RAW on Ayn Rand

An apparent image of what appears to be an apple. Unsplash photo by Chris Dez

The latest Martin Wagner discovery is "Objections to Objectivism." It's a detailed critique of Ayn Rand.

Much of it discusses what is happening when a viewer gazes at an object that seems to be an apple, and I found it easier to follow than the "chair letter" mentioned yesterday. Excerpt:

Again, let us be country-simple here. The objects, events, experiences, of the non-verbal level appear, in the light of modern science, as creations of our nervous systems, just like the verbal level. That is, the space-time event which we call “an apple” exists evidently somewhere outside our skins, and, according to the most reliable (useful) equations, has a structure which can best be visualized or imagined as superimposition of waves of energy. The objective “apple” which we perceive does not contain this energy structure, which is known to us only by scientific and mathematical analysis and experiment; the “apple” of perception—the object—is manufactured by our senses and brain as they integrate various stimuli coming in from the energy-apple somewhere out there.

The invisible apple, the apple that we don’t see, the mathematical physicist’s or chemist’s “apple”, of course, contains the vitamins, flavor and other properties that make apples desirable to us. The visible apple, constructed by our nervous system, may not contain these needed elements—i.e., it may be a plastic or other artificial device designed to look like the invisible energy-apple that we really want.

Now, just as the objective apple (manufactured by our lower nervous system) is more dynamic than the word “apple” manufactured by higher levels of our nervous system), the external, invisible energy-apple appears still more dynamic. Every electron in it, for instance, is nonidentical with itself from second to second. (Every point has a date, in the Einstein-Minnkowski space-time manifold.)

RAW Semantics on the Kurt Smith letter

The latest RAW Semantics blog post weighs in on a letter Robert Anton Wilson wrote to Kurt Smith.  Brian writes, "It contains some wonderfully lucid passages that clarify parts of Bob’s whole approach and philosophy in a way that I haven’t seen elsewhere."

RAW's customary wit and humor is there, but I must confess I don't follow the argument that a chair being seen by a viewer is not a chair but a "space-time event." I get it it that the person is seeing in image of the chair in his brain, and that seeing it does not capture all of the features of the chair, but I still think it's a chair. RAW says he used to argue about such things with Robert Shea, and I wonder if this is one of those instances when I would have agreed with Shea.

The more important issue is that I want to complain, once again, that RAW's voluminous correspondence with Shea has not been preserved. In Cosmic Trigger 3, RAW expressed the hope that all of those back and forth letters would be published. Unfortunately, neither man did a good job of preserving their papers and allowing such a book actually to be written. It's mind-boggling to me that both of them made so lilttle effort, but it is what it is. (I've tried asking their literary heirs. RAW and his family moved constantly from place to place, so I'm sure it's a factor. I don't know Shea's excuse -- he lived in the same home for many years.) 

I still hope, somehow, those letters might be found and published. 

Robert Anton Wilson podcast featuring Adam Gorightly

 The "Where Did the Road Go?" show: "Seriah hosts Greg Bishop and Adam Gorightly.  The discussion begins with iconic writer/philosopher Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism- and quickly goes... a lot of places!"

More information here. 

New John Higgs book announced

 

When John Higgs said he was about to announce a new book, I looked at the visual cues and suggested the title might be Bonding with The Beatles.

I was in the general neighborhood. John's new book is called Love and Let Die. 

From the press release:

"The Beatles are the biggest band there has ever been. James Bond is the single most successful movie character of all time. They are also twins. Dr No, the first Bond film, and Love Me Do, the first Beatles record, were both released on the same day – Friday 5 October 1962. Most countries can only dream of a cultural export becoming a worldwide phenomenon on this scale. For Britain to produce two on the same windy October afternoon is unprecedented.

"LOVE AND LET DIE is a story about two opposite aspects of the British psyche exploding into global culture. It is a clash between working class liberation and establishment control, told over a period of sixty dramatic years. It is also an account of our aspirations and fantasies, and of competing visions of male identity. Looking at these cultural touchstones again in this new context will forever change your understanding of the Beatles, the James Bond films, and six decades of British culture."

More from John at the link. 

'Immanentizing the Eschaton' book available

From the latest John Higgs newsletter: "In previous newsletters, you may recall mention of a wild, strange and transformative pilgrimage from the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset to the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Accounts of this journey by some of the 69 pilgrims involved have been collected by Jeff Merrifield and form a new book called Immanentizing The Eschaton. It is required reading for those who suspect something important happened on that journey, and also those who were there but who are still trying to get their heads around what happened. Currently you can only get the book from Jeff directly, who you can reach by emailing mythologies23 (at) gmail dot com. His book on the underground temples of Damanhur, however, can be found on Amazon."

I wrote to Jeff and asked for relevant details, he wrote back with terms for people who live in the UK: "I've just had a new delivery of copies. It's £14.99 and I'll send it post free and signed. Best way is to pay through PayPal (jeff@playbackarts.co.uk) and if you use the payment to friends facility I don't pay a fee on your moneies. Make sure you put your postal address on the order.  If you are averse to PayPal, drop me a line and I'll send you my bank details for a direct payment."

OK, but what about Americans, etc.? "Postage world wide would have to add £4.99," he told me. 

Prometheus Rising reading and discussion group, Week 52

By Apuleis Charlton
Special guest blogger

I’ll admit, I’ve never quite grasped the fourth-circuit. It seems dreadfully boring to me- and perhaps that is a sign of my imprint. I am an individualistic person who dislikes the constraints of society, intensely in some circumstances, and who strongly prefers to be left to their own devices. At the same time, that could easily describe a large swath of Americans or humans today. Perhaps when dealing with a “societal” circuit, the data will become dated quickly as society changes. I certainly don’t think that repression is the same issue today as it was in the seventies/eighties. Jerry Falwell is regarded by most “sane” people as a demagogue and hyper-moralist and few people outside of the church communities or the Republican Party can even begin to wrap their head around Evangelical Christian’s desires. 

So what happened after the publication of Prometheus Rising? To return to my favorite dead horse, the dissemination of information has warped our previous understanding of how a society should or can function. Writing at the end of the eighties, Thomas Pynchon notes in Is It Okay to Be a Luddite? that whatever the implications of the world wide web, it will mean more of the right information will get to the right people. If you take out the word “right,” I agree with Pynchon. As humans are bombarded by signals from other vantage points, we seem to enter into interior-negotiations with ourselves over whether we will be more affected by these “outside” signals or the “inside” signals of our daily lives. 

For example: the Conservative fear and hatred of Hollywood. Conservatives can recognize that the external stimuli of film, television, music etc. is alluring and disruptive to the insular communities that they desire. By importing different views of life and society into the living rooms of “average” citizens, even when those views are rendered as a weak, virtue-signalling subplot that is easily missed or ignored, the entertainment industry is an agent of chaos that brings the immorality of coastal society to small-town, “real,” America . Therefore, even something as milquetoast as Captain Marvel can be interpreted as a radical-feminist screed looking to upset traditional masculinity. 

I wouldn’t say that their fears are entirely unfounded. The way we consume entertainment and whatever we mean when we say “culture,” has a direct impact on how we view society in the “real world.” Thirty years ago, the most your average, “well-informed,” non-Jewish person would have known about Orthodox Jews would be that the men have little curls of hair and the women cover theirs. Last year, the whole nation was educated in Orthodox beliefs as we examined the community's relationship with COVID-19. Those who bothered to read or watch the news could hear debates about why people in Orthodox communities didn’t want to take the vaccine or stop gathering for religious events, despite medical science. Similarly, outside of occult circles, the Yezidi were unheard of in the West until around 2014 when coverage of the Syrian conflict forced them into news stories. We learn, or at least have the opportunity to learn, more about the world and different peoples than ever before. 

The blunt description of the Princess of Disks is quite humorous to someone who has studied tarot extensively. The Princess of Disks actually represents the sublime degradation of matter, the end point of the process described over the entire tapestry of the tarot, and the all-important function of destruction and rebirth. In a way, I read Wilson’s summary of the circuit in this chapter as the building of a tidal shelf, but it is rather a structure that is being destroyed and rebuilt in perpetuity. The fourth circuit changes to the consternation of those of us who were imprinted earlier than these heathen children.

That number, again

 Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme

"The assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BCE ('the Ides of March' by the Roman system of dating) is the most famous political murder in history ... after a futile attempt to fight back, Caesar pulled his toga over his head and took the twenty-three dagger blows that killed him."

Introduction by Mary Beard to The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives, a new translation of Plutarch I am currently reading. 

Beethoven 'Tenth Symphony' to be released soon

Some of Beethoven's notes for a planned 10th symphony. 

With the use of artificial intelligence, a group of musicologists have put together a Beethoven "Tenth Symphony," using fragments the composer left behind when he died. 

It will be easier to form an opinion on what to make of this after it's released,  but for now, there's a clip at the end of the article to listen to, a little over three minutes. 

Bobby Campbell on almost everything

 

Bobby Campbell is one of the nicest people I know. Fortunately, he is also interesting, and quicker on his feet than I would be if I had a bunch of rapid fire philosophical questions tossed at me by Gerry Fialka, who interviews him for an hour and 40 minutes.

It turns out that if someone is interviewed for that long, you can learn a lot about him. If you watch, you will learn what Bobby has in common with Frank Zappa, how we should deal with Ezra Pound these days, what Bobby liked to do with $20 bills when he was younger, what Bobby would call his autobiography, how Robert Anton Wilson shaped his behavior, why he is optimistic, and many other topics. 

I inferred watching the video that Gerry Fialka seemed to know something about Frank Zappa; I'm a Zappa fan and I read the Barry Miles biography a few years ago. Well, it turns out that Fialka is an artist, writer and filmmaker who used to work with Zappa. The interview with Bobby is part of Fialka's interview series; there's also an interview with Steve "Fly" Pratt I need to get to.

The war on some drugs suffers a setback

Robert Evans' book, A Brief History of Vice. 

On Twitter, Robert Evans writes, "R.I.P. to Robert Anton Wilson, who would've loved to see this moment."

What's he referring to?

Headline from Vice: "Companies are Getting Rid of Drug Tests Because They Can’t Find Enough Workers."

"In the midst of a global labour shortage, employers around the world are doing away with drug tests in a desperate bid to attract more job applicants, fill more roles and retain more workers.

"A survey, conducted by staffing firm ManpowerGroup and released this week, indicated that 9 percent of more than 45,000 employers worldwide were eliminating job screenings or drug tests as an incentive to 'attract and retain in-demand talent.' That equates to some 4,050 employers, from 43 countries, who are willing to turn a blind eye to workers’ recreational drug use if it means filling vacant positions."

In reply to Evans on Twitter, @amoebadesign replies, "He created this moment...maybe :)."

Andrew Ferguson also replies, saying, "I like to imagine that RAW was one of the few lucky dead granted a vision of the totality, and is thus spending his afterlife in the ecstasy of holy laughter."

(Off topic, I guess, but Ferguson is an expert on R.A. Lafferty, another of my favorite writers. I had no idea he was a RAW fan, too.)

John Sinclair event is Saturday

The above Bobby Campbell piece promotes the John Sinclair "Intergalactic Broadcast" for John Sinclair, the poet, marijuana legalization activist, and former manager of the MC5, a band mentioned in Illuminatus! The event will mark Sinclair's 80th birthday. More here. 

Steve Pratt has worked with Sinclair for years in Amsterdam with radio shows. Radio Free Amsterdam is "Blues Jazz Reefer Music Programmed By John Sinclair." 

Robert Anton Wilson on John Dillinger

 Government mug shot of John Dillinger. 

Martin Wagner tracks down a 1972 article on John Dillinger that offers background on the notorious criminal (and Illuminatus! character.) The opening sentence is hard to beat: 

John Herbert Dillinger—you remember, the big 1930’s hold-up man who looked like Humphrey Bogart—lit a flame in the hearts of Ma and Pa America which no other major criminal has equalled, unless you include a few recent Presidents.

Much of the article covers ground that many of you read in Illuminatus! and also explains the John Dillinger Died For You Society. 

The Wikepedia article on John Dillinger is interesting and shows that much of what RAW wrote is fairly accurate but that RAW's account also includes some mistakes. Here's RAW on the incident in Little Bohemia:

Surrounded by the Feds at Little Bohemia Lodge in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, he escaped out a back window, while Hoover’s Heroes shot lots of holes in four vacationing businessmen who walked out the front door at the wrong moment.

Wikipedia says:

Special Agent in Charge Purvis and several BOI agents approached the lodge when three men exited the building and began to drive off. Agents yelled for the car to stop, but the men had been drinking and did not hear the agents. Agents opened up fire on the car and the driver was killed.

Dillinger and some of the gang were upstairs in the lodge and began shooting out the windows. While the BOI agents ducked for cover, Dillinger and his men got out the back of the lodge toward the lake and were able to get out of the area very quietly.

But the article also offers confirmation for some of the more wild bits in the RAW article, including the controversy over whether Dillinger was the person actually killed by the FBI. (Plans to exhume Dillinger's remains in 2019 apparently fell through.) 

Crowd at the Biography Theater shortly after Dillinger was shot to death by the FBI. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 51

The Colosseum of Rome, built in Rome in A.D. 70-80. Unsplash photo by  David Köhler.

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

Exercise one asks the reader to “Compare Greece in the 4th Century BC, Rome in the First Century AD, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, England c.1600-1900, New York c. 1900-1950, and California today.” I find it interesting that the first four categories parallel the structure of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Asimov divides the poems and plays into four categories. He begins with works set in Greece, then in Rome, then in Italy and southern Europe, and then in England. Now the dates don’t exactly parallel those Wilson gives, but Shakespeare seems fascinated by those times and places teeming with new ideas: Classical Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy and his own England. He also had a fascination with the deep background for the England he lived in. Ezra Pound’s Cantos also focus a great deal on the focal points of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, southern Europe in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and Early Modern England. 

I love Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God and the BBC television series based on them. I have had the pleasure of showing the TV series to a number of high school classes, often after teaching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. I found it interesting to teach these works during the last three presidential administrations. I found it interesting to see the parallels between Ancient Rome and contemporary America. 

Contemplating New York from 1900 to 1950 I think of Henry James’s visit to New York in 1904. He seemed deeply aware of the cultures of both London and New York at the time of this transition of world power and wealth. Louis Zukofsky found it significant that James visited New York in the year of Zukofsky’s birth. Zukofsky lived mostly in New York, and Pound had a huge influence on him. Zukofsky’s “A” seems to me a valuable work for examining the shifting strands of world culture and history during this period. Contemplating this period I also think of the evolution of jazz, from the music of Louis Armstrong to that of Duke Ellington to the new bebop of the 1940 developed by Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and others. 

“California today” has at least three meanings: the California of 1983, the original publication date; the California of 1997, the revised second edition’s publication date, and the California of 2021. I first read Prometheus Rising in Arizona in 1985, and I looked towards California as sort of a promised land where Leary lived and Bob had lived (and would live again). I reread the book many times in Arizona and did most of the exercises there. I moved back to California in 1997. (My family had moved from San Jose to Tucson in 1978). It seems less of a promised land to me today, but it also seems as though we find the fastest growing economies today in Asia. In the future I suspect that a lot of future wealth will come from space as we have completed our circumnavigation of the globe over the past few thousand years.