Have you seen that vigilante man? Ry Cooder sings. A familiar tale these days, most but not all hollywood movies feature themes of retribution, 'Death Wish' being a prime example. In fiction, lets not forget, the protagonist is the partner of a murder victim. Fed up with the lack of action on behalf of the law, and action to mean not just arrest and the usual capital punishment but an equal punishment (The Equaliser?). Death in return for death. An eye for an eye and all that which stems from premature judgement.
Facebook (The worlds greatest spying machine) seems to have spawned a new culture of local crime detectives and individuals who play judge, jury and executioner. "Look what this bastard did, lets lynch the fucker, shame him for ever, lets catch him and hang him ourselves." You know what i mean? A new kind of cyber-mob rule with all the trappings of violent retribution. Remember that 'convictions make convicts'
I often see a moral game of trumps playing out, regarding who killed the most people, or who suffered the most, or who really should be arrested and tried. Tried not by the court systems, but by citizens interested in bringing justice and equality to their fellow citizens and humanity as a whole. I would recommend looking at government representatives, lobbyists and corporate CEOs who many of the would be cyber-executioners seem happy to sing praises for, vote for, and invest hard earned money in.
Although i am probably best described as left-liberal leaning, going as far as to label myself a mutualist anarchist on the weekend, this author understands that the process of criminal trials, and our system of courts hold a critical and potentially helpful alternative to lynch mobs, and ‘batman vigilante’ types, solving crimes alone without peer review, and administering due punishment, like most but not all crime solving 'super heroes' of fiction. These are acts of retribution based on a singular point of view. A trial includes at least 13 points of view, if you can temporarily forget about the odd stacked jury and biased (paid off) judge.
I hear you though, I know where your coming from, a lot of criminals have been caught and shamed and punished through the use of social networks, surveillance culture and digital informants. Many, i presume are guilty of the crime they are shown to be committing. It's a double edged sword (word) Based upon the sensibility toward other media, pictures, news reports, video clips and social phenomena, i must stress CAUTION when making 100% identifications in the age of photoshop, Newscorp, Daily Mail readers, and global propaganda warfare.
I truly hope not to sound like I'm telling anybody what to think or not to think, no. I write this to inspire a deeper and closer scrutiny when joining in with a campaign to enact ANY kind of violent retribution for a crime, so explicitly propagated.
The great British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russel once said that the greatest invention of the 20th century is the human capacity for suspended judgement. "Have you seen that vigilante man, on facebook?"
RAW and I met while he was making this Documentary movie in Santa Cruz with deepleaf productions. I swiftly got involved in the project, presenting different ideas and some support and contacts. I have one copy left here in Europe! But now it has appeared on youtube so i suppose this is the unnanounced global launch. Enjoy. --Steve Fly Agaric 23.
Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic: The Lives And Ideas Of Robert Anton Wilson
Contains over 3 hours of material including Maybe Logic feature, expanded interviews with all the featured RAW cohorts, maybe logic exercises, and original, non-simultaneously, DVD-randomized footage of the best of Pope Bob.
"Maybe Logic AcademyMaybe Logic Academy is an innovative online learning institution and community. The Academy features online courses by some our most important and ground-breaking writers, theorists, artists and teachers.Courses are grounded in the philosophy and perspective of maybe logic, an approach which emphasizes the fallibility and relativity of perception and tends to approach information and observations with questions, probabilities and multiple perspectives rather than absolute truths. This "model agnosticism" informs all MLA courses by maintaining an experimental attitude towards any particular paradigm, theory or model of reality. -- http://www.maybelogic.org/academy.htm
I have been writing and posting at internet for over 4 years, and since owning my first computer in July 2005 i increased my web activity thrice fold. I just experienced a mac hardrive crash and am currently using borrowed computer terminals, contemplating a new processor...
I would like to link to some of my friends, and some of my own work-spaces/screens at various web addresses - as a ODE - to the web critters who have helped bring me into the bloggsphere by linking and commenting and co-creating with me. Listening and making sense out of my strange cuisine. Thankyou...
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.
An ambiguous and widely missunderstood grouping of FIVE words, or four if you miss off THE'
I think the phrase "A Poem including History" works as a helpful pointer. Finnegans Wake and the Cantos'
Are each "The Tale of the Tribe" in their respective ways. "Illuminatus! Trilogy" too!
These 3 texts when considered together may constitute a triangular structure, from which RAW's TOTT SHINE most
Brightly?
Also the book by Michael Berstein [1980] "The Tale of the Tribe: The Modern verse epic of Ezra Pound."
Steers us once more toward uncle [EZ] who with [JJ] become the two primary exhibitors of
RAW's TOTT. [which i figure is NOT his final published book "email to the Universe", but something much bigger
woven and threaded throughout his books, and sombunall of his literary influences, an invisible landscape. ]
So what i refer to as [RAW's TOTT], as opposed to anybody else's idea or conception/perception
of the TOTT remains something we have yet to define. But he left us many clues. [rising drums and Cello's]
Maybe it requires a total revision of RAW's entire catalogue
With the new TOTT gloss, [best condensed at the back of his bookTSOG]
To move closer to lifting this great ball of TOTT crystal IMHO.
...the alphabet vs. the equation....?
...language as Class Warfare...?
Here's a condensed paragraph from RAW, giving us Further clues:
**I hereby acknowledge the debts my works owe to Remy de Gourmont, for his method of dissociation of ideas, to Alfred Korzybski, for his formulations of general semantics; to Richard Bandler, for his invension of neurolinguistic Programming; to Buckminster Fuller for his synergetics, to Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner for their studies of control and communication between animals and/or machines; and to Ezra Pound for Ideogrammic Method. None of them deserve any blame for my errors or blunders.** -Robert Anton Wilson, email to the Universe.
I would like to echo Bob's sentiment here, as he does not deserve any blame for my earaws or blunterz. !
And here we have a neat introduction to [RAW's TOTT]compiled by the sparkling MLA.
"==Tale of the Tribe== The first of Wilson's MLA courses bridging the political, the social and the psychological, [[Tale of the Tribe]] promises to be a landmark journey with our dear Dr. Bob. Starring **Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friederich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon** and **Marshall McLuhan** -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of **Robert Anton Wilson.** Join Wilson as he explores the themes, minds and ideas of his forthcoming book, The Tale of the Tribe.--A.A MLA Admin.
And here is a question by BOB, from the back of his book TSOG: The thing the ate the constitution,
That i think crystalizes RAW's TOTT, And deserves DAILY revision...
What do Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon, Marshall Mcluhan and Internet all have in common? You''ll find out. -TSOG.
I have started doing this new work, condensing the nodle clusters
From RAW's work's [the names of the characters to begin with]
And started arranging them in different ways. [having searchable source's has greatly inspired this posting]
I feel that i have stepped over/through some boundaries in some sense,
By cutting bits from RAW's writing and sticking them together. [byte-ing RAW]
But, with the strictest supervision, and with a community who can FEEDBACK
with each other while doing so, we can basically continue RAW's work,
And study his structure, technique and methods?
In some sense this new work of mine is nothing more than a collection of Robert Anton Wilson quotes.
But unlike any other collection of RAW quotations,
This one focuses on RAW's Tale of the Tribe, the historical characters,
who "make it new".
I hope the MLA, TRIBE, and everybody else can join this great
Work in conception/perception.
But for me this is just the beginning, the bare bones, an historical
Kind of invetigation. [phase I]
I wish for audio/visual components, and hyperlinking which help
Make the words NEW.
Maybe email is the best way to work this out in the initial stages?
Edited from an essay i started in 2006 about my voyage to the States. With added links and accentz. .....Please excuse my lousy granmar and spilling.
Eternal Flower Power.
Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory. --RAW.
On April 10th, 2000 A.D I-fly set keel to breakers and started a journey from Stourbridge bus station in the Black Country, England, to America. On a trip to confirm for myself that Dr. Robert Anton Wilson was a human being and not a .gov robot by checking BOB in performance for myself at the Prophets Conference Santa Fe, New Mexico. This trip, as you'll discover, was the beginning of an epic adventure for me, a classic journey in fact that must be turned into a Novel some time soon, maybe in 2008!
My trip brought me into orbit with RAW (Uncle "BOB") on several occasions, but also synchronistically many of the illuminated icons from the vast multi-colored cornucopia of critters all referenced and incorporated into his books; such as (Dr. John Cunningham Lilly, Saul Paul Sirag, Paul Krassner, R.U Sirius, Jack Sarfatti, and other's that I am still discovering, or they are discovering me? ). These remarkable meetings were satisfactory evidence for me at that time, and still today in retrospect i suppose, of what Bob describes very generally in the book "Coincidance": a term taken from James Joyce's masterpiece Finnegans Wake, roughly translating into the more widely referenced JUNGIAN' term "Synchronicity". They only became satisfactory evidence though since i decided to write this bit of feedback, taking my trip seriously, meaningfully, rather than looking at my trip as a tourist holiday with planned events and meetings with these remarkable beings from planet America.
For instance, meeting R.U Siriusat the no.80 bus stop in MarinCounty one hot day only one week after he conducted his interview with the producers of what became the DVD movie "Maybelogic". Which i was also involved with at the time due to hearing of the project from the horses mouth earlier the previous year, September 2002. Maybe synchronicites increased in 2003 due to the irresistible force of the "23" enigma?But, when Bob told me of his up coming buzzing movie project called "Maybelogic" i swiftly contacted the producers and asked if i could help and get involved in any way. My goodness i thought, wow somebody is making a movie about RAW! Something i aspire to complete one day, and always wondered why the hell weren't there more movies about RAW and his books?Therefore i was floored with surprise when i was graciously given "Associate Producer" credits on the award winning movie and also included within the soundtrack under my production alias: fly agaric 23.
Fly agaric meeting R.U Sirius at a bus stop in Marin 2003 has the trademarks of a Joycean Epiphany to me now sitting in the sleepy town of Stourbridge, stirring my builders tea, slightly stoned, thinking of synchronicity and RAW.
Only one week after an auspicious meeting with two shamans from New Orleans at the Prophets Con.who synchronistically share their birthdays with my own (April 15th!, the famous day in history when the RMS Titanic sank) and also had a fondness for John Lilly, showing me "Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Bio-computer", (Currently OUT-OF-PRINT?), over a refreshing Marijuana cigarette. I was beginning to dream awake. Less than 14 days later I was greeting participants at the John Lilly symposiumheld at 3220 Sacramento street near the Presidio in San Francisco a city i did not originally plan to visit when i left on my tripto the States. A straight 10 on my own 'Koincidancometer'!John Lilly's famous quote that starts "In the province of the mind" features in RAW's classic book, and my original turn on "Cosmic Trigger" as does Saul Paul Sirag and Jack Sarfatti who also synchronistically were a part of the "LILLY" symposium!Both presenting brilliant tributes to John that I'm sure uncle Bob would have found fascinating if he would have been present. Neurology, Cosmology, Interspecies Communication, Medicine, Mathematics, Physics, Philosophy, Humor.
Another fragment from "Cosmic Trigger" featuring Dr. John Lilly is copied from the chapter entitled: "Some Egyptian gods intrude on the narrative and Our Lady of Space speaks again. Page 111.
"Dr. John Lilly, who has duplicated much of Timothy Leary's research and supplemented it with hypnotic methods and Sufi yoga, describes many encounters with what seem to be extraterrestrial intelligences in his Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Bio-computer. Dr. Lilly agnostically examines also the possibilities that these transmitters are time-travelers from the future, very advanced Illuminati Adepts alive now on earth, "angels" in the traditional sense, or projected aspects go his own mind. In the Center of the Cyclone he says clearly:
Such a network [of Adepts] exists and functions... throughout this planet. I suspect it extends/farther than our earth, but this is yet to be publicly demonstrated unequivocally beyond the private experience of myself and others.
A network of adepts that extends far beyond our earth... that was what your narrator was gradually coming to believe, and here it was being said, with only slight reservation, by Dr. John Lilly - the man once defined by the New York Times as "a walking one-man syllabus of Western civilization." --Robert Anton wilson, Cosmic Trigger Page 111-114.
*(Pages 112 and 113 contain Egyptian and Dogon' Indian images or pictograms, both framed with images of the Goddess Nuit - the Egyptian divinity of the stars.
In retrospect I feel like i temporarily contracted a kind of psychedelic Forrest Gump' syndrome,i mean to say i can understand better now several years later, after learning a little more about RAW's worlds at the MLA and that many other people have an strange increase in synchronistic experiences when they read "BOB's" special writing. Strange but true for me. You either accept it or not, and I chose to accept it.Occult characters from the books i loved so much and found attractive and awakening were manifesting themselves in the flesh in my life, in honor of Dr.John Lilly and in some sense including the physics of synchronicity, ECCO. Telepathy and space-time travel.... "Damn", i often thought to myself, i have a hell of a lot to learn. If you have seen some of the papers by Jack Sarfatti for example you will see what i mean. A thorough understanding of Newtonian physics and some of Einstein's special relativity seems necessary, or at least a familiarity with the special LANGUAGING equations used to describe the multi-dimensional stuff and things. The great Saul Paul Sirag, who wrote the epilogue to RAW's "Cosmic Trigger" delivered a talk mostly concerning G. Spencer Brown's "The Laws of Form" which Dr. John Lilly seemed to find particularly interesting.
I have not found any indications whatsoever from my outword-bound research that violence, depression or serious worrying can achieve anything but more suffering and dis-ease and confusion. Conversely - optimism compassion and love have been my own experiences with most of the characters and some of their doctrines from Cosmic Trigger, so i want to say yeah Bob was so right on time, many of the characters in Cosmic Trigger are alive and doing the things RAW is writing about them doing, in some sense. Evolving the worlds poly-culture.
"The great beasts that inhabited Europe, Asia and North America die off as a result of mutations and diseases caused by the solar flare. All relics of the Atlantean civilization are destroyed. The people who were Gruad's erstwhile countrymen are either killed or driven forth to wander the earth. Besides Gruad's Himalayan colony there is one other remnant of the High Atlantean era: the Pyramid of the Eye, whose ceramic substance resisted solar flare, earthquake, tidal wave and submersion in the depth of the ocean. Gruad explains that it is right that the eye should remain. It is the eye of God, the One, the scientific-technical eye of ordered knowledge that looks down on the universe and by perceiving it causes it to be. If an event is not witnessed, it does not happen; therefore, for the universe to happen there must be a Witness."
--Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus
To become the narrator, the protagonist, the author and the creative force, to become the MEDIA and the MESSAGE seems to me the most powerful and compelling messages worth SHOUTING OUT to others. Do it! Do it NOW!Write, sing, dance, sculpt, read, do poetry! Awake, get up and go any rediscover your shaman ally, your Holy Angels and Tricksters, go and write that spy story, that novel you were putting off'. Get the band back together. Tour, play, communicate. These kinds of messages poured into my life while reading BOB for the first time, the optimism began to ooze out of me too. I began to think like a mystic and a poet, and call myself one as thats what i was doing.
Thank goodness BOB introduced James Joyce and Finnegans Wake into my studies, as this book helps me to learn and to process this infinite regress of life, and ease the shock a little bit, of discovering the meaning of What? Who? When? Why? and its transient quality. I have decided that Hugh Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle" which is really a James Joyce principle, pinpoints the subtle method of writing-out your multiple personalities, voices, demons, spirits, thoughts in a new fun way consistent with modern physics, cutting edge psychology and cognitive therapy and the spirit of global internet. See: "UNKLE BOB Principle".
For a better understanding of my own remarkable meetings and synchronistic timespace travels i will dive into RAW's book 'Coincidance' for pearls and let uncle BOB describe, in his own words, his own models and metaphors that revolve around James Joyce, Taoism and Physics:
"If we ask why this quantum ontology agrees so conveniently with the teachings of Buddhism and Taosim, and why both physics and Eastern mysticism agree with Finnegans Wake, the only answer seems to be that the deep structure of matter, experimentally investigated, contains the same paradoxes as the deep study of mind, when experimentally investigated by the techniques of meditation and Altered States of Consciousness. In the depths we do not find One Mind and One Reality, as Theists and materialists both imagine, but something so different from day-time concepts that it can only be categorized in contradictions." - Robert Anton wilson, Coincidance, Page 100.
"The two philosophers most frequently mentioned in Finnegans Wake, Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno of Nola, taught a dialectic of resolution of opposites. Joseph Needham in his monumental Science and Civilization in China, repeatedly mentions both Bruno and Nicholas as the only two Occidental philosophers before Liebnitz to have a basically Taoist outlook" --RAW
I've been reading and studying many texts and ideas put together by RAW over the last 10 years with a more intense and deep tissue study over approx. the last 6 years that have included remarkable meetings with RAW and some equally remarkable internet classes with him and other bright and RAWfull minds at the Maybelogic Academy from 2004-2007. Around the period that RAW went passing through the Lower lights and bardo states into that great Gig in the numberless skies i was rather frantically writing notes, going back and forth through my notes of other notes to try to represent RAW, to pay tribute to him his many lives and ideas. One year later, after many inspiring and ground breaking multimedia tributes around the world to RAW, and a re-reading of some of his texts, i feel like i have my title and my contribution, or a part of it: RAWrientalism.
"This book intends to change your way of percieving/conceiving the world, without drugs or drums or voodoo, simply by using words in certain special ways." --RAW, E-mail to the Universe.
RAW's condensed experience montage or "coex system" of communication, those certain special and cheeky ways of using words and language to the delight of his readers seem to have a distinctive "Oriental" flavor to them, if you open your taste buds up. Rawrietalism is related to the spatialized conceptions of time in themes of Chinese poetry. Ezra Pound and James Joyce are two giants of western culture, and used effectively as investigative glosses and filters and encyclopedias to help finnish off' a Rawriental Canvas at the exhibit of Oriental Coex Systems: Taoism and Quantum Mechanics. RAW's first published article called "The Tao of Joyce. (Realist 1959)" makes clear that RAW was passionately involved with Orientalist poetic studies for over fifty years.
"Taoists were familiar with these relativistic considerations long before Einstein." he writes.
"The Tao is in the dung," said Chuang Chou.
IMHO RAW's prose and mixture of iconographic images from the rag bag History of the world, equal and surpass some goals and conditions set out by the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary. By just using special words in a special order. Just words, and more than words. A limitless imagination and optimism and compassion to share these experiences. To help calibrate and sensitize the neural mechanisms of perception, to help us "see"better. See more clearly, with more good data.To attain Relaxation, insights and an increased sense of the contents of one's memories.
"Peace comes of Communication" --Ezra Pound
Maybe RAW's technical and practical skills as a satirist and writer are equalled elsewhere in the dungeons of the literary world but it was the content, both the quality of the subjective content and the "time-space-binded" multi-cultural content of RAW's writing that set him apart from everybody else. The despicable terrors, the Taboo secrets, the stuff that nobody else dare write about, the ......... hidden things RAW applied his Genius and methodological "process" too, highlighting them and so freeing the reader in some way of the fear and Terror that hold so many of us down as secrets and taboos. All writers and artists do this to some degree, excorcising demons. A rare American, an Irishman unafraid to follow his own way to resolving the most difficult andcomplex equations. Always questioning everything wherever it takes the mind, but holding onto structures and mathematically precise models at the same time. A balanced "center" or balanced "Stereo" mixture of perception, mixing between left and right brain characteristics.
Lightbrain Rawriental Daoism.
Ideogramic Method.
RAW distilled "ideogramic Method" through the lens of Ezra Pound as a kind of RAWriental perceptional device, an operating window of visual manipulation and extended meaning with an equal and opposite persuasive power as a linguistic sequence. "ideogramic Method" makes sense to me now as a typical Rawriental journey beyond language, beyond beyond where alphabet, predicate and subject vanish, crumble and turn to gas. Synthesis and resurrection take place giving birth to a knu picture-word. A Magik sigil, with the dormant charge of "epiphany" coiled in the minds vine. A constant questioning and fresh establishment of free-space for free "mind" to add its own subjective meaning and playful free commentary. Like the "space" a legendary Jazz master might create seemingly out of nothing, invisible. Space. Woid. Once again the fullness of emptiness; expansion and contraction, appearance and disappearance, the non-location of the Tao in Raw's writs. And the UNKLE Bob' principle.
My tribute to RAW, his lives and ideas for the most part relates to the peace that comes from balanced communication, his Taoist, Zen Buddhist qualities as a wise man of the West and his continued influence on cultural relations. Spreading Oriental intelligence of a beneficial nature to all-sentient beings.
"As is well known, the events of the Wake occur "at no spatial time" and cannot be sharply defined because "every parson, place and thing in the chaosmos anywhere at all connected with it was moving and changing all the time" (page 118). In short, we are within the Einsteinian universe; and Joyce realizes, as did Alfred Korzybski, that the aristotelian "laws of thought" cannot hold in such a universe: "The sword of certainty which would identified the body never falls" Robert Anton Wilson, (page 51). Coincidance
MLA Springs into another phase of collaborative projects, I'm looking FWD to the next issues and hope that this multiwriting project expands in all directions.
Gorillaz: Journey to the West by Steven 'Fly Agaric 23' Pratt. 2007.
"I wish to develop my hypothesis further by proposing the following idea: What if DNA, stimulated by nicotine or dimethyltryptamine, activates not only the emission of photons (which inundate our consciousness in the form of hallucinations), but also its capacity to pick up the photons emitted by the global network of DNA-based life? This would mean that the biosphere itself, which can be considered "as a more or less fully interlinked unit," is the source of the images. - Jeremy Narby, Cosmic Serpent. P. 131
The Gorillaz are a bright example of 21st century novel languaging.
Post modem Aliens from another planet, and now as a harmonious accent to their reality bending oeuvre' they're paying direct tribute to a 16th century Classic Chinese Sacred Text, utilizing "from all quarters" the plurality of different mediums, dance, music, gymnastics, magic, from Oriental traditions and then, retranslating this big soup with modern audio/visual technology, and what you might call a more westernized extravaganza of light, Holographic projectors, and most importantly for this writing, the arts and crafts of Hip Hop culture.
Graffiti, DJ'ing, M.C'ing, Which, as i wish to show here and have hinted at before in a piece of writing for Maybelogic Quarterly called "The Knu Science of Hip Hop," have a distinctly Oriental mystique about them, Calligraphy, Swordsmanship, and many Martial Arts have been recently pulled into the fold of Hip Hop Culture, Wu Tang Clan, Ninjatunes, and the Gorillaz all have an affiliation with Orientalism, to give three examples that spring to mind, but of course many Orientals may vary in their opinion of how closely these western artists imitate their cultural values attached to these terms.
But what's important to me, is noticing that along with the outwardly noticeable Oriental themes through much Hip hop, there is a deep rooted affinity with orientalism and Hip Hop culture, rekindled and rediscovered by street poets and dharma bums, a new communication has been established by Graffiti writers and DJ's and Poets, and billions of people are tuning into Hip Hop culture world wide. Or language is mutating faster through Hip hop culture, especially fueled by modern Web 2 technology (Youtube, Photobucket, google) Digital photography and other new mediums for languaging.
The Gorillaz and Chen, and the humans in the mist, seem to have unified many of these themes, but in a way i find particularly attractive with a particular sensitivity to the "Oriental" way of seeing and perceiving which i suspect can be fantastically and completely different to our own Alphabetical and Westernized way of seeing, interacting and processing our symbol systems. Animation may have been what Ernest Fenollosa was searching for as a medium to translate the interacting picture poems within Oriental languages he was studying.
Instead his work found Ezra Pound, who was helping to birth Animation in poetry through Imagism, vorticism, Modernism and Surrealism and all of the great real icons of art and culture: The ancient wisdom of Chinese poetry, orientalism and Eastern culture are wrapped up in "Monkey", if you wish to unravel the rope and begin to analyze the fur on the Monkeys tale more closely you can see the fantastic "other" worlds emerge of Eastern ideogram cultures, Chinese poetry and their more positive cultural images related to enlightenment, peace and at-oneness with Nature, distilled from their oriental equivalent of synergetic historical periods, their Renaissance in arts and literature, in Respect/rejection of myth and in the relationship between mankind and nature.
"Journey to the West has an Epic encyclopedic cultural background in Chinese folk religion, as strange and new to most westerners as any alternative historical fictions from our own culture such as Tolkien's Middle Earth or the even the Matrix such are the seemingly Alien qualities of much Oriental culture. Its twice as strange but four times as real as our Western history, due mostly to the fact that, to be blunt, a chinese written character is more real than an alphabetical one. Hands down. Each and every way, ideogram conveys multi-directional images in multi-directional readings Chinese mythology and value systems; the pantheon of Taoist and Buddhist deities is still reflective of Chinese folk religious beliefs today. -Journey to the West
My personal impressions of the "Gorillaz" kind of worldview if you like is that they are living in a post alphabetical world, an apocalyptic afterfuture where a virtual self (avatar) seems ever so slightly or at least equally real. This concept relates very nicely for me to poetics based on the Zen-Buddhist conceptions of nonbeing as being, emptiness as form, and transcendence of the duality between self and world.
The Chuang Tzu, an ancient philosophical treatise, states that: "Tao cannot be conveyed by either words or silence. In that state which is neither speech nor silence its trancendental nature may be apprehended." perhaps painting best typifies that state which is neither speech nor silence, but manages to convey a unique mood which can transport us into a special awareness. Yet, if we, as westerners, are to experience the tao in Chinese painting or in the I-Ching, we must recognize and transcend certain limitations of mind. - R. L. Wing, The Illustrated I-Ching
The classical spiritual Avatar or guardian ANGEL parallels the "Gorillaz" avatars in many ways. And the flurry of Avatars born to web2 everyday. Avatars become a vehicle to help bridge self and supra-self, the A-typical western dualistic paradox which has long been kept alive in small enclaves and underground cells in the Western lands.
Hip Hop culture recently manifested thousands of magical Avatars, powered up with symbol, sound and movements united together, charged. Generally many Eastern religions include the phenomena of the "Avatar" as a kind of virtual super self, a comic book hero; often graphically mutated with an animal or element within nature.
In literature this metamorphosing takes place in metaphor, poetry and allegory. The great Oriental mystics, and many Western esotericists and Shamans and bards have been using metaphor to combat the demons of reality since the beginnings of "Time/space", within "ZEN" Buddhist and some Taoist creation stories and poetic parables we often see metamorphosis between mankind and nature.
Oriental paintings for example, eclipse the human being with Mountain, wave, river, cloud, monkey. Gorillaz have brought this myth science arkestra back to a Western stage in 2007. Capturing this kind of holographic motion on the page with words might be a helpful metaphor to use when describing what Joyce has left us in Finnegans Wake: a flurry of spicetyme Angels.
See Finnegans Wake and The Cantos of Ezra Pound for working examples of exactly this kind of omnipoteia, multiple sensory, multi-cultural, multi linguistic and multi-symbolic communications. More simply called Epic poetry or referred to as "The Tale of the Tribe". Monkey: Journey to the West qualifies as an Oriental based "Tale of the Tribe" or cultural compendium, working on many different levels, philosophical, spiritual, magical, historical.
And so i am knitting Monkey into a kind of Maybelogical glossed Oriental "Tale of the Tribe" and hijacking their performance into my own interpretations of Orientalism and Modernism.
"The Monkey King's journey from animal being to human being to spiritual being was obviously a Buddhist metaphor for the way in which you have to endure calamities to reach enlightenment. - Chen Shi-Zheng, Director with Gorillaz of Monkey: Jouney to the west.
And so the real and unreal thinking goes around and around, but thankfully the Gorillaz, dubbed as the worlds first Virtual band due to the cartoon/comic book like appearance and the hologramic "projections" of the band during their perfoirmances. The band however is a mutating band of gypsies, a well pool of talent from around the world, many special guests both real and virtual make magical appearances in both the real and the virtual world. Jamies Hewlett and "CHU" recently glossed a full 217 Meter train which rolls from London to Manchester daily. Journey through the West (Midlands) When the train is in motion the images are in motion creating animation and moving pictures, live film. Outdoors. A taste of public transport could aspire to, if it could break free of the influencial government dogm that Graffiti IS a crime!
Gorillaz as a medium for Chinese Poetry."Another set piece, by no means as poetic as Mutt and Jute, introduces the Tristan theme: the Prankquean (21-23) is Brangwen or Brangane who is responsible for mixing up the love-potion (21.27 lovespots) and the death potion in the opera: they both look like a pint of Guinness; hence the thematic riddle 'Mark the Wans, why do i am alook alike a poss of porterpease? (19-20). - Matthew Hodgart, James Joyce A students Guide P. 139
The philosophical questions raised about what real reality really is and what a virtual reality really is! is a portal of discovery which thanks to the Gorrilaz and their mist (tech support, musicians, producers, painters, designers, financial backing etc.) has led back to well spring of valuable information, preserved with out the usual mass identity fragmentation and forced re-shaping to fit in with the Knu world order reinforced by False Iconic Corporate Capitalists.
The boundless Wisdom of the Orient goes straight to the root, the seed, back to nature as metaphor. The Fullness of emptyness. The infinite Potential contained out of nothing. A new paradigm shift is languaging itself into our collective reality and i feel that the Gorrilaz and associates have crafted a fantastic gloss from which to update our instruments and communication apparatus, to help the people swallow up the whole mass-age and spit out "her" stories.
Monkey Magic!
Tori Amos sings about MONKEY: Journey to the West
As you may or may not know, all primates -- and we certainly are primates -- have what are called 'male dominance hierarchies'. This means that the longest-fanged, meanest s.o.b. in a monkey tribe takes control of the group resources, the females, the weaker males, and this character runs the show, and this is pretty much how we do it today.
But my belief, based on 25 years of working with and taking psychedelic plants and substances, has led me to -- well, certainly to the brink of hubris -- to make an adjustment to evolutionary theory and suggest that these psychedelic substances are not private, peripheral, ancillary, cultish, esoteric, meaningless, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or obscure; they are in fact central to understanding how what we call 'human-ness' actually came to be in the first place.
I really believe that the reason we have language and notions like community, altruism, loyalty, brotherhood, hope -- the reason we have these qualities, which are the qualities that we embrace as most human and most ennobling to us, is because for a period of roughly a hundred thousand years we self-medicated ourselves and suppressed the poisonous presence of the calcareous tumour of ego. - Terence Mckenna's "stoned" Monkey hypothesis
"The vast, interconnected mantle of mycelia reacts quickly to the availability of plant and animal debris, recycling carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, iron and other essential elements. When storms, floods, volcanoes, or other natural disasters wreak havoc on the environment, fungal champions come to the rescue, capturing debris with mycelium and beginning to recycle. Humans have the unfortunate distinction of creating more debris than any other organism on this planet. We have become the new natural disaster. From our minor significance in the biological world only 10,000 years ago, our population is now over 6 billion, continuing to rapidly increase, taxing resources and stressing habitats beyond their maxima. - Mycotech
"Well, it's about Ezra Pound and James Joyce, whom I regard as the two major innovators of twentieth century literature. And oddly they both had a very powerful influence on Marshall McLuhan who has influenced how we think about all media, especially internet, even though internet didn't begin to develop until after McLuhan was dead. - Robert Anton Wilson, speaking of his "Tale of The Tribe." - RAW Utopia Interview 2001
Classic Oriental theatre and picture/poems rendered into a Hip Opera. Monkey: Journey to the West, in (2007), and so on through the emerald jungle of Orientalism and Modernism, now glossed with wind and rain of Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Google maps, blogs, hyperlight communications. Escaped the city on a train, like a Haiku through the wilderness between London and Manchester. New weather patterns. Next will be the Vedas, the Sutras, the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Popol Vuh, Finnegans Wake i hope, the classics made KNU. The Worlds classics. Here we have something that i boldly think constitutes a new paradigm shift, equivalent to mass enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, in some sense - illumination, lights, simply. If we could just choose to see it that way. Awaken to the lower lights. Greet these holographic entities and make them welcome, they are here to stay. Bonded by an undefined spirit behind the curtain, a hidden hand in mind: The tech support mist of mind. Monkeys in the mist. Fresh air rushes in-coming, the virus of language sneezed from outerspice. The end of word is HERE. burp!
Monkey: Journey to the West Provides a new kind of band, and a new kind of Opera, a backdrop this week upon which to hang a bunch of important questions facing mankind: Virtual Reality and Oriental Reality. Who distributes it, how?
"Peace comes of communication."-- Ezra Pound
Every-things happening everywhere nowadays! Like in Finnegans Wake. So Knu pist modem to to show a bit of gnu-historical glow and knu-contextual flowing relationships sailing to our subject matter of eve're:thing. See "Google", "Wikipedia" etc. (The internet of things). The Oracle of surprise information.
"We have speculated that the vacuum fluctuation of space-time is a holographic modular hierarchy whose individual levels posses properties in common with the King Wen sequence of the I Ching and morphology of DNA. - Terence and Dennis Mckenna, Invisible Landscape. mckenna.psychedelic-library
The Epic tale Journey to the West, both in the 1580's and the 2007's spills out of the conventional stage box with wet and wild bardic spewing from all quarters, metamorphoses, telepathy, sympathetic magic, levitation, spells, Sacred Elixirs, Autopoiesis,love potions, telekinesis, sign language, teleportation, Crypto-zoological nightmares, wild psychedelic visions and alien voices, transbutation, animism, direct communication with space Gods, weather gods, insect gods, mountain Gods and MONKEY gods, Gorilla "Gods" all sorts of Nature "gods" often called AVATARS in the more Easterly quarters. Interplanetary sentient web 3, a flurry of Angels, a paradigm shift, a re-orientation and redefinition of our collective internet of things, our reality engines. Identity? Am i google now? If i think of it?
"The idea of representative government after we overthrew the monarchy was: we'll have representatives who will represent us. In the first place, they don't represent us! They represent the corporations who pay their campaign finance. And in the second place we don't need anybody to represent us. Now that we've got internet we can represent ourselves. So I think all those people should be thrown the hell out of office and forced to make a living as honest men and women do, rather than by lying to the gullible and selling them out to the corporations, and we can represent ourselves through internet.
As a matter of fact, Buckminster Fuller--one of the most brilliant people of the twentieth century, often compared to Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin for the extent of the fields in which he was an expert, he was an expert in at least a dozen fields--one of his last books has that theme. He calls it desovereignization: getting rid of human representatives and representing ourselves though electronic media. So I am not as original as I sometimes think I am. - RAW Utopia Interview 2001
Gorillaz are not the first virtual band they are one of the first really enlightened band, literally. They are light beings. Part human origin, part non-human, artificially represented as real (avatar): Spooks, Phantoms, Projections, alien hyperlight beings etc. Not of the word. Beings of Monkey magic-LIGHT. Gorillaz are Aliens from another dimension. They have landed again. They are mythical magical beings; they have a strange new hemisemi-fictionalized history, partly based on real flesh and bloody humans but humans who sometimes pretend and imitate themselves and so making them also satisfactorily "unreal" and so falsifyable, and so "Real" again! and around we go! but, they make up for this confusion, for me, with a very convincingly real presence when on the stage communicating through sound-waves and music.But writing about music is like blowing smoke rings about architecture so i'll leave that for crumbling music press. Monkey: Journey to the West seems more Real and interactive and present NOW than most political Puppets on the world stage in 2007. The hologramic projection equipment and the magic (Peppers Ghost Technology) provide Gorillaz with Monkey Magic, new creation engines, partly programmed by a real Chinese master - Chen Shi-Zheng. Gorrilaz' combine with the incredibly rich and incredibly vast portal of new discovery and rediscovery of The Orient, via Chen Shi-Zheng. Joyce's Epiphany, McLuhan's "Electronic Orientalism" and the human tech-support team helping to translate and propagate a new hyperlite from a newBudust'" Sutra. Follow the journey of Wu Cheng'en and his experiences with a totalitarian Chinese culture intolerant of great poetry in a similar way to how totalitarian America was mostly Intolerant of Ezra Pound and totalitarian Great Britain was Intolerant of Oscar Wilde and other great genius of world literature.
Monsters and demons are trying to obtain immortality by eating flesh! This provides a large part of the plot in Monkey: Journey to the West. I am familiar with Immortality themes within some mythological contexts and some cannibalism in mythology and fairy lore may can be glossed as the trickery of prankster drug cultists who created "False" etymologies for certain species of sacred fruits to keep them hidden and hidden. Entheogens are chemical and biological candidates in for real ingredients within real wet dazzling "Immortality Elixirs" like Ayahuasca or other psychoactive brews, teas and snuffs. In both the (biological) reality of the damp forest and the freshly perfumed hillside and in the digitally remodeled virtual reality of the myth space/time including history Also see RAW's essay on why Hannibal Lector would make a better President than George W. Bush!
"The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the out-pressing vitalities, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. - Ernest Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
Monkey teached me to revisit the relationship between words and images and things. Poetry in the print media world now a unique kind of bridge-space between words and images. A GLUE that binds cultures, languages, history, religion, Law and science all together, a tale of a tribe, a modern verse epic, a cultural encyclopedia. See "The Cantos and Finnegans Wake! Something more than the sentencing masses. Monkey: Journey to the West has some of the qualities of a Modern verse epic and due to its 2007 web 2 re-release and digital transmission by hyperlight communication around the globe millions of times in a minute into outer-space/time; Monkey: Journey to the West (An OPERA feat. The Gorillaz), is something the pre-internet poets such as Joyce, Pound, Po and Crowley and hundreds more seemed to be dreaming of in their folded up catapillar form. The crystal ball of freely available classics.,
Classics of world literature, poetry and tribal encyclopedias, e-post, e-modernism and the beginning of a new Global Theatre perhaps, the electronic age as the coming of the hyperlight age, youtube, facebook, myspace, google, wikipedia, flikr, photobucket, e-bay, and bluetoothing wireless "everyware" (Sterling 2006). Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. -- Henry Louis Mencken
Imagism in the early 20th Century was heavily influenced by the relatively unknown, Ernest Fenollosa partly revived by Robert Anton Wilson and more directly by Ezra Pound who famously included many pictograms or word/images in his grand synthesis "The Cantos": A Globally oriented praxis of language and culture including Oriental cultures, especially Chinese languages. (which was a center study text in Wilson's course "The Tale of the Tribe" at Maybelogic Academy in 2004. I have come around and around to thinking that uncle Bob encouraged others to read and re-read Pounds Cantos so as to be sufficiently equipped with a single bound poetic guide (an oracle) to help us and our new emerging multicultural global community (VILLAGE) and our own relative comprehension of "reality" and "History" to boot as we crawl through the sewage of the 20th into the new 21st century e.v.Finnegans Wake is the other single bound Oracle that Robert Anton Wilson recommends. I would add his "Illuminatus!" to make three blinding bound Oracles for better processing 21st century life.
"For centuries, the epic tale of the Monkey King's journey of enlightenment has been an omnipresent part of Chinese culture, delighting young and old with its heady mix of adventure, mystery and magic," said the Manchester International Festival's website. - cartridgemonkey.com
Alphabet and ideogram meat again stuck in web 2, Finn again for humanity to move forwards again and to get around the obstacles and roadblocks blocking our communication canals again.
I use the term Gorillaz' to mean Human beings and alien light beings, a part of the many collaborators who are Gorillaz tech-support mist in some sense, the production crew, the multiple personalities behind the metaphorical curtain of a 21st Century virtual band.
Monkey: Journey to the West maybe a knu catalyst for a new paradigm shift in the western lands if we see it clearly due to the new means of community within which classic literature from the Orient and all over thw world can begin to weave its magic "binding" qualities. Everyware! And catalyze the sort of cultural exchange and feedback the modernists would have liked, i guess. The classics of Oriental culture translated for a Western world word 3 experiencing alphabet psychosis.
"You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone." - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Fly Agaric 23 Wed 27 June 2007.
"Internet belongs to the people that use it. Nobody has found an effective way of policing it, and they never will as far as I can see. Any way of controlling internet would involve creating a world government and the people who most want to censor opinions are the most opposed to world government. So they can't do it that way. If they try to do it any other way they'll wreck most major corporations that depend so much on internet to do business. So it can't be done.
Internet is going to remain free, and I believe, I've believed since I was in my early twenties, that everything that accelerates the flow of information and communication benefits the human race, and every communication jam damages us. So internet is the greatest tool, or device, or gimmick, or whatever you want to call it, for accelerating the flow of information between peoples. It is, I think, the most revolutionary force in the history of humanity since the invention of the wheel--especially when Asia and Africa get online in a major way. That's what I really look forward to." -RAW Utopia Interview 2001
