
At the Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton reviews The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan and Steve Moore, and recommends it to everyone.
When I am trying to do a summary of a fairly long blog post, I sometimes struggle to find an excerpt that accurately conveys the whole. But I think this sentence gets the point across: "It may be the best single expression of magic in theory and practice extant."
The review goes into detail about the different sections of the book, such as "Things to Do on a Rainy Day" and “Old Moore’s Lives of the Great Enchanters.” Read the whole thing.
Illuminations: Stories. Alan Moore. Bloomsbury Publishing.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
I can remember reading “A Hypothetical Lizard” the first time in my dorm room, lit only by the light of the screen as evening fell. I had found it somewhere online, perhaps from the Alan Moore Yahoo! group I was a member of at the time, perhaps a friend had found it and sent it to me. I wasn’t unused to reading prose from Moore, having recently finished Voice of the Fire, but at the time I was still much more used to his comics work and reading interviews where he complained (rightly) about the Watchmen film and every once in a while released a new tidbit about the forthcoming League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. There was something about his writing, even though this story was from a year before I was born, that was strikingly consistent: Alan Moore always speaks with his voice, no matter how it reaches you. Moore dwells often on the same themes, even if those themes are viewed from a prismatic perspective- what I found was at once familiar and unsettling.
“Familiar and unsettling” would be a fair way to describe my reaction to many of the stories in his recent collection, Illuminations.
In “A Hypothetical Lizard” I found a small cosmos in the House Without Clocks that was exotic and erotic, a bit tempting and wholly tragic. But more to the point, we must congratulate Moore in hindsight for the trap he laid and cinched in the story; by providing us with a narrator who was trapped, Moore highlights the inert role of reader as we watch the inevitable unfold in his vignette of a beautiful hell. The complexities of Rawra Chin and Foral Yatt’s past is boiled down into lamb’s blood by an unnecessary reunion and a foolish reentwining- if nothing else, the story is an excellent argument to leave past relationships alone. The symmetry of revenge and ill-gotten inspiration is perfect. After reading the story for the third or fourth time when I purchased Illuminations, the suction of its resolution is surprising. There’s aching all over in the story; the yearning to understand, to enjoy and be enjoyed, to be recognized becomes something like a wildlife documentary. We root for the gazelle while understanding that the kill is the point of the scene, the thrill of it all; and that after all, a lion has to eat. But while the story is precise, it doesn’t strike one as particularly just. It just Is. And perhaps Som Som, our neurologically diverted porthole into this drama, has the best reactions when she utters some non sequitur about her own half-remembered life.
After reading “A Hypothetical Lizard,” I looked up other stories set in Liavek, the shared world that Moore’s story takes place in, and was sad about how the couple I read (by other authors) didn’t live up. There is no reason for such disappointment to take place with Illuminations; as some stories appealed more to me than others, they are all brewed using the excellent mash that is Moore’s mind.
The second and third stories in the collection were my favorites. Although both had been planned for earlier publication, and one actually had been published, this was my first time hearing about either. Alas, the loss of that Alan Moore Yahoo! group seems to have kept me out of the loop. For myself, “Not Even Legend” was the highlight of Illuminations, combining an emphasis on perspective and the possible nature of the supernatural that left me close to tears at certain points. (I am going to endeavor at this point not to give much away about the stories because; firstly, that would be an exhaustive and overly long review and secondly, Moore’s work speaks for itself quite clearly without my extrapolation.) “Not Even Legend,” written during the height of the quarantine efforts during the Pandemic, seems to suggest that perhaps more baffling than aliens, ghosts or entities we might as-of-yet be wholly unaware of, is ourselves to each other. The story, full of misapprehension and mistakes and ends, keeps Moore’s inevitability strongly in play from the beginning. Also, Moore’s proposed categories of “unknown unknowables” are deliciously imaginative. The second story, “Location, Location, Location” is either more or less straightforward than “Not Even Legend” (I can’t decide at this point) and just as hyper-disturbing/fascinating. Some of the themes and imagery will be familiar with anyone who reads Moore regularly—apocalypse, our teetering institutions and sarcastic literalism—but there’s something to say about reading an author obsessed with apocalypse writing about it as they and the world around them grow older. At the very least, “Location, Location, Location” helps Moore’s reputation as the foremost expert, living or dead, on English religious-eccentrics.
Having been a subscriber of Moore’s lamented/celebrated Dodgem Logic, I had already read “Cold Reading '' many years ago on a December evening, when it should be read. I liked this story and remembered it pretty clearly; it follows in the great British ghost story tradition of M. R. James and Robert Aickman, but with some updates for those of us familiar with the skeptic-believer debate. It does lose something without being presented alongside a short comic about Lady Gaga serving cocaine and dildos to children on Christmas instead of bangers and mash. “The Improbably Complex High-Energy State '' is a story about Boltzmann brains and concerns Moore’s other favorite topic aside from apocalypse, creation. This story premiered in a new issue of New Worlds, which I was saddened to find out I had missed, but I feel the authors at Moorcock’s run of the magazine would have approved of it. And before we arrive at the big number of the performance review, we find the titular story “Illuminations.” Evidently, this was inspired by a disastrous seaside trip Alan Moore embarked on fifteen years ago, yet less time has passed since the story's inception and now than that inception and the holiday(s) that inspired Moore. “Illuminations,” if I understand, is a condemnation of nostalgia and seeking to recapture times gone by; perhaps memories, like relationships, are best left undisturbed.
At this point in the review, now we come to “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” the headline affair of the book, even if it didn’t make the title page. Like “Illuminations,” “Thunderman” is a recrimination against nostalgia, but instead of focusing on a disappointing vacation, it considers the industry and cultural phenomenon that is comics books. It is a fairly easy to decode roman a clef for the American comics industry, although I would have to be a bigger comics buff to recognize who everybody relates to in our “real” world. The main thrust of the plot concerns some editors and writers at American comics (a stand in for DC) in the mid-twenty-teens and aligns nicely with the societal breakdown that began its first seismic thrusts that are still shaking away at our foundations today. Here is Moore at his wittiest and most jaundiced; poignantly, it is dedicated to the recently departed Kevin O’Neill, another genius who was unfairly dealt with in an industry that while meant to build on the imagination, instead often devolved into crass commercialism. This is, I feel, in some ways a culmination of those many interviews I read with Moore castigating DC and Marvel back in the aughts. I felt primed, after a manner, by the biographical snippets at the beginning of each of the last six issues of The League (“Cheated Champions of Your Childhood!”), where O’Neill and Moore covered the tragic careers of British comic creators. Don’t act surprised, reader, in what you find herein. And now I must say, people, come for the invectives and anger; stay for the astounding display of Moore’s virtuoso writing skills.
After Jerusalem, I didn’t think I was ever going to be as surprised and enthralled by Moore’s word-weaving, but he somehow pulled the trick off again. He surprises the reader with tales-within-tales replete with descriptions that are thought-provoking and hilarious. My favorite scene in the arabesque that is “Thunderman” would have to be two men looking through their former editor-in-chief’s New York apartment- the sheer joy of seeing how many variations Moore could devise for “pornographic magazine” was thrilling. I kept expecting for him to run out of new ways to describe the same thing and he simply doesn’t. I felt breathless by the end of that scene and in many ways, it was from laughter. That’s one thing I’ve always felt like critics miss about Moore; even when he is taking a piss, he is truly, deeply, funny. Moore has done a couple of impromptu stand up routines in the past and I think he would have made an astounding comic; if only we could slip into that alternative dimension and read what he would have to say about that industry.
The sticking point with “Thunderman” is that Moore is not only attacking the comics industry, but fandom and the medium itself. It is no secret that Moore, who I would argue is as great and important as Jack Kirby is to the medium, views comics with utter disdain. Out of his massive corpus of comics, he only acknowledges five of them in his “By The Same Author” page at the beginning of the book. Moore’s grievances are understandable, but some readers will feel attacked or feel as if something they love and consider important is being unfairly maligned. While I have very little loyalty to comics (to the point that I used to describe myself as “an Alan Moore fan, not a comics fan,”) I can see where this will strike some as pure bitterness. Indeed, it is nigh-amusing to think of someone who loves Watchmen or V for Vendetta, without having read or listened to Moore’s interviews, eagerly picking this up. It isn’t pretty. This possible roman a clef veers a little too close to hell. In the same reality-defying prose he used in Jerusalem, Moore serves us the teased pappardelle of our real selves spooned out with the bolognese of our bloody immaturity, seemingly forevermore. Don’t expect comfort here; here there be tigers.
Rounding out the collection we have “American Light: An Appreciation” and “And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence.” “American Light” was another favorite of mine, based on Melinda Gebbie’s recollections of San Francisco and the Beat scene which went much further than Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. This is a work akin to “The Crazy Wide Forever” from the much earlier The Black Dossier insomuch as we are seeing Moore’s expert imitation of Beat writing; it is also a much more mature piece of writing than what was called for in that delirious compendium. As I began the story/poem, I almost thought that it was just a device for Moore to write a complex poem and provide annotations so that the reader could understand just how great his poetic skills were. Then the story quickly formed in the tension between the poem and the footnotes; like the Beat scene, like America in the twentieth century, it is a story of selfishness, genius and those left in the wake. I highly recommend it.
As I am so shamefully ignorant that I haven’t yet identified what event “And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence” is about, I feel I have little qualification to write about it. But this is one of Alan Moore’s meditations on death and memory and is a fitting end piece to the collection. Like “American Light,” it did recall an early work of Moore’s, namely the chapter from Voice of the Fire:” “Confessions of a Mask.” Moore ends his work in silence.
Yet, joyfully, we are assured that Alan Moore is still rich with ideas and projects for future works: his Long London sequence is still forthcoming and boy, I can’t wait to read what all it entails. Illuminations is as worthy of attention as anything Moore has previously published, and that is to say quite a lot. Sometimes I feel like a Worsley Porlock to his Joe Gold, but thank Whomever that Moore walks among us and wields his pen. Oh, the book is very sexual and you’ll be left slightly horny as you stare slack jawed into the starry abyss. Fall to!
Over at his Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton has wrapped up his online reading group on Sex, Drugs and Magick with a blog post on the afterwords written by Rodney Orpheus, Andrew O'Neill, Alexis Mincolla and Arden Leigh. There are also notes on other items of interest.
While he isn't sure yet about the next project, Charlton reports that some book reviews are likely on the way: "I've recently finished Alan Moore's Illuminations and Phil Baker's City of the Beast: The London Of Aleister Crowley, both of which I intend to review soon as I think they'd be of interest for our little group. I also received Higgs' soon to be out of print novels which I might write down some thoughts about.
Speaking of Alan Moore, happy 69th birthday.
The bookshelf photos seem to be popular, so here are a few more. From Chad Nelson.
Another from Chad. What's the deal with the framed photo of a buffalo?
Another Chad. He does seem to have a few books.
At his blog, Jechidah, Apuleius Charlton has a new post up to answer a question posed by Spookah, "Apuleius, I feel curious, which other books would you consider essential reading for anyone interested in magic”?
About 33 books are listed, in three categories: "How Can Anyone Believe This Shit?," "Practical Magic (You Already Know It) and "Some Discretion Needed."
When I visited him in August, Apuleius told me his biggest magic influences are William Blake, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson and Alan Moore, and all of these folks are represented in the list.
There's also a photo of one of Apuleius' bookshelves. I love bookshelf photos; if you download the photo and blow it up, you can read many of the titles, and try to figure out why Apuleius has two copies of Somnium, the wonderful fantasy novel by Steve Moore.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
Over the course of this reading group, I have used Prometheus Rising as a series of lenses with which to examine the world, Wilson and myself. I have drawn upon the immediacy of the world as it has changed over the course of the past year and a half, as well as my experiences and thoughts when I have read Prometheus Rising in the past. The world does change rapidly, seemingly more rapidly as the future arrives anew every day; no one can fault Wilson for inaccuracy as far as that prediction is concerned. I have spent many of my posts concerning Prometheus Rising detailing my qualms with other predictions. I don’t feel the need to continue journaling my anxieties and quibbles.
I am in full agreement with Wilson that stupidity is the main danger in the world and that intelligence increase is our best (only?) hope for a truly new dawn. I still maintain that stupidity continues having quite the moment amongst members of the human race but I’d like to consider RAWillumination. Here is something that could be considered social media that I think works to make the readers a little better and smarter over the years. Through his persistence, friendliness and discerning taste, Tom has built a place for people to gather and judging from the people I see commenting regularly, his work has attracted others who are earnest in their desire to share and learn with each other. I am not alone in having noted that this website is one part of our day that we know will be a bright spot. When Tom had to take a hiatus last month, sincere condolences were offered, showing that there is a true sense of community amongst the regulars. I’m sure many of you missed checking the blog for the week it was offline.
This ramble is to say that I believe Tom is doing his part to increase intelligence, step by step- and look how others have built upon his work: Tom, in this reading group alone, has provided Eric a platform to display his years of knowledge of Wilson, Beethoven, Joyce and more. (I have hopefully occasionally added something of value.) Through their work and the responses of our dedicated commentariat, we are able to continue a dialogue with the dead as we continue to explore and debate their words. The good news is that Robert Anton Wilson is alive and well and living within all of us.
As long as there are minds to meet and places to gather, we’ll continue to nurse the lives and ideas of the authors, musicians, artists and madmen that have inspired us all across space and time. We will continue to ascend, sometimes slowly and with great confusion, to something better than yesterday’s world. The bright and shining future might not arrive as soon as we wish, and I know that I still have much to learn about patience and acceptance, but as long as we are working on it, there isn’t an excuse to fall into the slough of despond. We continue to bend our shoulders to the wheel.
Step by step, Prometheus rises.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
I am not going to claim to understand Bell’s Theorem or even the basics of quantum physics. Most of what I “know” about quantum physics come from Wilson anyways, so I wouldn’t be adding anything new.
I do teach a little about relativity (the Special Theory, the General Theory is beyond my ability to communicate) and about how theories of physics coexist, due to the virtue of teaching John Higgs’ excellent Stranger Than We Can Imagine every spring. In that book, Higgs explains that our global positioning systems/satellite navigation works on the principles of Newtonian physics, relativity and quantum physics which should be mutually exclusive paradigms.
Without pulling the book off my shelves, I believe it takes Newtonian physics to get the satellites into orbit and keep them up there, relativity for the positioning to be accurate and quantum physics in the computer chips that run the system.
In a profound way, I find this paradox to be of great comfort. I prefer a bit of mystery in the universe, and suspect that the mystery is an inherent part of its composition, at least from our perspective. I’ve never felt much at the end of this book, these last few chapters have passed the parts of the book that have affected my way of living and thinking so dramatically. Perhaps it is my mathematical illiteracy or my inexperience with large doses of LSD or any amount of ketamine that has kept me from palpably understanding the truths in this chapter. (One could also point out I’m obviously not advanced enough in yoga and, knock on wood, haven’t experienced a near-death event.)
In a way, this is an apology that my latest entries are ending on a whimper instead of a bang. This is a life changing book and packs a wallop of psychology and ontology in the opening before floating off into experiences that only some of us have touchstones to comprehend. I have found myself having little to say about Wilson’s writings in the last bits, for which I hope that I might be forgiven. As we approach the end of this long reading group I find myself increasingly wondering “what comes next?” I ask that question in many senses, will Prometheus rise in all of us or will it be like the larger morass of humanity, some firebrands and wise-ones coming into being, teaching and some of us half-listening. Will humanity ever set aside our pettiness, take to the stars and focus on life expansion? When?
A little bit of mystery might be part of the composition ...
I don't usually talk about current events, but if you stand for free expression, it is hard not to be shocked by the attack on Salman Rushdie. I have not read Rushdie. I am visiting Apuleius Charlton this weekend; his wife, Adie, who is very well read, has read many of Rushdie's books. She recommended The Satanic Verses to me, and so did Apuleius. There's a lot of hate out there, and we are pretty far away from maybe logic.
We had a nice conversation last night and when I asked Apuleius about his magick influences, and he cited his "four fathers": William Blake, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson and Alan Moore.
Above is the "Bobby Campbell gallery" at Apuleius' comfortable apartment, which has all sorts of interesting art on the walls.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
I am not an O/optimist and I can't relate to a lot of this chapter. Before Wilson, one of my august teachers was Voltaire, who envisioned a better world but didn't trust mankind's baser instincts to make it so. That old attitude has set deep within my bones. I have noted, along with other writers, that part of what makes reading this book bittersweet is that many of its predictions are incorrect, and that is more glaringly clear in this chapter than any other we've covered in recent memory.
Two parts stood out to me in particular. Let me begin with: "The average Man or Woman of 1997 will be as obsolete in 2007 as a medieval serf is now." We could get into the ways that this prediction is both true and untrue, but I don't think there was as much difference between the world of 1997 and 2007 as there would be if we compared 2007 and 2017. While we could measure some advances in automation and technology between the late nineties and the later aughts, I am more interested in cultural differences.
I have been saying this since 2016 or so; while a time traveler from 2007 to 1997 could relate information that would make sense in the context of that past, a time traveler from 2017 to 2007 would have a much harder time communicating how life has changed in the intervening decade. The world began to vaporize somewhere around Obama's second term. Everything began changing so rapidly that previously unthinkable movements became reality which became policy. Threats thought long dead reared their ugly heads, flinging the bilge of our culture's undertow over witnesses. Concepts which would have been laughable in the late-twentieth or in the dawning of the twenty-first became deadly serious. The world is changing.
That isn't anything new, but it is changing at such an ungainly pace that, even if it is for the best, it resembles nothing so much more as festering and collapse. Towards the end of his essay "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?," Thomas Pynchon states: "It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk -- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days." I disagree violently with the prediction that our information technology has allowed "the right data to those whom the data will do the most good," because so far it simply isn't true. Desirable progress is still achingly slow, useful technology and resources hoarded and mismanaged by fools and foes of the rest of the race (the so-called "wealthy" and "powerful" in case I'm not clear) and moreover, the Internet has allowed the wrong data to get to the wrong people. Perhaps this is just my pessimism and these are but the birth pangs of a new and better era; after all, I think most historians would point out that periods of transition are characterized by chaos and destabilization. But we aren't stabilizing.
Things are demonstrably worse in the United States since the beginning of 2022 e.v.; we have witnessed the unfathomable rise of evangelical fascism in America, which shows no signs of deceleration, and while we suffer from the very clear and present dangers of global warming, nothing (or not enough which is about as useful) is being done to mitigate it and reform the power structures that have allowed this issue, and again I say this issue of clear and present danger, to become seemingly intractable. The foundations of our society are being mangled and perverted in front of our eyes and it seems to this observer that we are powerless. The group of powerful people who are supposed to act as a counterspell to this tide of pro-stupidity and maliciousness are hobbled by their own investments in this rotting haul and are usually busy dithering over issues that couldn't be less important. Perhaps the world where progress was supposed to happen also depended on realizing that old paradigms cannot stay in place, and we have failed to act on that in a meaningful way.
And this brings me to the second passage, where Bob heaps a little scorn on my attitude from beyond the grave: "Our human world is so information-rich (coherent) that it is almost certain to 'collapse' into even higher coherence, not into chaos and self-destruction," and further "A note to confirmed pessimists: Prigogine's analysis is based on probability-theory and, hence, is not certain. Thus, if you have found these lyrical pages unduly alarming, take comfort in the thought that, although human success is highly probable, there is still a small chance that we can blow ourselves up or that your favorite apocalyptic scenarios might still occur, despite the general trend toward higher coherence and higher intelligence." And here I sit, unconvinced of any "higher coherence" emerging recently and thus condemned as a foul, brooding pessimist whose dearest wish is the fulfillment of my dire prophecies. Alas.
If you go onto the Internet, check out our modern forums of social gathering, look at the pages of the our newscorps and how they can't agree on foundational facts (also, what is considered a news source), see what good higher education is doing for most people and believe that this is "coherence," well...I might be able to interest you in joining a great business opportunity, so please get in touch and grab that checkbook!
I'm more than willing to hope and trust that there is a probability that humanity will strive on as we always have and that tomorrow will be better than today...I'm just not counting on it anytime within the next decade(s). Progress is neither inexorable, nor is it inevitable. Human culture, government and economics are not evolutionary processes, no matter how much we project that onto those structures. Please world, prove me wrong.
I once amused John Higgs by mentioning that I had a go-to expert on Aleister Crowley. This is no longer true, in the sense that I now have two experts I can consult, as needed.
I love shopping for cheap ebooks and every month I check the books that have gone on sale at Amazon. (Hundreds of books go on sale every month.) When I spotted that Perdurabo, a biography of Crowley by Richard Kaczynski, was available for $1.99, I went ahead and bought it, then checked with my experts for this blog post.
I didn't have to write to Oz Fritz, as I knew he had written about it. Here is his review, and I felt better about my purchase after reading it. Oz wrote, "The blurb on the front of dust jacket says: The definitive biography of the founder of modern magick. Having read the first edition of Perdurabo, and every other biography of this controversial figure, I readily agree."
Oz's 2010 review actually was sparked by the release of a revised and updated edition, and Oz wrote, "Diving into the first chapter, Birthday, it becomes immediately apparent that the factual research of Crowley's life and history is thorough and extensive, bordering on pedantic."
Oz writes that Kaczynski successfully addresses the claim that Crowley was an evil black magician. "That couldn't be further from the truth. However, Perdurabo is a critical account, not a white-washed attempt at spin control of Crowley's legacy."
My other expert is Apuleius Charlton, so I consulted him, too. Apuleius told me, "I have read it, it is fawning and I view it as the antipode to Symonds calumny. [E.g., The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds.] Kaczynski is an OTO ideologue. If you want to read a modern bio, everyone loves 'Do What Thou Wilt' (I haven't read it." [Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, by Lawrence Sutin.]
I'm not a magick expert, but I wanted to read a Crowley bio because of his large influence on Robert Anton Wilson.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
This is both a great time to be reading this chapter and a difficult time to successfully perform some of the more optimistic exercizes at the end. Today is a strange holiday; I imagine that there are always groups/individuals in our country who are discomforted on this day, who feel that the country we’re supposed to be celebrating isn’t “their” country- I would wager that more people feel like this today than even in the dark ages of 1922. We are surrounded by the SNAFU principle, or as Oz commented on my last post, the AFU principle as things don’t really seem normal right now. It would seem to be obvious that there is a conspiracy in our country to limit our rights and enforce minority rule- but is it still a conspiracy when it is so out in the open?
Attempting the sixth exercize, after recent events, quickly became distressing. Again, this could be said at any point in history, depending on your position on the globe/in society/in your personal life. When my eyes have been glued to the news, it instead became a meditation on what I chose to “notice.” If my day as god gives me any insight to the positive realities, it would be that they are to be found in the pages of fiction and with people you love, not in the wider world. Happily the fourth exercize is relatively easy during the summer, when I am out of the classroom and away from the headaches of the year; most people are perfectly pleasant when I run errands. There’s a lot to be said for common decency and politeness.
So that’s what I’m wishing for all of us on today’s Glorious Fourth, common decency and politeness. Just don’t look for it at the top of the pyramid.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
Well, this isn’t a heartening chapter and I can see how there could be many interpretations of this chapter vis a vis the state of the nation in 2022. I think the least controversial or biased assessment I could give would be that this chapter describes the state of the world that led to the current state of the world. There are many groups that feel oppressed, spied against and as if they are the target of a vast, whichever-wing conspiracy. Aside from the rapid advancements of mass communication, can we also blame decades, if not centuries, of mismanagement to the half-to-wholly deranged state of the populace today?
Certainly, our government’s inability to articulate the voice of the the people is one of the reasons for our current SNAFU situation; polls indicate that most Americans are for abortion access, cannabis legalization and more laws around gun ownership, but the actions of powerful interest groups and particuarly loud and belligerent parts of society have caused the current balkanization of rights that vary depending on which side of a river one lives. The overreliance on the Supreme Court to ensure our rights, instead of Congress, has guaranteed that the composition of the Court(s) is all-important; the tide had firmly turned against liberalism when Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination. Now, after watching the Court which has (mostly) defended civil liberties for the first part of my life, I must deal with the entirely predictable cognitive dissonance of watching the Court strip civil liberties from the American people. Perhaps, as other commentators have pointed out, liberalism was truly defeated after the Citizens United ruling which determined that people with vast amounts of money have every right to sway elections and politicians as they see fit. I guess we can take comfort that Antonin Scalia is looking up from hell and smiling at the work he accomplished.
The secret police, if they exist, have an easier job today when half of the country is at the other half’s necks and watches with delight when the “other side” screams and moans in dismay. I’ll admit that I enjoyed the indignant mewling of Evangelicals when Obergefell was decided and can recognize the same smug triumph in convervative/Evangelical writers today as they look forward to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t seem like we need a government created atmosphere of paranoia when we loathe our neighbors to such a degree, all we have to do is look at who has what political banner/sign/bumper sticker to feel threatened. To know that there are member of our of families that voted for that asshole, to know that this friend refused to get the vaccine, to know that our coworker is happy that abortion access is being restricted…I don’t need any fancy police to feel persecuted. That seems lazy and unAmerican, I can pull myself up by my own paranoiac bootstraps.
And if I were a person in power, I think I’d be delighted if I weren’t concerned with ruling well. When we can’t agree with what is happening when we see recorded evidence or hear recorded words, imagine what else the people in power can get away with. Better yet, if you believe certain sources, we can see what the people in power are getting away with and have to sit impotently by as those morons still support them. Oh ho! What fun!
It’s my turn to write a second post about this chapter so I’m going to save some of my ideas for then. I’m hoping to have some more positive reports after trying some of the exercizes given at the end of the chapter. Right now, please believe that the SNAFU principle rules the day.
1. In the Hilaritas Press newsletter announcing the publication of Wilhelm Reich In Hell, Rasa wrote, "we think the timing could not be more appropriate. We live in strange and challenging days."
This could refer to any number of things, of course, but one of the main concerns of RAW's play is the amount of violence humans do to each other, and there has certainly been a raft of mass shootings lately in the U.S.
There was another one on June 1, the day the book came out, and it had a kind of grim synchronicity for me.
Five people were killed during the Tulsa shooting, including the gunman and two doctors. The shooting took place at the medical campus for St. Francis Hospital, only a short distance, an easy walk, from where both my parents and my sister live. Survivors and their families were reunited at Tulsa Memorial High School, my alma mater.
So certainly I have violence on my mind as we discuss the book.
2. I recently posted about "Infinite Gesture," R.U. Sirius' new collection of song lyrics without music. Steve Fly Agaric 23 has now set one of them, "Not A Bug But A Feature," to music. Listen to the track here.
3. Over at the Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton has been leading an online discussion of Sex, Drugs & Magick. He's been busy with his day job, but that's easing up, and he wants everyone to know blogging will resume next week.
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
When I was younger and thus different than I am now (and thus beknighted and ignorant according to my current self) I vowed and swore and declared that I would not purposefully manipulate my daughter’s religious viewpoints. I take religion/spirituality/the lack thereof rather seriously and at the time compared raising a child in a religious ideology as a spiritual violation of autonomy. It wasn’t until recently I realized how gravely I had forsook my noble vow and broke my promise time and again. My daughter was playing with a wand.
Indeed, as I looked over it I had manipulated, corralled and exposed my daughter to everything that I love, my gods, my universe and magic from the youngest age. When she was an infant I surrounded her with fairies and read her The 1001 Nights. I conducted Enochian investigations in the room across from her where she’d come and visit as a toddler. When she was older I took her for long walks telling her stories about The Great God Pan and grey-eyed Athene. I filled her head with ideas about magic and hinted at possibilities outside the realm of the everyday. We made a game/exercise of her grabbing statues or items off my various altars and her asking what they were, as if learning a catechism. I immersed her in my beliefs and she is well on the way to making them her own and eventually something new.
I can’t say that I regret reworking the terms of my vow- after all, I never blatantly told her what to believe and now she is old enough to debate and consider ideas I bring up on her own. I’m pleased by what she is and might be. Did he smile his work to see?
Yesterday, at a rare family gathering one of my relatives remarked that my daughter acted “exactly” like me and was my “mini-Me.” I could only respond “that’s why I am so fond of her, I like things that resemble myself.” Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
I have lived most of my adult life in spaces that were consciously designed to suffuse me in my own bullshit. Consequently, I am nigh-neurotic in my preference for meeting with others in my own spaces. It is the same at school; I will always choose to stay in my room and insist that I teach in my room during classes outside the regular day.
Reading the material in this chapter is imminently familiar as I know it by rote, it is one of the things I digested easily when first reading Wilson, and it made me feel awfully smug about being on the right track as an adolescent. (He even refers to Blake as "The Poet," which tremendously warms the cockles of my heart.) In many ways it is the satisfaction of what one must feel when they hear the letter of their version of Natural Law. I guess I’m still awfully smug, although I am aware that I have become somewhat addicted to my exteriorized world to the point where being in another’s is decently uncomfortable after a short span of time.
I intend to do the exercises concerning mapping others on the four terrestrial circuits. I believe this is one I have done before and I hope I can find my notes as it would be interesting to see how my impressions have changed. While not listed as an exercise, I will give a brief example by notationally dissecting myself:
1st Circuit: Strongly oral characteristics with a deep aversion to adversity or pain
2nd Circuit: Primary “I’m not okay, you’re not okay” script coupled with “I’m okay, you’re not okay” paranoiac-leaning subscript
3rd Circuit: Deeply devoted to their own sense of logic and semantics, very dismissive of contradictory “logics”
4th Circuit: Strong currents of moralism and “ethics” obsession coupled with recalcitrant attitude toward many societal structures and norms
:( With that going for me, I should be able to write a pretty good fundamentalist Christian critique. All in good fun, one hopes!
Randy Weaver
Randy Weaver has died. He was known for a confrontation with the government (arguable instigated by the government) at Ruby Ridge in 1992 that resulted in three deaths.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote about Weaver in the "Preface to the 2000 Edition" of Sex, Drugs & Magick: "In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only 'offense' of which the Weavers were guilty ... The Weavers sure had a lot of nutty ideas; nobody but another Fundamentalist would deny that. But maybe their idea of the nature of the current U.S. government, and its attitude toward its serfs and subjects, was a hell of a lot more accurate than the ideas you read in liberal journals."
Apuleius Charlton wrote about the case in a blog post that's part of the ongoing series about Sex,Drugs & Magick. His post argues that ultimately Weaver put his family in danger.
Jesse Walker on the Weaver case: "It isn't hard to find examples of marginal groups whose paranoia about the government drove them to violence. The tale of the Weavers shows how the government's paranoia about marginal groups can drive *it* to violence, too."
By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
What the hand, dare seize the fire? - Blake
I’m happy to report that I feel as if I understood this chapter better this time around. On a cold January night over a decade ago I’m in a dark room on a dorm bed, kneeling with a face hot with seemingly endless tears. These tears don’t really come out as droplets, or I am not perceiving them as drops, but rather like some sort of effluvial web. My face has become a delta. I’ve ingested mushrooms for the first time in my life and I’m being told a story.
Last night my wife and I were talking about LSD in the context of “The Story of Jane: Ice Maiden” from Sex, Drugs and Magick; we were discussing the phenomena of people believing that psychedelics, especially LSD, are some sort of magic switch. We then began discussing the phenomena of how profound/not-seemingly-profound psychedelic experiences can lead to drastic change in people’s lives, usually not immediately (that almost always wears off), but over long amounts of time. I began talking about how my later experiences with LSD seemed to confirm over time and reflection that, contrary to the widely-reported experiences of a larger reality or knowledge of God, this was it. Whatever “this” and “it” might mean is still being deliberated upon. But those experiences confirmed for me that I am everything I’ll ever know. I am a composite of many different moments. There is an undertow of black, gold and stained wood.
Maybe not the most useful paradigm, but I’m surprisingly comfortable with it. The “I” on the dorm bed isn’t. Not yet. I wanted to storm the gates of Heaven and steal fire, find some sort of secret door into another, less-dull world. Soon, actually over a year from this night, I’ll be reading Prometheus Rising for the first time, much later in my consumption of Wilson than one might imagine, and I’ll grok a lot of it. I’ll be continually surprised by everything I missed over the years.
There’s a me that asks my friend of many years, when the conversation has gone on too long and come to its final, self-referential end (for me) and I’ll ask, how many times I can’t imagine; “Am I good?” I’m very concerned with “goodness,” “happiness,” and other canards. This question is never answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Some nights with my wife, when the conversation has gone on too long and come to its final, self-referential end, we’ll play the perception game, trying to imagine how others see us. It’s the same game, the terms are just a little looser, less metaphysical. But maybe that isn’t the correct perception of the conversation.
Today, rereading this beautifully written chapter, I am struck by the Magic Room game; it seems to be one of the most promising and enticing exercizes provided in the text. I can remember that the last time I read it I found Cagliostro’s Alien Game from The Trick Top Hat to be more interesting and useful. I can’t remember why I didn’t take it as a serious tip before that. Looking back over myself, I can pinpoint two plausible reasons: (one) I am hostile towards computers in my mind if not in practice and (two) I have read this book as a “mystic” many times and have overestimated the difficulty and performance of astral projection. Astral projection was something that concerned the “I” on the dorm bed with the wet face. It sounds terribly exciting and the best way to meet the gods, demons and grey aliens I wanted to find in the jungle of magic. Alas, it will come as a bitter disappointment when I realized that astral projection and pathworking is a very-willed exercise that isn’t quite what Crowley described in Magick Without Tears and The Temple of Solomon the King. Gods aren’t great at keeping appointments.
Reading the chapter I’m also reminded of the psychosynthetic self-identification exercise that I’ve practiced for years; that dissociation with the usual impressions of “self.” I question whether the “self,” that self that is a centre of pure consciousness, described and built by the exercise is another false self. I am okay with the idea; I’ve learned I can’t completely quit hypocrisy, but I can try to employ it strategically. I’m reminded of the years of therapy-training in psychosynthesis where my teacher would constantly admonish my pointed focus on the more fantastical elements of magic and instead asks me repeatedly to ask myself what is useful to my life. I’m arrogant and learning is hard before I begin to understand. I accumulate a lot of bruises before I learn to stop staring at the stars while stuck in the woods.
Now, the Magic Room game and its near future computer seem like an elegant experiment, primed for this moment. I’m looking forward to whatever “I” I might be in the future might make of the damnable computer that cannot process doubt. I feel the thrill of a younger magician, hungry for experience.
The I on the bed is listening to a story, as told by Richard Burton and collected by Jorge Luis Borges, read to me by my friend I used to ask “am I good?” It is “The Tale and the Poet:”
Tulsi Das, the Hindu poet, created the tale of Hanuman and his army of monkeys. Years afterwards, a despot imprisoned him in a stone tower. Along in his cell, he fell to meditating, and from his meditation came Hanuman and his monkey army, who laid low the city, broke open the tower, and freed Tulsi Das.
The story goes on Forever.
(For the members of the Sex, Drugs & Magick group, I apologize for my hiatus and have a small explanation in the next post. I'll be finishing it tonight and posting either this evening or tomorrow.)
