Every yin needs a yang. Every Hodge
needs a Podge. We should be united.--Illuminatus Trilogy! Page 423!
Fly: Could you explain a little bit about your holographic prose?
RAW: No. I'm struggling to write a whole book about
that right now and can't imagine how to
condense it. Besides, it's the hardest
part of my work to translate...
I'll give you two related samples from the Illuminatus and see what you
can make of them: "They shall come to gno gods."
"They shall come to gnu godz."
email from--Tue, 8 Jan 2002, 11:10:54-0800.
I have slept on this small riddle Bob spun for me, or i shd/ say i have not communicated my thoughts very much, and in retrospect i think it helps us in our continued investigative and independently minded research into RAW and his communications. So here i will expand a little on my research into these related samples.
“SIMON MAGUS. You will come to know gods.”--Illuminatus Trilogy, Page 183.
And then a little further down the page we find:
“The note said:
"Machen's dols = Lovecraft's dholes?"
VECTORS. You will come to no gods.”
Near the end of the bugguiness of Finnegans Wake (page 615) we find the line
“Mucksrats which bring up about uhrweckers they will come to
know good.”
I suspect Bob might of sailed across this line on one or two of his many readings of Finnegans Wake. And he put it into I.T! ?
While researching this small puzzle that Bob left for me to unravel, i discovered something else that grabbed me like T-Rex or King Kong, out of my seat. Typical of RAW in many ways, or typical of the ever expanding infinite-flux of being? On Page 183 of Illuminatus, the page on which we find Simon Magus saying: You will come to know gods, also features a dialogue about Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) in the context of the investigation of Professor J. N. Marsh, who appears to have gone missing, in the novel?
Maybe Bob was actually answering the question directly without being consciously aware that his example from Illuminatus! was right next to a passage describing fly agaric intoxication and some of its background history. (Amanita Muscaria appears as the 24th entry of the INDEX to Cosmic Trigger, and this is where i first came across it in the context of RAW. I had however read a little of Terence Mckenna around about the same time who also writes of Amanita in his book “Food of the Goods”. But the point here is that i was still unaware of Amanita and its use and ab-use within Illuminatus Trilogy! (!). Up until re-reading the book in the class Illuminatus! with Bob himself.)
As this communication with Bob was facilitated by email, he might have noticed fly agaric@hotmail.com, my email address, and then so maybe he did choose the line from Simon Magus especially for fly, as an answer to my question about Hologramic Prose?
With a fully searchable PDF version of Illuminatus Trilogy! you can find thousands of Joycean like--coincidances of contraries--but often on a different level of magnification to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and its maximal condensation. Hodge-Podge seems to have Viconian, Joycean, Zen-Koan like qualities tied-up-with-it.
During lunch (which always ended with golden apfel-strudel), Galley and Eichmann danced for her,
a complex ballet which Hagbard called "Hodge-Podge"; as many times as she saw this, she never
was able to determine how they changed costumes at the climax, in which Hodge became Podge and
Podge became Hodge. --Page 412.
And just like the DANCE of Hodge-Podge described, the Illuminatus Trilogy itself comes to a climax with the Appendix and its greater explanation and exploration of Hagbard’s Hodge-Podge principle in a more Geo-political, Historical, cybernetic language.
In this chaotic period, the Hodge and the Podge are in dynamic balance. There is no stasis: The
balance is always shifting and homeostatic, in the manner of the ideal "self-organizing system" of
General Systems Theory or Cybernetics. The Illuminati, and all authoritarian types in general, dislike
such ages so much that they try to prevent any records of their existence from reaching the general
public. Pre-Chou China was one such period, and its history (except for some fragments in Taoist
lore) is largely lost; we do know, however, that the I Ching was reorganized when the Chou Dynasty
introduced patriarchal authoritarianism to China. --434.
I find a new beauty in the fact that Illuminatus Trilogy! combines these literary principles, in action (Captured by Theartre) and also with a CODEX, or appendix that begins to divulge the methods by which the author created the “Action” of the novel itself, and also being bound into the novel itself in a self-referncing or “hologramic Prose” technique; unique to Uncle Bob and his magikal communications.
I have started a piece called the Unkle Bob principle”which uses a term i read by Hugh Kenner in his book Joyce's Voices to describe James Joyce’s technique of using a general principle, that i understand to mean: The voice of the narrator need NOT always be the narrator him or her-self. Kenner's Uncle Charles Principle honors the character called uncle Charles who sits in his outhouse reading and doing his bog business, and maybe also narrating parts of Ulysses?
Anyhow, i’ll be putting these bits of research together and then applying them to I.T! Plus adding some source’s and sauces.
--DJ Fly Agaric 23
MPHDJ