Eco and Wilson: Guerrilla Ontologists Are Mist

Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.—Umberto Eco, Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986)

"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger 1, Final Secret Of The Illuminati.

For Umberto Eco 1932-2016

Disclaimer:

I read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco more than 18 years ago, and i found it very dense and difficult back then, but influential none the less. I also tackled ‘Apocalypse Postponed’ (from Stourbridge Library) which i enjoyed much more, probably because it was non-fiction, and so accessible to my non-classical taste at the time. Did Umberto get high? i asked in my 20s. Still, the text required a slow reading, and challenged me on every page. Although i enjoyed Eco, i did not continue my affair with his works. Although, i acknowledged his greatness among living philosophers, i did not ever think to compare him with Robert Anton Wilson. On the passing of Eco last week, i found myself doing this in my head, and thought. Dang, might just as well write it down and out. I apologise in advance for any misrepresentations and/or skewed interpretations on my behalf, when writing of these intellectual giants.--Steve Fly

Eco and Wilson: Guerrilla Ontologists

  Umberto Eco and RAW have much in common, not least being born in the same year,1932. They were intellectual titans, able to swim out to the vast ocean of philosophy and science, classical history, occultism, and the history of secret societies, and drag the full net back to the shore of humanity in the form of fucking good story, over and over again. They both produced a mixture of scholarly works and fictional novels. They were renaissance scholars who each produced work that inspired a flurry of imitators. The Da Vinci code, by Dan Brown for example, seemed to me like a watered down mixture of major themes from Eco, in particular his most popular ‘In the name of the rose’ and Wilson’s ‘Historical Illuminatus Chronicles’ but who can really put a finger or a paw on it?  

  Both had deep interest, and a unique methodology of expressing thoughts about ‘reality’, that old slippery fish. Eco developed a rich latticework to represent the premise of ‘hyperreality’ inspired by his study of semiotics, and he translated and share his complex ideas with a large audience, a pretty rare achievement for a public figure, an intellectual who writes novels.

  Eco studied at many great learning centres of the world, in the thick of academia, whereas Dr. Wilson travelled an unorthodox route, largely an autodidactic species of genius. You could say Eco was high brow and Wilson low brow, but any two-valued comparisons such as high and low should be treated with suspicion. Both philosopher novelists turned their back on Catholicism at a young age, but continued to include it as a recurring theme.   

Not accidentally, Standard English also assumes a sort of "glass wall" between observer and observed, while English Prime draws us back into the modern quantum world where observer and observed form a seamless unity.--Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology.

  Wilson was a strong proponent of many different theories of ‘reality’, or perhaps he might say ‘Reality tunnels’ with an accent on the pluralistic nature of things, the process oriented world view. Wilson trawled the fields of semantics, cognitive psychology, quantum mechanics and design science, together with a practical interest in mysticism and neuro-metaprogramming. Inspired by Alfred Korzybski and ideas from Aleister Crowley, together with his friends Alan Watts, Dr. John Lilly, Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller, Wilson also had a legendary sense of humour.   

  The following quotes from Wikipedia put a nice touch to the term ‘Guerrilla Ontologist’, a tag which RAW was fond of using. Wilson published one of his first essays on James Joyce in 1958. 

'In 1967 he gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla," and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla." The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

"His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

I think that both Eco and Wilson, with their open pluralistic philosophy, or Guerrilla Ontology, and their interconnected novelistic techniques, of including real historical and literary forces, distorted by a surrealist mirror on set of lenses, would be delighted by the latest psychological research in the field of ‘Virtual Reality’. Here we have evidence that each individual perceives a different universe, due to the changing parameters of each human sensory system. In VR each participant gets a different audio visual experience, confronted with the fact that if you are not looking at something, how are you supposed to know it is there? and to a lesser degree this applies to sounds from behind too. 

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.—Philip K. Dick.

  Experiments show that even trained minds, fully aware that a they are in a simulation, perhaps walking across a steep drop on a plank, will wobble, shake and react almost unconsciously, as if, they were REALLY in the simulated scene. Meditation can have a similar effect, as can some drug use, and in fact all consciousness change techniques confront a similar question.    

  With VR, however, it’s like coming at it from another place altogether, a place where you are suddenly forced to face deep rooted questions of the nature of reality, identity, perception, likes and fears etc. You do not have to train the mind to be still, so that the clear images may emerge, or chemically alter your neuro-semantic system, no, although these techniques have their own plus and minus points. No, a convincing 3D immersive audio/visual simulation can trigger similar neuro-chemical activity, resulting in dormant, perhaps unconscious but instinctive sensory responses. It does not take much to pull the wool, or goggles, over the eyes, and influence the deep rooted physical responses to neural stimulation. I predict that soon, one may propose a new '360 immersive' expression of the meaning of Quantum Mechanics, or Quantum Entanglement, or Mirror Neurons. Make it new.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.—Umberto Eco, "Can Television Teach?" in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12.

  This is my hacked together message, a trigger, whereby i hope you at least go and read Dr Wilson and Umberto Eco again. Contemplate for yourself the nature of reality and realities, and of virtual reality and virtual realities, and perhaps if you are fortunate, with the additional help of the latest VR hardware. With luck, in here, some of the the foundational principles of general semantics, and semiotics, can ride shotgun together, inside the latest 3D VR environments. 

  I think we are going to require innovative tools to help the public at large gain more empathy for what is beyond their senses, and learn to better discern the real from the unreal, or...the pretty much real from the not really so real, and so on...

...New tools to combat naive realism, together with captivating games, films, porn and beyond, all media that will shape and meta-program the minds of many generations to come. In VR, you may finally be able to go fuck yourself backwards, convincingly enough to never say that phrase again without wincing.        

—Steve Fly.

    Bristol.

    UK

I'll leave you with these thoughts...

The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place? - Karl Popper. From Yesod, Chapter 118 of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

"You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.”) Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.— Robert Anton Wilson, Language as Conspiracy, p. 277.

SPS is for Saul Paul Sirag (Interview with fly agaric23)

When I recorded this interiew in 2000 A.D. on minidisc recorder I had no way to transcribe and upload the results, and there was no wikipedia to enhance the wisdom of Saul. Big thanks to Jack Sarfatti, please spend a moment at his new website:
http://www.stardrive.org/

FLY interviews Saul Paul Sirag:

FLY: Robert Anton Wilson?

SAUL: Yeah, i first introduced him to Jack,

SAUL: Yeah, well he learned about this Bell's theorem stuff from Jack and me, i introduced Jack to Wilson, that was when he was living in Berkeley.

FLY: Oh, the trick top hat

SAUL: what?

SAUL: The trick top hat', oh, yeah, the trick top hat, yeah that’s the next one i think, and the third one is called 'homing pigeons', trick top hat is the one that has references to both Jack and Me as coming up with futuristic kind of physics that changes things drastically and so on.

FLY: That’s interesting as John Lilly just recently spoke about the...erm...form of law

SAUL: Laws of form?

FLY: yeah, and the trick top hat relates to that somehow?

SAUL: I'm very interested in the Laws of form also, yeah he talks about it in both his fiction and he has written a lot of non-fiction too of course, and maybe more none-fiction than fiction actually, although, you know he's one of these people that mixes the two together a lot, kind of like Borges' the Argentinean writer, well, B draws a fine line between lit. criticism that is not fiction and the fiction that he's criticizing, B's criticism is so speculative and interesting that it reads almost as fiction, you know.

FLY: I like the idea of exploring our unreality's. At the back of the book "Secret Chamber by Robert Bauval" there's an appendix in which the author mentions Wilhelm Reich and something he calls Cosmic ambience. Terence Mckenna is quoted at length, talk of probing into unreality's, but now were realizing that's our reality too.

SAUL: One of the most important pieces of criticism that's really fascinating, and it's about that famous British poet - William Taylor Coleridge - and you see what's interesting about that poem is that Coleridge calls it a - fragment of a poem - the reason he calls it a fragment is that he actually dreamt' the whole poem, he woke up and just started writing it down, but he got the first part of it written down, and a visiter came and visited, and he forgot the rest of it, so he calls it a fragment of a poem anyway, its a beautiful poem all by itself, but here's the weird thing that Borges points out - there really was a Khan who was a builder - and he was the grandson of Genghis Khan; who was just a conquerer, but Kubilai Kahn was a builder. What Coleridge never knew is that Kubilai Kahn really did order a pleasure dome to be built, and that was enough, but what wasn't known in Cooleridge's time is that it itself was an incomplete building, and that was discovered by archeologists after Cooleridge's time, eh, so what Borges says is there's a kind of archetype, a vast archetype thats trying to get in through our reality, the first time its comes in the form of a building Kubilai Kahn wants to build, and for some reason its not completed, and the second time it takes the form of a poem about Kubilai Kahn's building, and that's incomplete too, because of this guy who walks in and disturbs his memory of the dream. So then Borges speculates that it will try to come in a third time, and he thinks that the form will be different, in some way. My feeling about that is that the form, having my own prejudices about forms, is that the form is what Mathematicians have discovered, a beautiful set of structures, they call it the Coxeter graphs, named after the canadian H. S. M. Coxeter, who's still alive in his 90's still doing math very accurately, and he invented these graphs in the 1930's to classify hyper-dimensional crystal structures, well that already sounds like Kubilai Kahn and Coleridge - and then in the 40's totally independent of Coxeter'mathematicians work because it was in a totally different part of mathematics, a Russian mathematician named Dinken, invented the same set of graphs to classify very different kind mathematical objects, something called; lie algebras and lie groups. Then in the 60's a french mathematician called Rene' Thom invented a whole new field of mathematics called Catastrophe theory, which deals with dynamic systems that can undergo drastic changes due to a very small change in the parameters that they are dependent on, thus the word catastrophe, but catastrophe is to be taken in a neutral sense, that is to say a lot of catastrophes are good.

In fact what RT was trying to model was the changes that living systems go through, he wanted a mathematics to deal with living systems, especially development and growth and so on; which is very difficult to deal with mathematically.

Well then a Russian mathematician named V.I Arnold looked at Rene Thom's work and said Thom just delt' with a lower, small set, 7 of them in turned out, of catastrophe structures, but actually there is an infinite series and they are classified by these same graphs, so then of course the obvious idea that Arnold had was that the must be a whole bunch of other mathematical objects that can be brought into this classification scheme and so he set that up basically as a program for his students and himself to work on over the years and a lot of other mathematicians have been involved in this. And it has the feel of an archeological dig like their digging up this vast.... see because, Here's why, its because all these mathematical objects are related to each other by way of these graphs, the graphs form a kind of bridge between different types of mathematical objects, that’s a very powerful thing to be able to do in mathematics because what's very difficult to see with one type of math object and if you have a bridge between the two and you can switch back and forth and get a much broader and much more accurate feel for what's going on.

And so the idea now is that the mathematicians are wondering what the vast underlying object is that the whole set of graphs ultimately refers to and that object is this archeological structure in some sense, and its being dug up, its not a ruin its not something that’s incomplete because its mathematical, its - gotta’ be whole - so to speak. And a very interesting thing from the point of view of science is that all the math objects that have been brought into the classification scheme with these Coxeter graphs are of great use and interest in physics. In fact especially in unified field theory type physics, that’s cutting edge now, like string theory, uses all these kinds of objects usually without the physicist realizing that they're grabbing objects that are related to each other by way of these graphs, because for the most part they don't know about the history of these discoveries and that it’s kind of ongoing, sort of at the cutting edge of mathematics, a kind of unification in mathematics concurrently with a unification of the forces of physics, and these two programs are intimately interrelated, and so what i think is that this vast underlying object that underlies all these graphs, is simply reality - reality in all its forms - you know.

A physicist is going to want to call it physics, because they want to bring everything into the physics program, someone else might want to call it something else, like life or something , it has the feeling of a living breathing creature, its a bit like Phil Dick's idea of VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligence System, and yeah, ironically he claimed that the definition is in some Soviet encyclopedia of some distant year, and of course the soviet Union is long gone, but still the idea of VALIS is still valid i feel.

FLY: valid VALIS!

SAUL: Laughs.

FLY: I’m also interested in the parable between the yang-mills field theory and the work of the mathematician Ramanujan.

SAUL: Yeah, oh yeah, see that’s related to this ADE stuff too. It all is. Yang-mills fields was first a generalization of the electromagnetic field, the em field is mathematisized in a sense, by a simple group which is a circle called U1, a unitary one group, and its a communicative group, in other words the way in which you rotate a circle does not matter, 30 degrees plus 60 degrees equals 60 plus 30 degrees, so it doesn't matter, and that;s a communicative group, and in the language we use today we say thats the gauge group of electromagnetism.

But what Yang and Mills did back in the 1950's, 54 i think was the year, generalized the group into a bigger group that deals with rotations ultimately rot' in a 3d space, and thats the gauge group; they were trying to model the strong force, but it turned out to be the right group for the weak force, then in the 60' there was the unification of the st and weak force by simply putting U1 and SU2 together as a bigger gauge group, work by Weinberg, Salem and Glashow, and this had certain experimental implications, like the existence of certain particles that were then found which verify the theory, but in fact there are still parts of the theory we are still trying to verify, like the Higgs particle, which hasn't been found yet, and thats part of the theory, and we think that eventually it will be found, but generally these gauge groups are groups that are classified by the ADE groups, now SU actually is an ADE classification, simply the very first rung on the ladder so to speak, in order to bring in the other forces like the strong for force they have to go to a larger gauge group, put all 3 forces together, weak the strong and the electromagnetic force, they had to go to SU5, which is a 3 dim group, that work was done in 74 i guess, by Glashow and Geogee, the same Glashow that did the work on electro-weak theory.

But then in order to bring in gravity which is a lot harder to do because gravity entails Einstein's theory of general relativity which is so different from Quantum mechanics, these other forces are modelled by way of the rules of general relativity, which are very different, almost opposite from the rules of Quantum Mechanics, so it’s very hard to put these theories together; to assume sub theories, or some bigger theories. But thats been done now with superstring theory. Yeah, since 1984 superstring theory has been proven to be a viable consistent quantum gravity theory, and thats what started a sort of bandwagon effect in physics and when lots of young physicists got interested in studying strings.

But the gauge groups involves in string theory are huge groups, like E8 x E8. There are 3 groups, which is interesting, an infinite A's, An Infinite D's and then only 3 E's, E6 E7 and E8, the dimensionality is huge. E6, is a 78 dimensional group, E7 is a 133 dimensional group and E8 is a 240 dimensional group, and they use 2 copies of it. They have an E8 x E8 version of superstring theory, they have 496 dimensional group actually, and the E8 x E8 gives you 16 very special dimensions which they use to interpolate between the 26 dimensional superstring theory and the 10 dimensional theory in a very clever way. And all this is an out-growth of what you mentioned - the yang-mills theory of 1954 - it’s an out-growth of other developments too, but that was a key development in 1954 and i just wanted to plug that in and see how that fits into the ADE scheme itself, you see?

FLY: I see a parallel between the superstrings and the strings on an instrument

SAUL: Yeah, well it is like strings on an instrument in this sense, that the harmonics, what we call vibrational states, quantized vibrational States are exactly harmonics, auk, and string harmonics are what we used to call particle states, OK, that’s how string theory corresponds to particles, and the way the correspondence works is by way of the gauge groups that are classified by these ADE graphs so the ultimate tool is simply these graphs, which go way back into the 30's to Coxeter's work, not knowing the way these things were be used in the future but he really started something there and Dinken in Russia you know, the same graphs, classifying "Lie algebras which are the algebras of the gauge groups as we use them in physics now and he had no idea that development was going to happen, he was a pure mathematician not a physicist, even physicists in the 40's should not foresee that development.

And you mentioned RAM earlier, and some of the more esoteric discoveries of RAM are actually very fundamental parts of super string theory and special membrane theory, and so people thought of RAM's work as not only been rather fantastic of course, its amazing he came up with those identities, allot of his work involved saying "this is equal to that, and the two things are so deferent that, you know, you might never in a thousand years think that was true, they're still working on proving RAM's ideas, and a lot of people are working on that now in mathematics. But a lot of his ideas are being brought into physics by Super-string theory funnily enough.

FLY: One of the things i found really interesting in the work of Buckminster Fuller was the isotropic vector, (Vector equilibrium you mean?) yeah... i'm looking for relationships between the superstrings and Bucky's work...

SAUL: The vector equalibrium is an object that has 12 vertices, ok, and actually that object, is one of these crystallographic objects, in fact that crystallographic object exists exactly in what i call the reflection space, or you could call it a crystallographic space of the SU(4) group. OK, and in fact of course; those 12 vertices actually correspond to what we call; eigen values of the S4 group which correspond to what we call the gauge particles, or the force particles. You see; there's two types groups of particles in quantum theory these force particles and matter particles.

One of the fundamental ideas in particle theory is that matter particles interact by exchanging force particles, and mathematically the way that works is that in these gauge group structures you have two different types of crystallographic structure, you have the matter c.s and the force c.s, and in the case of SU(4) the matter crystallographic structures are like tetrathedra, you have two tetrahedra making a cube and those exactly correspond to the eigen values of the quarks and anti-quarks, and the electrons and the neutrinos. OK. So those are all matter particles, but then there are actually 15 force particles involved because SU4 is a 15 dimensional group but 3 of the force particles have zero eigen values, and 12 of them have none zero eigen values and those eigen values exactly correspond to the vertices of what Bucky fuller calls the 'vector equilibrium'. So that object is being used but in a totally different way to what he thought of it.

Fly Agaric: yeah.

Interview with Saul Paul Sirag, in North Beach, San Francisco: 27/05/2000. Recorded and transcribed by Steven "Fly Agaric 23" Pratt.

NOTES AND QUOTES:

"In 1936 Coxeter moved to the University of Toronto, becoming a professor in 1948. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1948 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950. He met Maurits Escher and his work on geometric figures helped inspire some of Escher's works, particularly the Circle Limit series based on hyperbolic tessellations. He also inspired some of the innovations of Buckminster Fuller. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxeter

A Fuller explanation: the synergetic geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller
By Amy C. Edmondson


Toward a science of consciousness: the first Tucson discussions and debates
By Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Alwyn Scott


Ramanujan: essays and surveys
By Bruce C. Berndt, Robert Alexander Rankin


The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science ...
By Lee Smolin


Strings, conformal fields, and M-theory
By Michio Kaku






http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics.html

The search for a unifying theory was interrupted by the discovery of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which could not be subsumed into either gravity or electromagnetism. A further hurdle was the acceptance that quantum mechanics had to be incorporated from the start, rather than emerging as a consequence of a deterministic unified theory, as Einstein had hoped. Gravity and electromagnetism could always peacefully coexist as entries in a list of Newtonian forces, but for many years it seemed that gravity could not even be incorporated into the quantum framework, let alone unified with the other fundamental forces. For this reason, work on unification for much of the twentieth century, focused on understanding the three "quantum" forces: electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces. The first two were unified in 1967–68 by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam as the "electroweak" force.^[7] However, while the strong and electroweak forces peacefully coexist in the Standard Model of particle physics, they remain distinct. Several Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) have been proposed to unify them. Although the simplest GUTs have been experimentally ruled out, the general idea, especially when linked with supersymmetry, remains strongly favored by the theoretical physics community

In current mainstream physics, a Theory of Everything would unify all the fundamental interactions of nature, which are usually considered to be four in number: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. Because the weak force can transform elementary particles from one kind into another, the TOE should yield a deep understanding of the various different kinds of particles as well as the different forces. The expected pattern of theories is:

Theory of Everything

Gravity

Electronuclear force (GUT)

Strong force SU(3)

Electroweak force SU(2) x U(1)

Weak force SU(2)

Electromagnetism U(1)

Electric force

Magnetic force

In addition to the forces listed here, modern cosmology might require an inflationary force, dark energy, and also dark matter composed of fundamental particles outside the scheme of the standard model. The existence of these has not been proven and there are alternative theories such as modified Newtonian dynamics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

UB is for UNKLE BOB: The Principle.

UNkle

The U.N.K.L.E BOB'! principle.

Fly Agaric 23
©®--

'Reality it is not I who am writing this crazy book," said Joyce of Finnegans Wake. "It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table." Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, Page 126

    The late great Hugh kenner (1932-2003) in his book "Joyce's Voice's" creates something he calls The Uncle Charles Principle, so called in honor of the "naming" pipe smoking, uncle who sat on his arbor or "shitter'", in James Joyce's early master work "A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man":

'Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired  to his outhouse, but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat." --James Joyce, Portrait  of the Artist.

          In Robert Anton Wilson's book Coincidance, described by some as a kind of readers guide to James Joyce, Bob describes and exhibits the "Uncle Charles Principle" in many ways although the three words: "Uncle Charles Principle" are suspiciously absent from Bobs writing. Wilson's gives off an aura of the "UCP" with his  vivid reflections and methods for teaching along theories synthesized from such great minds as David Bohm, Alfred Korzybski, Giordano Bruno, Timothy Leary and many other of the goodvibe Illuminati, 'those who incorporated some version on the hologramic principle in their individual and particular system, scaffolded into RAW's fantastically condensed essays. The Title of the book "Coincidance" is taken from Finnegans Wake itself,

Part:1 Episode:3 Page:49, "Now let the centuple celves of my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, -- of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me -- by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity"

           In Coincidance roughly a quarter way through the book in a chapter titled "Death and Absence in James Joyce" RAW writes: "As Richard Ellman has noted Joyce was no man to back down from a paradox, and two of the stories in his first book of fiction, Dubliners, seem indeed to drive home the points that Death and absence can be higher and more beautiful than life and presence."

          if the Narrative idiom need not be the narrator's then the question who is writing begins to crumble into many other fragments, layers of voices, some very faint but familiar, some Loud and unpredictable dynamic and haunting, brilliant and highly entertaining.  Illuminatus! Trilogy by RAW and Robert Shea includes many characters who also seem to often display spooky quantum-jumping consciousness.They have narrative affinities with the other scripted actors in motion, but not necessarily all the scripted characters in a particular scene. Illuminatus has many thousands of ghosts in its machine. Sombunal  scripted narrative affinities.

Hugh Kenner says that "To wonder what "literally" may mean is the fear of the Word and the beginning of reading. -  RAW

      "Reality, Joyce learned early, does not answer to the point of view, the monocular vision, the single ascertainable tone. A tone, a voice, is somebody's, a person's, and people are confined to being themselves, are Evelines, are Croftons, are Stephens. "Some of my methods," Joyce later said, "are trivial; and some are quadrivial." At the very least, on the model of two-eyed men, reality exacted a doubling: in the earlier fictions, a double attitude, which Ulysses divides into a double narrator of whom one member has a repertory of impersonations. - Hugh Kenner, Beyond Objectivity, Joyce's Voices.
    

Robert Anton Wilson synthesized Pound and Joyce together in his class"The Tale of The Tribe", and shown us that the poets become united in their goals of revolutionizing the word with their RAW genius, but they seemed to create entirely different systems for accomplishing this. As the theories of Waves and particles can both be used to describe light. Stoned, I have often read page after page from the Wake starting from roughly the center of the page and then, reading off in all directions, and reading back again, looking from all quarters. Kenner simplifies the Uncle Charles Principle to: "The Narrative idiom need not be the narrator's." and so i figured that reading in different directions would produce different narrative points of view, in Ulysses Joyce often creates a sort of palindrome effect by manifesting a cloud of idioms, a bunch of folks who could be managing the narrative, slightly.

 "It is difficult to reason in terms of animals' states of consciousness. Anthropocentric as we are, we are used to negating any form of consciousness at all in other species, especially in the lower orders of animals. Orthodox scientific thought is permeated by the philosophical dogma known as behaviorism, which excludes the possibility of thought of any kind in the animal kingdom. - Giorgio Samorini, Animals and Psychedelics.

     So when I'm looking for a chemical biological metaphor that might add to communicating something resembling the "Uncle Charles Principle" now remixed to become the "Uncle BOB principle", insects and their chemical communication networks, for the most part invisible to our human senses, but yet perceptible to other "insect" consciousness? The narrator as a "fly" on the wall. And so Illuminatus like Finnegans Wake in some respects, is like an alphabetical symbolic Zoo, a roving state circus of perceptive consciousness, everyman, without becoming bound by seeing from the point of view of just one species all the time.

Eulaesa, Euplusia, and Euglossa bees carve scratches into the flowers of these orchids, through which the liquid perfume seeps out. The bees then absorb it through their hind feet. These insects return time and time again to the scratches they have cutinto the flowers and are consequently clumsy in their movements, which has been interpreted to be the result of narcosis (Dodson 1962) - Animals And Psychedelics,  page 6.     

    I propose that the mysterious phenomena of animals drugging themselves will raise similar questions as we would ask about the "Uncle Charles" type phenomena, the invisible all-connecting theory or GUCT as i am calling IT, but here, applied to literature, texts, and so maybe the scientific categorical identity of a specific chemical compound, its GCAT poem. Plus the pheremonal relationships and biological information transformations between species and then, to further complex the complex, their interrelated networking between themselves as a community and then also their networking with other species too. Interspecies communications.The blueprints of a not too distant more "Greening", more telepathic type of global internet. No wires, no conventional hardware, no conventional power supply required. Just some special plants and elixirs. We technopagans are fully equipped with fine-tuned sensory apparatus, and experience with these Ultra-Highways and prepared to interact with the required mediums of communication. What we require are translators. GUCT is such a device. An approach towards better solutions and/or framework s from which to hang my questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, and language. Here for example are some collected constants produced by all sorts of hallucinogens.

     1) Bright pulsating light

     2) Images of tunnels and/or tubes

     3) Varied but intense colors

     4) Rotating or spiraling images

     5) Geometric patterns

     6) Erratic moment of imagery

     7) Subject becoming part of imagery or participating in the experience

     8) Multiple "TV screens" often displaying autobiographical data

     9) Integration of memories into the experience

     10) Various "complex imagery" (i.e., recognizable (often cartoon-like) human, animal and other forms) --Categorized by Ronald K. Siegal

 

    These constants strike me as sounding a bit like primitive descriptions of Telepathic Internet but biased to the human sensory apparatus, and feature classic "Alien" experiences. Maybe to a fish or a toad these experiences are part of their waking reality, who knows the contents of the mind of nature from the perspective of a toad? consider this question in the context of pharmacology, a toad may have all sorts of useful applications with his or her built inn, chemical factory and their fascinating genetic information.

          But to access this hidden archive of conscious experience you must enter the kind of thing that i mean by Toad consciousness, or the realms of animal cognition and plant cognition. To humble yourself, first, to nature and the animal and plant kingdoms. Watch Planet earth and Smoke a joint.  Its helpful i think to remind the reader of the distinctions associated with some ideas of Alfred Korzybski. Plants are energy-binding systems and generally ignore each other, animals are Space + energy-binding systems and generally utilize movement with 3 dimensional cognitive functions, and then humans are Time + space + energy-binding systems, and so our general purpose is to synergize. GUCT aims to sinnerjizz.

           Is there an absence of Time paradox? In a similar way to how semiotics demands an entirely new way of reading and a whole new reality, as does mimetics? Finnegans Wake and the Cantos and Illuminatus? GUCT requires something exemplified, here, now, in the literal, textual time-travel of  "future perfect passive tense" delightfully described by Eric Wagner in his wonderful teaching, Hokium Pokium:

You put the verb stem in

you take the ending out

you put the future tense of sum in & you shake it all about

you add the adjective ending

in concord with number & person

That's the future perfect passive tense. - Eric Wagner, Maybelogic Quarterly Issue one.

         The Grand UNKLE Principle seems to be a hallmark of both the fictional writings and the absent "term" peripharalized by "a walking one-man syllabus of Western civilization." as Dr. John Lilly once called Dr. Wilson and so IT shall be called the Uncle "Bob" principle. Bob was often kindly referred to by friends and associates as uncle Bob and Ezra Pound was often called Uncle Ez by uncle RAW during the Maybelogic Academy classes, this makes for a nice triple "Uncle" compound for Joyce/Pound/Wilson. U.N.K.L.E? "

          It seems that James Joyce, Hugh Kenner, Robert Anton Wilson, and the other proponents of the "Uncle Charles Principle", Infinite Jesters, and Zen Bastards, tricksters etc.; that the invisible phantoms and the sort of romantic 'feeling' that something is looking over your shoulder, watching, narrating, writing you. well It maybe present everywhere, narrating like the mystics have said of it. But the word for "IT" circumnavigates itself creating a field.

GUCT: A field of observers, a circle of onlookers, all dressed in different costume, with different accents and mannerisms, from different continents and cultures. A kind of historical haunting, an electromagnetic haunting entity, spooky in its invisible beauty, a whispering ghost, a congealed conspiracy cloud. Contact and connection with disembodied intelligence, extraterrestrial contact, the narrator behind each synchronicity that you experience. A bit like what Philip K. Dick describes as VALIS. The doubling of experience. Remembering ring. A repeating perception of a repeating event. again.

GUCT: Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.
The Tale of the Tribe. According to fly agaric 23.

          The whole gang of physicists, mystics, poets, comedians, spies, revolutionaries, and cops mentioned throughout RAW's books are detectable with a subtle and thirsty ear and a hungry intuitive nose. Two master authors (Wilson and Shea) writing 'IT", further splits and complicates the question of authorship and identity in the "Illuminatus! Trilogy", not to mean doubting of the literal authenticity of the books themselves or suggest that somebody else helped write the books in the vein of the boring Oxbridgefnordians. No, by questions of authorship and identity i mean a more philosophical group of metaphysical type questions regarding authorship and identity in literature, how do you narrate a character without an "IS" of identity for example? E-Prime Crime Fiction? and how does the "Uncle Charles Principle" function in Illuminatus? how does Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, VALIS and the others function by using multiple points of view, and UNKLE principles? and how are they woven into Illuminatus. When and where, how and why? Who's "Hidden variables" lurking under the stairs? The mystery of correlation without connection, synchronicity that brings us back to Coincidance and GUCT. And hopefully some concrete scholarly historical details to chew on.

        It might be helpful here to invoke the PKD Book turned movie; A Scanner Darkly as skilled deployment of the "Uncle Charles Principle".  The Ideogramic method and Epiphany are all at play this movie. Holographic, quantum jumping strategies are used for telling the tale of the tribe. But a tale that like Finnegans Wake and The Cantos avoids such terms as Time-travel, and so the recognition of it, but peripheralized the experience of space-time-travel by employing similar kinds of forward/backward up/down inner/outer, multidimensional word/symbol/image devices.

          Some might choose to use yet another term for this magical effect, recorsi or the constant circulation of energy back into itself, self perpetuating, cyclical, spiraling in and out simultaneously. An historical vortex. Invoking Pound's Vorticism, Vico and Bruno, Joyce and others, all characters from RAW's TOTT, and so within Illuminatus! Trilogy too? Like the Tao.

          Joyce seems to echo what RAW teaches us throughout much of his writing "YOU are the master who makes the grass green", the 23 Enigma and all the other related spooky paraphenomena in Wilson's works seem to intone Joyce and Pound's voices. I'll leave Crowley for others to chew on. RAW has actually applied two further terms to the most potent "magical" devices employed by Pound and Joyce: Idiogramic Method and Epiphany. These terms as described by RAW give us an insight into the mechanisms, and the methods crafted by these superstars of Reality engineering. Looking from Pound's Ideogramic point of view for amoment we can see the influence of Oriental models of reality, and how they create multiple points of view that can move both backwards and forwards, that can be read backwards and forwards, up/down, inside and out, as Pound was greatly influenced by pictographs (ideograms), and was forced to revolutionize the word so as to translate what it was like to read/process Oriental poetry/painting.

          Simply writing a paragraph that can be read forwards and backwards gives the communication a pictographic effect. And this is something that we find in both Finnegans Wake and The Cantos, clusters of narrators including nature's voices, moo's and chirps etc. allsteeped in histories dull tea-pot, a flurry of images and pulsating verbs all moving like the wind in all directions, across the sky page. And from this flurry of word/sound/power comes a sense of order and meaning much greater than that of most other books i have read. Because of the encyclopedic nature of these vast works, these languaging machines, It becomes, after further research, personal. The books branch out into your own back yard, or into your own kettle. Into your brew. They conspire to reach you in everyday experience with their multi-cultural linguistic harpooning and its a magical feeling when they reach you.

          Although this fun alternative to left-right linear reading of the English tradition can seem like a special and sacred Key to finding a hidden code of some sort or other has been less popularized within studies of Pound's Cantos than in Joyce's Wake. Reading these two books together combined with many essays and up-to-date feedback in 2005 from Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, i started to experience the omnidirectional patterns emerging from Pound's Cantos too, more explicitly in the pictorial Ideograms themselves, levitating on the page.

          Joyce's amazing Doodle family of hyper-textual languaging symbols explained by RAW in Coincidance with his own ingenious system functions and teaching tables of correspondences introduced a new symbolic language, a new model. Like Joyce's "Nat language" , my GUCT and proposed Telepathic internet are also Nat Language.Totally Alien, Totally viral.

Fly Agaric 23

©®--