Scott Apel discusses his Philip K. Dick book

D. Scott Apel's book Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is a key document for Dick fans. The anthology includes a very long interview with Dick and pieces by Robert Anton Wilson, R. Faraday Nelson and Dick himself. Lawrence Sutin, author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, says Apel's book is "Hands down the most joyous and entertaining book on Philip K. Dick."

For some useful background on the book, see below for an interview with Scott conducted by his friend, ej "Jami" Morgan. 

This interview first ran in PKD OTAKU #22, 14 May 2011. 

ej Morgan is a writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Among other books she is the author of the novel A Kindred Spirit. Scott describes it as "A brilliant novel about a woman who believes she's getting post-mortem messages from PKD." You can visit her official website. 

Here is Ms. Morgan's original introduction to the interview:

Never underestimate the “Phil factor.” And if you wonder what that means, D. Scott Apel’s Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is as good a place as any to dive in for a big dose. For instance, just as Editor Gregg Lee and I were discussing pulling the 1987 book out of mothballs and taking another look at it, Scott announced he is re-releasing the book as a trade paperback this spring. That’s synchronicity.

Who among us has not thought of a favorite PKD book, and had it turn up at a used book store? But, the more you dig in and learn about Phil’s real-life experiences, the freakier the Phil factor gets. Synchronicity becomes deeper and more Dickian. Scott found out first hand – with both real Phil and post-Phil encounters – and those accounts are the essence of The Dream Connection.

Morgan further reports (in 2026) " I did a lengthy telephone interview with Scott in the late 1990s that was supposed to  appear in Issue #8 of Radio Free PKD. Sadly, there was no Issue #8.  Greg Lee stopped printing the ‘zine after Issue #7." But OTAKU editor Patrick Clark agreed to run it, she says. 

This interview is reprinted here by kind permission of ej Morgan. 

JAMI MORGAN: Some RFPKD [Radio Free PKD] subscribers read your book when it first came out, and serious Dickheads may recall that you were a contributor to the original PKDS newsletter. Others will discover you and TDC in this second release. So, let’s start by going back to those early days in 1977 when you first met Phil. You were just a kid then, right? 

SCOTT APEL: Well, I was 25, just out of college and my friend Kevin Briggs and I had been working on a book project called Approaching Sci Fi Authors for a couple of years. To put the time frame in perspective, this was pre-Star Wars; a time when sci-fi was still pretty much a cult interest. We were sending out letters and lining up interviews with several authors who lived in or near the California Bay area. So, one day I come home and my Mom (I was living at my parents’ house at this time) said your friend Phil called. I said, “Who? I don’t have a friend Phil.” Mom said, “He just said, ‘Tell Scott his friend Phil Dick called.’” Of course, I was blown away. We still had some trouble getting the interview set up, because he tried to back out a couple of times. But his girlfriend at the time, Joan Simpson, helped convince him. I remember she told us it would be the best thing for him right now, since he had been brooding and melancholy and was having trouble writing at the time. Anyway, he finally agreed to let us come to his home in Sonoma and do the interview. It turned into a 2-day session with us staying overnight at his house. I described the whole experience in detail in the book. 

JM:  You intended to just ask basic questions about how he wrote his science fiction, but this led into an entirely different area when Phil began talking about his experiences with psychic phenomenon, something you didn’t anticipate when you set up the meeting, right? 

APEL: First of all, we didn’t anticipate the enormous length at which he wanted to talk about these things. Secondly, we never anticipated the enormous depth at which he wanted to approach some of these subjects. Science fiction and literature became just a jumping off point to talk about religion and philosophy. With most of the other writers [interviewed for the project] we were lucky to get an hour interview. With the really good ones, like Ted Sturgeon and Norman Spinrad, we were doing 2 hour interviews just because they had so much to say. But Phil, by comparison, had four times as much to say. Sturgeon was pretty well tapped out after the two hours, but with Phil we had over eight hours on tape. And we just decided that was the place to stop because it became obvious we could do a whole damn book just on Phil. So, yes, we certainly were taken by surprise by the depth at which he wanted to discuss the material. 

JM: You were interviewing him in 1977 and Phil’s life-altering event occurred in February/March 1974. The incident he called the “2-3-74” event. So, all of this was pretty fresh at the time, right?

APEL:  Exactly. In fact, the interview in The Dream Connection is THE most complete and most in depth description of those experiences that has ever been published anywhere. He may have had longer conversations with closer friends of his, like Paul Williams, but as far as what’s lasted on paper and anyone who wants to understand those experiences and doesn’t read TDC isn’t getting the full story. I’m very proud of that fact. That this most controversial part of the man’s life is the part we took most seriously, seriously enough to print it in its entirety. 

JM: And it certainly is controversial, because many of his original hard-core fans are really uncomfortable with his later works and believe he had some kind of physical or biological episode or that he was even insane. There’s the whole gamut of how people react to that part of his life. But, in TDC you came away feeling he was quite sane.

APEL: Oh yeah. There is no question about it in my mind. And, I can make a claim like that if only because I have a degree in psychology and I’ve worked in mental asylums. They train you to tell the difference between people who are sane, people who are insane and people who are acting insane. Phil was not in any way crazy. There may be some biological explanation for some of his experiences; you know a brain embolism or over-medication. I’m not a medical doctor. But, I do know the man was absolutely sincere in his belief that he had an experience that was in some way outside the realm of normality. He did his best to describe it and devoted most of the rest of his life of his life trying to put it in some kind of perspective and context. 

Now, if you turn to a book like Cosmic Consciousness by [Richard] Bucke, I believe his name is, a classic in the field, he writes descriptions of any number of people who claim to have had some kind of unusual experiences. They’re pretty much all the same and they’re very much like Phil’s. They all feel they’ve had some type of revelations. Now whether they’re medical or chemical, physical or spiritual, or all of the above – nobody knows exactly what that stuff is, yet the experiences all have similar characteristics. I’d say Phil is just another one. He had the gates of perception open, given whatever cause and for whatever reason. But, it certainly was not something that should be considered insane. It may be the next step in human evolution to get people of their minds and into the cosmic consciousness.

JM: Phil ranged all over the place, not only in his conversations with you but also in the Exegesis and in VALIS, trying to decide if his experiences were extra-terrestrial or contact with some disembodied entity. 

APEL: Yes, was it a disembodied spirit, was it his own reincarnation memories, was it totally drug-induced, was it aliens contacting him – this was a man with an enormous imagination. So, when he came up with a theory he tried to match it to the facts, because he did have some kind of scientific training. He would think of a theory and then he’d compare it to the facts and eventually discard most of it, which I think maybe a lot of people who read about Phil’s later life fail to understand. He was approaching all this stuff in a very scientific manner by applying his theories to the data and then discarding most of it as irrational. I like to think of it as entertaining an idea. He wasn’t convinced that aliens were affecting his mind or that Russians were transmitting works of art into his head. That was a theory. The way he tested a theory was to try it out – wear it like a suit of clothes for awhile and see how comfortable it was. Eventually the flaws would appear. In fact, he used the clothing metaphor. He would find a loose thread and pull on it until the entire suit came apart. Then he’d discard that and get a new set of clothes.

JM: You devote about 75 pages to the interview that took place and then conclude with an Afterward on the conspiracy-cloaked Russian Xerox Missive. In it Phil, or actually Joan (his then-girlfriend) referred to that particular theory as the “really important part.” Can you explain what that was all about? 

APEL: (pause) No, I really couldn’t. (long laughter from both of us.) That was just another piece of data in the hopper. Who knows what that was all about? I couldn’t even begin to explain it. [NOTE: Paul Williams does delve into the Xerox Missive extensively in his book Only Apparently Real for anyone who wants to further explore that point.] 

JM: And, what state was VALIS in at the time of your interview with Phil?

APEL: Well, that’s a complicated subject, but it is all spelled out in great detail in TDC. He had written a book called Valisystem A which I believe became, in part, Radio Free Albemuth. By the time he released VALIS, his thinking had changed so radically that the two books appeared to be completely different. At the time we interviewed him, he had finished Valisystem A, but wasn’t happy with it. He knew there was more to it, but didn’t know what and he wanted to take it in a different direction, but wasn’t sure where.

According to Russ Galen, Phil’s agent for many years, Phil told Russ that it was our interview that helped unlock his creativity and made him think in different directions, and actually enabled him to throw it aside and start from scratch and rewrite VALIS. 

JM:  Wow, now that’s heavy. (pause) That really brings up the issue about David and Kevin and your feelings that at least in part, you and Kevin Briggs were incorporated into David and Kevin of VALIS. 

APEL: There’s a couple of lines right out of our interview with him that comes right out of the mouths of David and Kevin in VALIS. Plus, most of the exploits in VALIS took place in Sonoma. Kevin [Briggs] called me and said, “Guess what! We’re characters in the book.” Then I read it and it was very clear to me that he did use us as characters. And, then I talked to Phil – I called him on the phone – and I said, hey, I know how you work, that you use real life people. And I know how you combine people occasionally into characters in your fiction, but I want to know is this David in VALIS actually David Scott Apel? And, is this Kevin really Kevin C. Briggs. And he said, “Sure are.” So, I got it directly from him that these characters were at least partially based on us. Now, Tim Powers and Kevin Jeter have also claimed that the characters are based on them. And I know they’re the more famous ones – the better and longer term friends of Phil’s than Kevin and I were. Yet, when I asked Phil about it, he was confirming that he at least used us in part, combining me and Tim Powers into David and Jeter and Briggs into Kevin.

You know, I hate to make a big deal out of this. I don’t want to sound like one of those people who is waving their hands for attention, yelling “Me, Me.” I just want people to know the real story. Because I’m sure at the time, even Jeter and Powers didn’t know the whole story. That’s all. And, I’m very proud to be associated in Phil’s mind with Tim Powers. He’s an enormous talent. We’ve since exchanged letters and it’s a point of honor for me that Phil would connect us in that manner. 

JM: EJM: Ok, let’s discuss what you call Phase Two – the second section of the book – dealing with dream telepathy. Do you recall who first mentioned the topic? Did Phil mention dream telepathy or did you?

APEL: No, I think I did, because a good friend of mine wrote a book called Dream Telepathy and we wanted to know if Phil had read that. Actually, Phil mentioned the concept and I said what you’re talking about sounds like the same thing in the book by Alan Vaughan where he covered experiments by several scientists who actually transmit and receive material in the dream state. So, it was something Phil was definitely aware of. 

JM: I bring it up because it’s crucial to the next phase of what happens in your book, AFTER Phil dies. 

APEL: Well, any condensation of those experiences runs the risk of sounding crazy. Which is why I took the time and the effort to detail the entire range of experiences in the book. Any kind of summary here will make it sound like something from the psychic friends network or a bad movie, some psycho-thriller made for cable TV. But, yes, a year or so after Phil died I began having dreams about him and about subjects he had talked about. And, as someone who had been keeping a journal of dreams for over 20 years, I paid a great deal of attention to them. I was able to identify them as very different from any other type of dream I had ever had and therefore paid even more attention to them. They all seem to revolve around these ideas of Phil communicating with me. So, you know, I’m fairly open-minded, and decided, OK, I’ll entertain the idea. But, what really made my mind up to even pursue this was the tremendous number of “synchronicities” that started to cluster around Phil Dick related activity. I couldn’t ignore the links between what was happening inside my mind and outside in my own environment. So, at the risk of looking like a fool – something I excel at – I decided Phil had some kind of message that he wanted to get through. So let’s just go ahead and take the next step and try to find a medium – which for some people is perhaps a contradiction in terms. But, since I knew Alan Vaughn who wrote the book Dream Telepathy, I contacted him and set up meetings with a number of different mediums and eventually I got some decent evidential data. 

[Note: Now, I won’t attempt to cover this vast amount of “evidential date” here. That is Phase 3 and takes up nearly half of the book. That’s for you to fully explore, if interested, in Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection. What I can say is that just as Scott believes Phil was completely sane and rational, I found Scott to be quite convincing, incredibly honest and sincere— both in the book and during this interview — discussing his experiences with mediums and attemps to contact Phil on the other side. And Scott wondered aloud about why so many people had similar experiences.] 

APEL: You know, I thought it was very interesting that after Phil died, others wrote about Phil making contacts... [Michael] Bishop, [Richard] Lupoff...was this same psychosis affecting them? Maybe because he WAS making a big splash in a psychic pond and ripples were going out to his friends. I just happened to be close enough to get doused. Others were far enough away to just see the ripples.

JM: And now looking back on it, what do you think the message was?

APEL: He wanted his friends to know he was OK, that he loved them and here’s some evidence that there is life after death. In some sense the whole story, in true Phil Dick fashion, transcended even the idea of interesting experiences, he wanted to come back and prove his philosophy, the stuff he spent his adult life writing about. In some sense, it’s like a footnote to say: “By the way, I’m back and I was right.”

[Note: I first read TDC in 1997 while engaged in my own series of Dickian synchronicities—“meaningful coincidences” as Scott described them. It was truly weird since I was working on a concept for my own novel which deals with Phil making contact from the hereafter [A Kindred Spirit]. When I started writing it, I had no idea so many others had tackled the topic of Phil “coming back.” Of course, I was just learning how pervasive the Phil factor is. TDC includes an essay by Ray Nelson, co-author with PKD on The Ganymede Takeover, in which Phil visits him in the dream state urging him to write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, based on notes they once developed in a writer’s group. Just good essay material? Nelson later confirmed to Scott that he started working on the sequel because the experience with Phil was “so real.” I’ve since learned that Paul Williams, former literary executor for Phil’s estate and founder of the PKD Society (and rock historian extraordinaire), experienced untold synchronicities, at the least, and at times actual feelings of contact with Phil, during the years he spent on the PKD project. I mentioned some of this to Scott during our conversation.]

APEL: Now, what you’re saying about you and Paul Williams and other people, that’s what I’m talking about. Synchronicity is not unusual among writers or among creative people. It’s actually quite common in the creative fields. What IS unusual is that so many people who knew Phil, or were fans of Phil, have these experiences clustered around Phil Dick material. Most writers, when they experience synchronicity, think it’s a sign that they’re on the right track, discovering meaning somehow and doing what they should be doing. But, what interests me is how many people, who are fans of Phil, have experiences like this related directly to Phil Dick material. It’s another step beyond just synchronicity. It’s the added Phildickian element and the real sense that life is becoming like a Phil Dick novel. You know, am I dealing with Palmer Eldritch? In Phil’s afterlife is he a benign interfering god or like Palmer Eldritch who is going to haunt me for the rest of my friggin’ life?

[Note: Scott says the experiences stopped once he published the book in 1987 and he felt closure to that ten-year period of his life. He went on to other projects, writing nearly 600 video and movie reviews for the San Jose Mercury News, writing plays and even appearing in some Killer B movies he became notorious for reviewing. So, why re-visit the book and the strange PKD experiences now?]

APEL: A whole new generation of readers are discovering Phil on their own or thorough the Internet. The first time I published the book it was truly a labor of love, my tribute to the man—Philip K. Dick and I didn’t care if I made a dime of profit. This time my motives are a bit more mercenary—I would like to make some money.

I’ve started up this new web-based independent small press publishing business. In addition to the Phil Dick book, I’m offering Chaos and Beyond, an anthology of Robert Anton Wilson material, my own Killer B’s video guide, and a real Phildickian science fiction comic novel called MFU, which I think is one of the funniest damn things I have ever read. And, finally, I do intend to publish that collection of interviews with the science fiction authors. There is so much brilliant material from the writers, material that should not be lost or forgotten. So, for now, I just hope to get my small press off the ground and make a success of it.

[This interview was originally written in 1999 for Greg Lee’s ‘zine Radio Free PKD. Scott Apel did republish TDC as a trade paperback in July of 1999.]

A new paper, inspired by Leary and RAW

                                                  

A new paper, "THE MEDIUM WAS THE MESSAGE: Synchronicity, Transmission, and the Emergence of Human-AI CoCreation," co-written by Craig Ellenwood and the Claude AI, has been posted (as a PDF). You can download a copy from Joseph Matheny's latest Substack newsletter.  Ellenwood has a website, but I could not figure out how to access the paper from there.

The paper is inspired by a 1995 piece, "How Have Computers Empowered Humans?", written to Timothy Leary, that Ellenwood found in the New York Public Library's collection of Leary papers. 

The paper is co-written by Ellenwood and the Claude AI.

"We argue that this represents a new category of authorship that existing frameworks inadequately capture. Claude is not a tool used by Ellenwood to write more efficiently. It is not a ghostwriter producing text that Ellenwood then claims as his own. It is a collaborator with genuine intellectual contributions — including perspectives on its own nature and situation that no human author could provide," Ellenwood writes.

Ellenwood says the pair also collaborated on his new album, available at the website. 

I don't know Ellenwood, but here is his description of himself: "Creative Technologist, Musician, AI Systems Artist, and Co-Founder of the music element of Burning Man (1992). Performed with Psychic TV (1991–93). Collaborated with Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Moby, Genesis P-Orridge, and members of Tool and The Smiths. Founder of Inoculate Media and Haawke Neural Technology, Point Roberts, WA, USA."

"This paper is dedicated to Timothy Leary, Genesis P-Orridge, and Robert Anton Wilson," Ellenwood writes. 

Synchronicity artwork

 

The artwork, above, is “The Buzz” by creationtrip. It was posted on X by Lucid Dreams, with this quote from Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson: “Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.”

My John Higgs synchronicity

 

My sister's copy

I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to visit my mother. While chatting with my sister in my mother's living room a few days ago, my sister mentioned that the local branch of the public library has a table where people can put books they own they have finished reading, and other library patrons are invited to take them and bring them home. Kind of like the "Little Free Libraries" that are common in the U.S. Susi mentioned there was a book that offered a different history of the 20th century.

The next day, Susi, knowing my interest in  history, brought the book over to show to me, and to my surprise it was John Higgs' Stranger Than We Can Imagine. It's one of my favorite John Higgs books.  I have my own copy, autographed by the author,  and I also had bought a copy and given it to my father. It was one of the last books my Dad read before he passed away.

"I know that guy!" I exclaimed. I explained that Dad had read it. Then I picked up my mother's copy of Every Day is a GOOD DAY, the Robert Shea book published by Hilaritas Press that I edited that came out in September. I showed them the quote on the back cover, from John, endorsing the book.

At this point, you probably are curious what John said about the Shea book, here it is: "“Entertaining, thought provoking and richly varied, Every Day is a GOOD Day is a perfect introduction to the anarchistic principles and humane thinking of Robert Shea - a man more interested in finding flaws in his own beliefs than he is in forcing those beliefs on others.”

Other endorsements are here. 

'Vineland' online reading group, Chapter 11

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

"The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara's phrase 'Wherever death my surprise us.' It didn't have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would ..."– Vineland, p. 202-203

"Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence."

– Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

The character Weed Atman has an interesting name. Sometimes Pynchon goes opaquely occult with his signifiers, other times he's screamingly obvious. Atman is a Sanskrit term for the True or Deep Self. It's the part of you that survives obliteration in death and gets reincarnated, according to Hindu doctrine. Atman can also get thought of as the essential nature of something. In philosophy they talk about the being of this or that. To give one example, Deleuze wants to find the being of the sensible in his philosophy of difference. Weed Atman could signify the being, or the essential character of Vineland given that various forms of cannabis consumption - weed - run throughout the book. Not necessarily the character Weed Atman, but his name, the only name in the book with this blatant a definition.

To state the obvious, marijuana has an explicit role in Vineland. After breakfast, Zoyd begins his day (and the book) smoking half a joint. If a reader proved highly suggestible, they'd already be stoned in the second page of text. We find two or three amusing cannabis references in the working practices of the 24fps enclave in chapter 10. There's another weed reference in chapter 11; I think a character turns up with a joint in their mouth. To state the less obvious, marijuana has an implicit role in this book. In chapter 10 we find DL's initials given a number of times and at least once in chapter 11.

DL = 34. Chapter 34 in The Book of Lies is called "The Smoking Dog".  Pynchon seems quite fond of both smoking (weed) and dogs. Vineland starts (the Copeland quote) and ends with a dog. I'll leave that for the reader to unlock.

DL's initials appear capitalized (although reversed) as Love and Death in "The Smoking Dog." I highly recommend reading that chapter and commentary as an adjunct to reading Vineland. It's easily found online and clocks in at less than two pages long. Crowley calls Love and Death "greyhounds" that chase us. Pynchon puts us in a greyhound bus station with Zoyd and a baby Prairie in a later chapter, 14, I believe. DL herself seems all about death and love with the vibrating palm delivering death and her love for Frenesi, Takeshi, and the gesture of love she showed Prairie. Also, D = daleth = Venus, the goddess of love.

Apart from entertaining his audience in such a delightful way, Pynchon provides keys for establishing a presence in the higher dimensions – Leary's brain circuits or systems 5 through 8. Weed Atman appears as one of two characters who starts out living but ends up dead, in the bardo as a Thanatoid. In general, the bardo can be thought of as the territory "in between." Metaphorically speaking, an explorer of higher modalities (brain circuits 5 - 8) needs to temporarily die to their conventional self image, their mundane identity (as determined by their experiences and actualizations in C 1 - 4) in order to establish a lasting awareness in C 5- 8. We can think of that presence in the higher circuits as our Atman, our True Self. Weed Atman, the being of Vineland, seems an obvious key for getting there. According to Wilson and Leary, marijuana activates C5. Though I suspect Pynchon doesn't care much for Bob Dylan (I could be wrong) the 24 fps slogan 'Wherever death may surprise us' reminds me of "Rainy Day Woman #12 & #35."

Weed Atman, the being of Vineland. I submit that atman symbolizes the land of the vine, the territory of the higher dimensions. Ingesting cannabis seems one easy way to start off in that direction when somewhat adhering to set, setting and dosage guidelines. According to Google AI's Overview: "A true vine is a long-stemmed plant that uses other objects for support as it climbs to reach sunlight. It develops specialized climbing structures like tendrils (eg., grapevines) or clinging aerial roots (eg., ivy) to attach to surfaces." This seems isomorphic to connecting more consciously with the inner galaxies that make up the atman.

* * * * * * 

This appears the 4th chapter in a row giving an emphasis on attention: "Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next Weed!" This quote also could serve as an illustration of someone moving into the higher dimensions ("another country"). It will be observed by those who pay attention to these things that Pynchon's use of the SC combination has noticeably increased in frequency since Prairie made her Spinach Casserole with its UBI (universal basic ingredient though universal basic income works just as well in the occult symbolism of SC). Most of this chapter takes place at the College of the Surf; the quote has "sports crowd."

Earlier someone mentioned family as a recurring trope or theme in Vineland. In Chapter 11 we hear about "Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth ...". Vineland ends with a big, annual family reunion. The only other main character who dies (maybe) in the book does so at the end. I have no idea if this has any relevance.

The storm that occurs when Frenesi and Brock are in Oklahoma that they also track on the Tube shows parallels with Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain." It's set in the aftermath of a weather event responsible for a lot of death. Like Wilson, Tom spreads his characters and themes throughout his written output. For instance, 86 has come up a bit in the Vineland discussion. Speaking of his younger self in the 3rd person on page 1 of his introduction to Slow Learner: "I mean I can't very well 86 this guy from my life." In the same introduction Pynchon explicitly connects the SC code with "The Small Rain" by informing us that the characters in it comprise a branch of the military called Signal Corps. The SC combo doesn't appear in the story at all.

The College of the Surf recalls a brief but scintillating adventure in my younger days. In 1978 a friend and I hitchhiked down to California from Western Canada. We spent a few days at Isla Vista, the locale of the University of California at Santa Barbara. One evening we hung out around the small night life area buying beer for underage students. We were underage too, the drinking age was 21 at the time, we were 18 but I guess we looked older due to our scruffy appearance from living on the road. The night before, we had tried staying in Santa Barbara on the beach, but were accosted by the police with their guns drawn on us – the only time that's happened to me. After searching us and failing to find any drugs, they took us to an area where homeless people camped and told us to get out of town before sundown the following day. After helping the students obtain their drug of choice, we dropped some acid and had a wonderful all night adventure finally crashing at dawn by the ocean. LSD gets a mention in Chapter 11.

The chapter ends with an interesting passage showing Frenesi reflecting on life, time and the way of service: "...time was rushing all around her, these were rapids and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often not in on the secret, are always, at every age, children" (p. 216). We see a lot there – Frenesi comparing her life to a river recalls Finnegans Wake; maybe a reference to Chapel Perilous; soldiering for children aligns with some lines from The Book of the Law, etc.  What struck me the most was that I had never considered surgery as a stage in life. But I guess as you get older and the body starts to fall apart all the medical stuff one has to go through does become a stage in life. I can relate to that.

Synchronicity: when researching atman I found out that the root word it comes from means breath. On Wednesday, someone I know very well went in for a lung biopsy and relayed a coincidence. One of the nurses asked what kind of music would he like to hear during the procedure. He said older Pink Floyd, please. When they wheeled him into the operating room the song "Breathe" from Dark Side of the Moon was playing. It couldn't be a more perfect choice, he thought.

Next week: please read Chapter 12, pages 218 - 268.

Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 105-109

AI generated image of Melville, right, and Hawthorne in the former's study.

This week: Chapter 105, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”

to Chapter 109, “Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin”

By Oz Fritz
Special guest blogger

The question of creating an American Literature with a distinctly separate identity from its British counterpart appeared of great interest to Melville before, during and after he wrote Moby Dick. He expressed thoughts about this in a critical essay titled “Hawthorne and His Mosses” a review of a collection of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Mosses from an Old Manse.  The review also addresses the subject of literature as a whole and Hawthorne’s place in it. Melville wrote the piece not long after meeting the elder writer for the first time. The two were part of a group of hikers along with other literary figures including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. walking up Massachusetts’ Monument Mountain in August, 1850. Melville and Hawthorne were forced to take shelter from a storm under some rocks for two hours. The enforced intimacy formed and sealed a fast friendship between the two lasting the remainder of their lives. 

At the time of the hike Melville was in the middle of writing Moby Dick. Hawthorne’s publisher, a friend of Melville, encouraged him to review Mosses from an Old Manse which had come out a few years earlier. Melville took a break from writing his epic novel to do so. According to Wikipedia, the close encounter with Hawthorne led Melville to reexamine, reconsider and revise his monumental work in progress.  One scholar, Walter Bezanson declared the essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” to be "deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading" for said novel. Indeed, Melville writes: “[b]ut already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germanous seeds into my soul.” In winter of that year, Melville unexpectedly paid Nathaniel a visit only to be turned away as he was busy writing and didn’t want visitors. Melville came back another time and was received. Later, Hawthorne surprised Herman by visiting his farm known as Arrowhead. The two spent the day “smoking and discussing metaphysics.” Historical accounts don’t clarify what they were smoking. Of course, we know that Moby Dick is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This essay can be found in The Portable Melville, inexpensive copies of which can be had online. Another Melville expert speculated that he wrote it in part to help prepare readers to receive Moby Dick. 

He sets the literary bar high in the second paragraph of the review with the egolessness of a Saint:

“Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors! Nor would any true man take exception to this – least of all, he who writes. When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while the spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of its reality.”

In attempting to substantiate the body of American literature, Melville compares and contrasts Hawthorne with Shakespeare saying that the distance between their greatness is not immeasurable. Writing about “The Old Apple Dealer,” a sad, melancholic story concerning a man who sells gingerbread and apples at a railway station, Melville says:

“Such touches as are in this piece cannot proceed from any common heart. They argue such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love, that we must needs say that this Hawthorne is here almost alone – in his generation at least – in the artistic manifestation of these things.”

He continues, and this, I believe, applies to Moby Dick as well: 

“Such touches as these – and many, very many similar ones, all through his chapters – furnish clues, whereby we enter a little way into the intricate, profound heart where they originated. And we see that suffering, some time or other and in some shape or other – this only can enable any man to depict it in others. All over him, Hawthorne’s melancholy rests like an Indian Summer, which though bathing a whole country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every towering hill, and each far-winding vale.” 

It seems that Melville believes a great writer can transmit and engender a sense of compassion and empathy in the attentive reader. Related to the above, responding to other opinions about Hawthorne, he writes:

“He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold.” 

I regard intuition as a form of Intelligence of the Higher Emotional centrum; Leary’s C6. Intuition grows and becomes stronger as one explores that territory. It seems that one of Melville’s points holds that great literature can help get one there. 

Melville prepares readers for Moby Dick by extolling the virtue and making a case for the dark side of Hawthorne’s writing so that they might be able to appreciate and more easily digest the shadow side of his own forthcoming (published slightly more than a year later) masterpiece. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side – like the dark half of the physical sphere – is shrouded in a blackness ten times. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wonderous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades: …” 

Coincidentally, a few days before reading “Hawthorne and His Mosses” I commented on this technique of blending light and darkness in regard to chapter 12 in the Sex Magicians by RAW as part of the discussion group working with that book (https://dovestamemoria.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-god-sex-magicians-chapter-twelve.html scroll down for my comment). I also mentioned that Pynchon uses this technique multiple times in Gravity’s Rainbow. (The first time I typed it I mistakenly called it Gravity’s Whale.) Some people maintain that not only did Moby Dick influence Gravity’s Rainbow, but that the latter novel represents a re-imagining of the former. I haven’t researched this enough to have an opinion, yet. I call the blending of literary light and darkness “chiaroscuro” after the artistic technique that does this visually. 

Synchronistically, we find a taste of this literary chiaroscuro in this week’s assigned section, in chapter 106, “Ahab’s Leg.” “For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystical significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur;” It continues a bit further in this vein. I consider this a synchronicity because when I started this piece, I thought I would write more about the establishment of American literature, not the chiaroscuro technique. Reading RAW’s use of chiaroscuro in Sex Magicians prepared me to recognize it when Melville makes the argument in the Hawthorne piece, but I was surprised and astonished to find Melville continuing his point here in chapter 106.

The two phrases, “all heart-woes, a mystical significance” recalls the concept of betrayal in the poetry of the Sufi mystic, Rumi. Rumi held that emotionally painful experiences can lead to inner growth and transformation. I tell people going through a rough romantic patch that when the heart gets broken, it can grow back stronger if one doesn’t completely capitulate to the pain. The passages in and around what I quoted reminds me of Nietzsche’s valuation of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy published slightly more than 20 years after The Whale. Previously I mentioned that Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced both Nietzsche and Melville. Some scholars say that Moby Dick influenced the maverick German philosopher.

The title of chapter 105 seems pretty self-explanatory – “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”.  Some of the size measurements given appear quite exaggerated as is a typical whale’s life-span. Melville appears to believe literally in Adam as the first human. The second half of the chapter considers the question: will humans kill all the whales and render them extinct like they nearly did with the buffalo? Some weeks ago, Tom mentioned a book called The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders that considers Moby Dick a warning about humans destroying nature. This chapter aligns with that premise.

Chapter 107, “The Carpenter” starts by asking the reader to shift their perspective to way out in space, specifically to the moons of Saturn. This resonates with Arthur C. Clarke's’novel, 2001 A Space Odyssey where the ship Discovery travels to Lapetus, a moon of Saturn. Kubrick changed it to Jupiter in the film because he wasn’t satisfied with the attempt to represent the rings of Saturn. The description of the duties and abilities of the unnamed carpenter sounds quite extensive and remarkable. Melville sums him up thusly: “this omnitooled, open and shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of harthorn, there is no telling.” Omnitooled recalls the language of Buckminster Fuller and his fondness for using “omni” as a prefix. Fuller was the nephew of Margaret Fuller, a friend and literary colleague of Emerson. The two possible “subtle somethings” seems metaphorical and suggest the concept I associate with the number 68. Quicksilver = Mercury (Hod 8). Harthorn is an archaic term for the chemical compound ammonium carbonate, a kind of ammonia used in baking, medicine and smelling salts. Looking at “harthorn” as a Joycean type of pun we can see “heart” (Tiphareth 6) plus “horn.” Also, recall the famous, mythical carpenter that corresponds with Tiphareth. We’re told, three times in this final paragraph, that the carpenter is a soliloquizer “talking all the time to keep himself awake.” I’m reminded of Sufis who use the metaphor of being “awake” to indicate consciousness that transcends the automatic (automaton), mechanical consciousness which they call “sleep.”

The term “soliloquy” gets frequently used in plays to indicate a character’s speech to the audience. The next chapter, 108, “Ahab and the Carpenter” gives what appears to be stage directions suggesting the form of a play without directly imitating one. This chapter has a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ahab calls the blacksmith Prometheus then orders from him a fifty-foot tall “complete man after a desirable pattern.” The full title of Shelley’s early 19th Century novel is: Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus. In esoteric circles, Frankenstein often appears as a metaphor for the alchemical creation of higher bodies. Mel Brooks’ hilarious film, Young Frankenstein, gets highly recommended for this reason.  Bob Dylan uses this metaphor as the central theme in the song, “My Own Version of You” from his album Rough and Rowdy Ways. For example, in the lyrics we find:

“If I do it upright and put the head on straight

I'll be saved by the creature that I create”

Can you look at my face with your sightless eyes?

Can you cross your heart and hope to die?

Got the right spirit, you can feel it, you can hear it

You've got what they call "the immortal spirit"

You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn'

It creeps in your body the day you were born

One strike of lightning is all that I need

And a blast of electricity that runs at top speed

I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years

Do it with laughter, and do it with tears”

It works better with the music, but you get the idea. I highly recommend listening to it multiple times over time. 

Chapter 109 presents a revealing confrontation between Ahab and Starbuck about the ship’s priorities. Ahab lets him know who is boss, then ends up following Starbuck’s suggestion after initially and forcefully resisting it. 

To bring it back to Melville, I’ll leave you with the comment Sophia Hawthorne said after reading Herman’s essay for her husband:

"the first person who has ever, in print apprehended Mr. Hawthorne." She called him "an invaluable person, full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind."

Sophia, of course, means “wisdom.”  Some branches of Gnostics considered her the feminine aspect of the Divine, and she was also known as the “Bride of Christ.”

Next week: please read Chapter 110, “Queequeg in his Coffin” to Chapter 116, “The Dying Whale.”

 

Review: midnight's simulacra by Nick Black

 

"code stoned. debug sober. document drunk.and never trust the nuclear regulatory commission."

midnight's simulcra is a challenging but interesting novel from Nick Black, an engineer who attended Georgia Tech University; the novel is largely set on the campus of Georgia Tech or in Atlanta. It is consciously modeled on Ulysses by James Joyce and also draws much of its inspiration from Illuminatus! 

It was published last year. The official website bills it as "a hysterical, scientifically rigorous, slow burn of a thriller, a modern picaresque, a portrait of autists as young men, and unlike any other novel you've read" and as "An autofiction of rogue engineering."

I would describe it as an ambitious work of modern fiction. Anyone who is familiar with Ulysses will see many references to it in midnight's simulacra. There is for example an interior monologue by a a woman in the novel obviously modeled after the one by Molly Bloom. The plot is driven by the interactions of two males with intersecting lives: Sherman Spartacus Katz and Michael Luis Bolaño, although the action takes place over many  years, not in just one day.  They meet at an academic quiz bowl and decide to both attend Georgia Tech. They eventually get into large scale LSD manufacturing and distributing and then Katz gets interested in smuggling and enhancing yellowcake  uranium.

Just as Ulysses fans can visit actual places in Dublin that are mentioned  in the novel, midnight's simulacra takes place in numerous real Atlanta locations. For example, there's an important confrontation in an Atlanta bar, where Bolaño buys a drink for the "Molly Bloom" character. I looked it up, and it's an actual Atlanta bar; you can go there  and buy the same drink. 

Nick Black's Goodreads account shows that he has read many important modern novels (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which I haven't gotten around to, is apparently another favorite). 

His novel's most daring innovation is the various nonfiction essays and explanations on various aspects of science, including how to manufacture LSD, the history of modern cosmology, the history of illicit LSD manufacturing in the U.S., and many other topics. Many of these lectures-within-the-novel are quite dense with mathematical  formulas and technical terms. In the introduction to the book, Black gives the reader "permission" to skim the portions of the book that are too difficult. I really learned a lot from this book, although sections were opaque to me. I use Linux for example, but I'm not a coder, and I could not follow everything that was happening when Katz fears his machine has been compromised and he reinstalls Debian Linux (a form of Linux considered more difficult to use than, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, distros that cater to nontechnical users. Among his numerous interests, Black is a Debian developer). 

So portions of the book can be difficult, although having said that, the main story is not difficult to follow. I would say that while Ulysses is largely driven by Bloom's interest in sex, midnight's simulacra tends to focus on drugs (some of the characters use a bong named after a Klein bottle, a good example of the intersection of interests). In addition, while Ulysses is generally life-affirming, midnight's simulcra can be read as kind of a tragedy. 

The five main sections of the novel are named after the five main sections of Illuminatus!, and references to Eris and to phrases such as "Hail Eris!" and "All Hail Discordia" figure prominently. As with Ulysses, there are more references to Illuminatus! that careful readers will catch. 

And here is a bit of synchronicity, one that I don't know if Nick Black knows about: As far as I know, the only literary award Illuminatus! ever received was the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, given at the Worldcon in Atlanta in 1986. (I attended the Worldcon, one of my favorites, but did not know about the ceremony and missed it). 

Portions of the book are quite funny in a dark, sardonic way, e.g. "You can always know the right way to interpret a situation by where Sartre, history's biggest piece of shit, stood on it." 

midnight's simulacra is available for purchase at the official website and also at Amazon, in hardcover, paperback and ebook. (The paper editions are the preferred editions and  include illustrations the ebooks don't have; I have ordered a copy of the paperback). 

The official website also has a hefty "try before you buy" excerpt of the first part and interesting background on the novel, including a partial bibliography of the references. 

R.I.P. David Lynch

David Lynch in 1990, the year Twin Peaks debuted on TV. (Creative Commons photo by Alan Light). 

My favorite movie and TV director, David Lynch, died Thursday at age 78. Wikipedia says he died after being evacuated from his home because of the LA fires. 

It always hits me a bit when a favorite artist dies. Lynch had revealed last year he had emphysema from years of smoking cigarettes.  So for me as far as a shock,  it was kind of somewhere between when Kurt Cobain and John Lennon died (a complete surprise) and when Iain Banks died (he had announced he was dying of cancer). (I found out about John Lennon when I was watching "Monday Night Football" on TV and Howard Cosell shared the news. This was before the Internet of course, but I got long distance phone calls from friends). 

So many questions! Will I ever find a TV series I like as much as Twin Peaks? (I own all three series and the movie; I have been engaged in a long re-watch. I'm in the second season right now). Was Sheryl Lee really the most beautiful screen siren ever, or did David Lynch make it seem so? Did Lynch and Mark Frost realize what a gift to the fans it was when they brought it back in 2017? What if Lynch had accepted the offer to direct Return of the Jedi? 

The New York Times has its weaknesses but it's still a good newspaper, and it really went all out with the Lynch news -- a long obituary, and six sidebars! Here are gift links to get you behind the paywall: The obituary, an appraisal from chief Times movie critic Manohla Dargis (who recounts getting lots of abuse for a rave review of Mulholland Drive), 12 Lynch titles and where to screen them,  some of the tributes from film industry figures,  his life in some memorable photos, a discussion of Twin Peaks from main TV critic James Poniewozik,  a "critics notebook" on his look from Guy Trebay. 

The Wikipedia article on Lynch is very long and detailed. 

Jesse Walker's favorite Oscar moment

Jesse Walker posted on X.com: "My favorite Oscars moment, from 2002: David Lynch and Robert Altman sharing a smile after they both lost the Best Director award to Ron Howard. Watching at home, we couldn't hear what they were saying. But Lynch said later that Altman was telling him, 'It's better this way'."

A St. Louis synchronicity

I like to record synchronicities on this blog, and I had one this week.  Before I married her, my wife was my Cleveland girlfriend and I lived in Oklahoma, so we had to travel to see each other.  Ann and I met in St. Louis a couple of times when we were dating, and one memorable get together featured a dinner in a very nice restaurant, a walk in a neighborhood with a house where T.S. Eliot once lived, and a viewing of "Mulholland Drive" (described by the New York Times as Lynch's acknowledged masterpiece) in a nice old movie theater. (That last bit may have been my idea). 

I flew from Ohio to Oklahoma this week to see my mother, and I stopped to change planes in St. Louis, which of course reminded me of all this. 

Robert Shea, Twin Peaks fan

I feel confident in posting all of this  because I know many RAW fans are big Lynch fans. Gregory Arnott texted me to make sure I saw the news. (See his article for this blog on occult aspects of Twin Peaks.)

One of the minor mysteries of writing this blog is that I've never been able to find any evidence RAW was a Twin Peaks fan. (I asked Scott Apel years ago). But you know what? Robert Shea was! I asked his son Mike Shea, and Mike replied, "He was! I didn’t watch it with him at the time but I watched it a couple of years ago and loved it."

My Beethoven synchronicity

Beethoven in 1813. (Source)

Monday was Beethoven's birthday and Eric Wagner wished me a "happy Beethoven's birthday." I didn't blog about him Monday as I try to follow the schedule for online reading groups, but I can write about him today. 

I have been a Beethoven fan for much of my life, and as I've written before, Robert Anton Wilson had a particular love of Beethoven. The essay about Beethoven in The Illuminati Papers, "Beethoven As Information," is my favorite short piece about Beethoven written by anyone, anywhere. 

Sunday I went to see a local community orchestra, the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, give a concert at a local Catholic church. The orchestra played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, along with a piece by composer Leó Weiner that I wasn't familiar with,  the Serenade for Small Orchestra. 

The Beethoven and the Mozart made the concert an ideal bill for me. Although I've listened to a lot of Mozart, I am not particularly familiar with that work. Here is an article about the soloist, Sibbi Bernhardssohn, talking about  how "it’s probably the most perfect out of all the perfect violin concertos that Mozart wrote."

It certainly won me over. Later Sunday after I got home, I listened to a recording of it. My wife thought I was crazy to listen to a recording of something I had just heard. I thought it was crazy she would not want to hear it again.

The Seventh is perhaps the Beethoven symphony I have listened to the most. The second movement is particularly famous; when the symphony was first performed in 1813, it caused such a sensation that it was played twice. The movement is used to good effect in Zardoz, a 1974 science fiction movie that starred Sean Connery.  I saw it in high school, and it was an early example of a Beethoven piece making an impression on me. 

Late at night before I go to sleep, I often listen to the late night classical music program hosted by Peter Van de Graaff (it's very good). When I tuned in, the radio was playing a solo piano piece. To my amazement, I realized that the piece used the melody from the second movement of the Seventh. It turned out to be an obscure but interesting piece by Robert Schumann, WoO 31, "Studies in the Form of Free Variations on a Theme by Beethoven (1831–32)," played by Peter Frankl. Van de Graaff of course plays many famous pieces, but he's also good at discovering obscure but interesting ones. 

Bobby Campbell on Maybe Night

Bobby Campbell, who has been putting together Maybe Day celebrations for years on July 23, last year created a smaller spinoff celebration, Maybe Night. Bobby recently announced that Maybe Night will return on Dec. 21 this year. 

More information at that link, but I also asked Bobby to take a couple of questions about Maybe Night, and he immediately agreed.

RAWIllumination:  Last year, you launched Maybe Night, a midwinter spinoff of your Maybe Day program. Were you happy with it? Is that why you are bringing it back? 

Bobby Campbell: I was indeed quite pleased with last year's Maybe Night event! It's pretty niche subject matter, so my expectations were rather reasonable to begin with, but I was delightfully surprised that we were able to connect with so many Wakians out there in the world.

The plan was always to make it an annual event, understanding that it would start small, but ideally growing into something that can exist on its own without my organization. Following the Bloomsday model. Same for Maybe Day actually! How likely that actually is, IDK, but it's fun to have an excuse to play around with this stuff.

RAWIllumination: Is Finnegans Wake one of your favorite books? Do you want to encourage people to read it, and explore how it influenced RAW?

Bobby Campbell: Finnegans Wake is for sure one of my favorite books! Though it's such a categorically different kind of text that I almost don't even consider it comparable to other books. I think of it more like a data repository, or a code base, or even a grimoire.

So far as recommending FW to others goes, I can only attest that I have found it a tremendously rewarding reading experience, and specifically for RAW fans, that once you get into it, it becomes patiently obvious why RAW made it such a central part of his work. That same whimsical current of satori inducing synchronicity that pervades Wilson's works is fully present in FW.

If you're the type that likes going down rabbit holes, this one is a triple black diamond!

RAWIllumination: If people want to participate in Maybe Night, what should they do?

Bobby Campbell: To participate in Maybe Night as a contributor simply create any type of media (writing, visual art, music, video, etc) related to Finnegans Wake and/or James Joyce and send to weirdoverse@gmail.com on or before December 15th.

(Your contribution does not need to be new or exclusive to Maybe Night, I'm happy to signal boost pre-existing works!)

I recommend sending in links to wherever your creations normally live, but if you don't have a platform I'm happy to host it directly on the Maybe Night site.

I'm also interested in anything related to Terence McKenna, Grant Morrison's Invisibles comic book series, and of course, Robert Anton Wilson!

To participate as a reveler, simply tune in to www.maybeday.net/night on or after December 21st 2024 and we will have a presumably robust program of hypnagogic delights! The current plan is to share a live stream of our winter solstice Maybelogues panel discussion starting at 1PM EST.

Or, of course, do your own thing!

Moby Dick online reading group: First chapters

The entrance of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Creative Commons photo, source. 

This week: The Etymology, the Extracts, and Chapters 1-3 ("Loomings," "The Carpet Bag," "The Spouter-Inn.")

In the first chapter of Moby Dick, our narrator Ishmael imagines headlines that mention his decision to go to sea:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."

Not bad as a synchronicity, no? And so, as we recover from the latest "grand contested election for the presidency," we embark on the Pequod, and on our Great American Novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We'll be trying to cover about 35 printed pages each week, not a terribly difficult pace, so there's plenty of time to hunt up a copy and join us. There are many ways to do so, as I remarked in last week's blog post. No matter which edition you choose to read, I'll be making the "reading assignments" based on chapters, not page numbers, so it should be easy to follow along, and post any comments you would like to make.

Is there any 19th century novel with a better beginning? The start of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities is justly famous, and I love it, too: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

But I also love the arresting beginning of Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Ishmael of course is a Biblical reference; as the Wikipedia entry reminds us, the Ishmael in the Bible was the son of Abraham and Hagar, banished to the wilderness. See the entry for useful notes. 

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ..." It's actually a damp, drizzly November as I write this; it is raining outside. But cheer up, fellow readers: We have an interesting novel to read!

I was struck by a couple of things as I read the first passages. The "sub-sub-librarian" credited with finding the various references in whales in world literature must have worked very hard in the era before the Internet to find so many passages.

There are lots of literary allusions in Moby Dick and much philosophical musing, but the book also can be read as an adventure story, and I found the descriptions very vivid: The icy streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts; the dark interior of the Spouter-Inn, with all of its decorations related to whaling; the meals Ishmael eats, including one in which the dining room is so cold the diners "hold to our lips cups of tea with our  half frozen fingers"; his bed, which features a mattress which feels like it is "stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery," his fright at first seeing Queequeg. 

New Bedford, by the way, has a nice whaling museum; I visited it sometime during the 1990s. 

Background posting from last week offering more details about the reading group. I'll be joined by Eric Wagner and Oz Fritz. The plan is to do this once a week, with a new posting every Monday. 

Next week: Please read chapters four through 14, "The Counterpane," "Breakfast," "The Street," "The Chapel," "The Pulpit," "The Sermon," "A Bosom Friend," "Nightgown," "Biographical," "Wheelbarrow" and "Nantucket." Sounds like a lot, but these are short chapters! 35 pages in my paperback copy of the novel. 

Legal weed comes to Ohio

Photo by Ndispensable on Unsplash

I live in Ohio, where Robert Anton Wilson also once lived. I live in the Cleveland area; RAW lived in or near Yellow Springs, a community near Dayton. His former Ohio home is mentioned in Illuminatus!; the character Simon Moon, for example, is a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs. 

Wilson died in 2007,  and so he has missed the ongoing revolution in legalizing cannabis in the U.S., which began in 2012. (I mean legalization for any adult who wanted to legally buy it,  not just medical marijuana users.) The first two states to approve legalization were Colorado and Washington,  in 2012, and other states have followed, including, as far as I can tell, all of the states where Wilson once lived. While there are still holdouts, particularly in the south and midwest, 24 states have legalized marijuana and most of the population now lives in a legal marijuana state. Unless you live in the Deep South,  i.e. the former Confederacy, most people can at least drive to a legal state. (Many states in the South where marijuana sales are illegal, such as Texas, allow Delta 8 THC sales). 

Legalization finally came to Ohio last year; it was blocked by Ohio's Republican controlled legislature, but approved by voters in fall 2023. Recreational sales in dispensaries began Tuesday, August 6, 2024. I linked to one of my articles about it yesterday.

Of course, I could not help thinking about Wilson, and all that he had to say about the "war on some drugs" and I wished I could know what he thought about recent developments.

There are no dispensaries within a few minutes of where I live, but yesterday I drove to a dispensary in Elyria and made my first Ohio purchase. I brought a small package of flower home. I was curious where in Ohio it was grown. (Because weed remains illegal nationally, in spite of the fact that Democrats who control the White House and Senate supposedly favor legalization, at least until they have to actually do something about it,  marijuana must be grown in the same state where it is sold.) 

I could not find a location on my flower package, but it said it was from Cresco Labs. So I looked on the Cresco Labs website, and what do you know? The Cresco Labs facility for cultivation and processing is in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It's a synchronicity that amuses me. 

RAW's radical approach to reading his fiction

Today I  will reveal to you my favorite sentences in the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy.

I have  the original mass market paperbacks, and in the front there is a sort of brief preface which says in part (this is from the third volume, The Homing Pigeons):

"The three volumes of the Schroedinger's Cat series can be read in any order desired.

"That is, this volume can be read before or after the volumes called The Universe Next Door and The Trick Top Hat or between them. 

These volumes may also be read before or after the three volumes of the Illuminatus! trilogy and before or after Masks of the Illuminati."

There are other interesting sentences that follow, but I want to focus on those three sentences for a moment.

Like many of RAW's works, the SC novels (now available as a shortened one volume work -- I don't even know if my favorite sentences survive in this edition, which has cuts) was published as works of science fiction.

Trilogies are a big tradition in science fiction and fantasy. Examples that come to mind include Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and N.K. Jemisin's more recent Broken Earth trilogy. I'm pretty sure none of the those authors ever suggested reading the books out of order.

There is a narrative bit in the three SC novels which make it clear they seem to be written to be read in the "correct" order, although I don't want to mention it, lest it be a spoiler. If you've read the books you know what I mean.

On the other hand, the books also can be read as variations on alternate universes. They do  not seem to read as chronologically linear works that all take place in the same universe, as the other trilogies I mention seem to be.

RAW is inviting the reader to do his/her/their own "cutups," approaching his fiction from different angles.

Illuminatus! is a work I read over and over again. Maybe next time I should start, perhaps, with The Golden Apple? And should we, as readers, try to think of an interesting way to read all of RAW's fiction out of order, either just the titles he mentions or also including the Historical Illuminatus! books? Or an useful sequence to read them in order, or as a mix of the two approaches? 

I guess it's a synchronicity, but as I was working on this blog post, I saw a Tweet by Joseph Matheny, quoting Jean-Luc Godard: "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." 

Rasa offers a 'Lion of Light' update

Rasa has put up a post in various groups on Facebook to provide an update on Lion of Light, the upcoming Robert Anton Wilson book on Aleister Crowley that's based on a lost RAW manuscript that Martin Wagner discovered in the Harvard library. 

The post includes a RAW quote most of us have not had the opportunity to read before:

Those who want to invoke the word “coincidence” to cover the rags of their ignorance are welcome to do so. Some of us have a new word lately, synchronicity, coined by no less than psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli – and I’ve read their books and must admit I came out as confused as I went in; as far as this brain can comprehend, coincidence is meaning-less correspondence, and synchronicity is meaning-ful correspondence, and if that makes you feel superior to the custard-headed clods who still say coincidence, you’re welcome to it.

– Robert Anton Wilson, Lion of Light

Rasa also discusses possible cover images for the book, including the one, above, that was submitted by Chris Mazur; to Rasa's surprise, the Mazur cartoon image was quite popular when he showed possible covers to RAW fans and asked for feedback. (I'm not at liberty to share some of the other proposed images, but put it this way, they were more like what you would expect.) 

Synchronicity and finding an old friend.

An ebook I published which talks about the importance of synchronicity to tapping into higher consciousness. See this excerpt. 

I've been interested in synchronicity for much of the life of this blog. I ran into a synchronicity this week, when I tracked down an old friend I hadn't had any contact with in a long time. I don't want to invade his privacy, so I'll call him "Sam" and avoid details.

Another old friend of mine, who I'll call "Percy," and I had tried some some years to figure out what happened to Sam. We had no success. Earlier this week, my wife asked, "Did you ever figure out what happened to Sam?" It wasn't a topic we have had a conversation about in a long time. 

Then two days ago, I got a message on Facebook from Percy, asking if I ever made any progress finding Sam. It was the first time I had heard from Percy about it in nearly a year. 

So I decided to go to work, running searches on the Internet and contacting people. One of them was one of Sam's few surviving blood relatives, a niece, who told me that for the first time in a long time, she and her mother (Sam's sister) had just talked about whatever happened to Sam, and wondered if he was still alive. 

Eventually I found Sam and I actually got him on the phone Wednesday and talked to him. 

My wife assumed that I had found Sam because of her remark, and I explained that no, I'd been prompted by Percy and I mentioned what Sam's niece said. "I guess it was in the air," my wife said. 

Click on the "synchronicities" label on this post for more synchronicities.

Prometheus Rising exercise and reading group, Episode 84, Chapter 15

Bob Denver as Gilligan, one of the seven castaways in the TV comedy series, 'Gilligan's Island.'

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

I find it interesting that Bob mentions only dead white male (DWM) painters on page 220, and he only names dead white male composers by name (except for John Cage who died in 1992 between the two editions of Prometheus Rising). He does mention “Rock”, “Disco”, and “African chants”, collective nouns that include people of color. Both Dr. Wilson and I had very Eurocentric educations, although we have both tried to overcome them. Also, since I write this in a community college classroom, I find it interesting that Bob generally doesn’t use the Oxford comma, the comma in a list of three or more items before “and”. Bob and I grew up in eras which considered the Oxford comma optional. All the grammar and writing books I have taught from in the past twenty-three years consider the Oxford comma mandatory.

Bob asks the reader to “guess which specific imprints created” Kurt Saxon and John White’s reality-tunnels. I find it interesting that Kurt Saxon and Robert Anton Wilson share the same birth year, 1932. (Kurt Saxon has outlived Dr. Wilson.) I wondered if John White shared that birth year as well. I found multiple authors named John White, but the author of Pole Shift about whom Bob writes in this chapter seems to have the birthdate August 16, 1939. Interestingly when I heard Bob talk in 1987 he commented on the synchronicity that the upcoming Energetic Harmonic Convergence would take place on August 16, 1987, the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. The initials E. H. C. made me think of all the H. C. E.’s in Finnegans Wake. 

My friend and fellow Joycean Conrad Holt and I visited the energy vortices in Sedona, Arizona, on August 16, 1987. That night I went to see the film Back to the Beach which included appearances by two of the cast members of Gilligan’s Island. That night I realized the isomorphism between the seven dancing girls in Finnegans Wake and the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island, and Conrad and I renamed our Finnegans Wake Decoding Society to Finnegans Isle. Of course 1939 marked the first publication of Finnegans Wake as well as the birth of John White.

The Clement Atlee quote on pg. 225, “The people of the earth are island shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding” seems even more relevant in 2022, alas.

Exercise 4 for this chapter says, “Write a criticism of this chapter from the viewpoint of Christian Fundamentalism.”

Brothers and sisters in Christ. I think we all know in our hearts the deep flaws in this chapter. Dr. Wilson mocks the inaccurate prophecies by Saxon and White but does not include any of his own failed prophecies from before the publication of this misguided book. He does make some ridiculous prophesies about the years after 1998, the year of the publication of the second edition of Prometheus Rising. We all know that God is only source of true prophecy. Brothers and sister, the Bible provides all can know of universe and all we need to know of universe. 

Dr. Wilson liked to mock Holy Scripture. He preferred the obscene gibberish of Finnegans Wake. Have you tried to use that worthless cesspool of an impractical joke to run your life? I, alas, have. Here before you sits a reformed Joycean. Oh, I want to spare you the years of degradation that that evil book has led me down. Repent, repent and turn back to God. We sit in the hands of an angry God, whom our sins offend. Pull down thy vanity, as Ezra Pound said in one of his few moments of clarity. 

Like Patty Hearst, we have gotten kidnapped by Dr. Wilson’s brilliant rhetoric and locked in the closet with his unfortunate heroes, the Satanist Aleister Crowley, the fascist Ezra Pound, the drug-crazed Timothy Leary, the sex-mad lunatic Wilhelm Reich, and the Anti-Christ himself, Friedrich Nietzsche. We read these dangerous authors with misgivings, but, not wanting to seem uncool, we came to understand them, even to agree with them. Before long we too disrespect our parents and storm the institutions which maintain law and order and civilization, with the machine guns of E-Prime, mocking satire, and other tools of Satan. Repent, repent, before we all stand in judgement before our Maker. We know in our hearts what we need to do get right with our Lord. Do not follow the instructions in the insidious chapter which calls for neurological relativism. This evil moral relativism has destroyed modern education and modern civilization. Repent, repent, before your time runs out. Burn your Robert Anton Wilson books and read the Bible. In Mark chapter 6 the Pharisees tried to convince Jesus the disciples should wash their hands before eating. Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their narrow mindedness, just as he would condemn Robert Anton Wilson. Repent, repent!