Toot and Come-Inn: Cannabis Seeds and Finnegans Wake, and dogs, you dig?
By Steve Fly Agaric 23.
(Dedicated to Sirius, the dog)
-- Is that answers? -- It am queery! -- The house was Toot and Come-Inn by the bridge called Tiltass, but are you solarly salemly sure, beyond the shatter of the canicular year? Nascitur ordo seculi numfit. -- Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.
--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pages 512-513.
Back in 2002, when i asked Robert Anton Wilson by email ‘Can you give a list of items for our emergency survival suitcase please?” he replied:
RAW, like James Joyce and perhaps a rottweiler, rewards those who dig deeper. Do you dig? Beneath the surface lies a labyrinth, with seemingly infinite pathways, like the human mind, and like the cosmos. While processing a kind of special language, and the multiple entanglements at play, these writers help the reader acquire new, and enriched understanding. A fuller picture, contrasting, and with adjustable brightness, of both the work under investigation and the life of the mind of the authors.
This new found appreciation for all things, can be turned toward the self to produce reflections on the coherence patterns, and the incoherence patterns. Both mind-at-large, and the cosmos can be transformed, with luck into a holistic cooperative engine of creation: a fun house. Useful metaphors for this--turning onto a new perception and a perpetually refreshing appreciation for the interconnection of all things--are psychedelic drugs, and some forms of cannabis. Ideogrammic method, Pranayama, great art and stoned perception may share a similar neurological dog pound. It has been said before that Finnegans Wake produces the closest approximation of the LSD experience, in all literature. Once again this generally says to me: an increased perception of the inter-connectivity and entanglement of all things.
Each of the three items Bob mentioned will be considered here to exhibit useful purposes for the survival of all around the world humanity. I'm taking this six word answer, and digging around through the shell-mound of history. I think that his answer deserves closer scrutiny, to be looked like a joke and a serious practical solution to our predicament. Please excuse my bias. I don’t own a dog, or spend much time with them, however i'm always within a few feet of Finnegans Wake and some cannabis.
Cannabis Seeds: seedsmanchaps
Cannabis is a versatile plant, no i mean versatile, like over 50’000 uses and counting. Capable of supporting an entire planetary civilization, if we could just figure out the fucking sharing part of the equation. Hemp can be used for building materials (Hempcrete) textiles, food and drinks, essential oils, bio fuels, paper, plastics, the list runs on. The female cannabis sativa plant provides another long list of health benefits for both the body, and for the mind (a hidden bonus of the plant which has been known to humans and used for thousands of years, starting in ancient China around 2500 BCE.)
Seeds are relatively tiny and easy to transport, in a small hip sack, for example, you can carry seeds to sew a farm capable of supporting hundreds of people with both industrial hemp, and cannabis foods, and launching the equivalent of the entire Woodstock festival, into orbit on the buds. You can clone, and cross breed as you wish, and you can get off your botany and make cuttings too, exploiting the natural abundance of nature all around us: ‘the intelligence within the cherry stone’. These rather awesome conditions on planet-world make all the shit grow, and without claiming taxes, or ownership, or patent. I think that RAW is giving us a hint at a critical tool to help humanity get off the grid, by growing a self sustainable future, literally green, really high yielding, and full of fun, just like the books.
Finnegans Wake: [insert placeholder:-]
To start with my own thoughts on FW, i think that Europe, India, Asia, Africa, Indonesia and the Americas would benefit immensely from taking a leaf out of Joyce’s poetic, global congress. To mean, we will do well to practice searching for meaning, with sympathy, in the mega-haystack of over 70 different languages, every day, for the rest of our days on planet world. FW is a dry run for the future, a time-space when/where all your familiar maps and models melt away into the carpet, and all that you have left is metaphor.
I think we would all benefit from an extra effort to try and understand the each other better. Consider, for one moment, if you can, what you are not, where you were not born, where you have not been. FW and cannabis seeds, in my experience help this exercise. As does writing itself. You, we, them, us all together on the sub, the spearhead glistening in the other hand of the narrative driver: the author, whoever she or he, or it be. And you, we, them, us, the tribe, we strive to nurture more sympathy, compassion for, other languages globally, and with dialects locally, so that cultures and people may become enriched, contrasting, brighter, nuanced, distinguished with all the stripes and shades of meaning, and all the threads of genetic biological matter and of narrative entangled anti-matter 'ideaspace' that makes up all-around-the-world humanity, and it's DNA code. The mother load.
FW could be RAWs most highly regarded single book, although he might say ‘beware the man of one book’ FW blasts the world of literature to pieces, and lets you put it back together again, and each time differently. An inexhaustible difference engine. A language or ‘natlanguage’ so powerful that it affected everything what came before it, or after. A real page turner. The mother load of performances by example: the the tale of the tribe. Holy sacrament, which the author has wiped his own butt all over. A densely packed hyper connected literary cosmos, providing endless entertainment and induces the sensation of an eternal present, for me, and a really trippy--infinite flux of being nowness. As you can tell, i think it really is a great book. I mean, it has all the best words! And some of the biggest words
The first published article by Dr. Wilson, in 1959 was titled ‘Joyce Tao’ and these two themes meandered through his life’s work, perhaps underpinning his rare skill for resolving opposites with wit and intellect. Taoism and Quantum Mechanics were both major influences on his thinking, today the fields of quantum entanglement, and quantum non-locality are all the rage, and i feel the progression for these fields will be something like the development of a broader, daring discipline, more like Taoism itself, in that it includes the human brain body mind nervous system. A presents new tools with which to navigate these reality labyrinths.
Rottweiler: Canicula
The study of dogs within the context of the work of Robert Anton Wilson led me to a mongrel, a Mutt and a Jute. Any that read Bob know of his interest in the sirius double-star system a.k.a the Dog star.
Some will recall the chapter in ‘Cosmic Trigger I: Final secret of the Illuminati’ where Bob quotes G.I Gurdjieff on Mr. G's typically cryptic writings about ‘burying the dog deeper’. Bob provides lots of evidence to suggest that the buried dog is 'Sirius’, buried to mean hidden. You dig? He goes on to suggest that the 'Silver star' of the Thelemic tradition may also refer to Sirius. All this comes after his famous July 23rd 1973 ritual, and subsequent contact with something weird, and something very interested in bringing Sirius his attention. Was it his own subconscious, E.T, a 6 foot Irish Rabbit? best read the book and make up your own mind. I think we can agree, with little doubt, that RAW implied that you may require a Rottweiler for personal security in the future, during a tsarist occupation, when you're busy tending to the plants or starseeding the Wake over the fence, to the neighbors.
I work with cannabis seeds, and i recently contributed to the third edition of the Waywords and Meansigns project: Finnegans Wake set to music) I do not own a dog. But i just found out that canicula is latin for ‘puppy’ or ‘canis major’ so the dog star might also be called the puppy star. “Canicula” appears in FW only 5 words away from “Siriusly”. Seriously. Now, i feel stoned.
—Steve Fly.
Evidence from the good book:
if yet not,
after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our
breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the
establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across
the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. —58
wherein he had gauged the use of raisin; ads aliments, das doles,
raps rustics, tams turmoil; sas seed enough for a semination but
sues skivvies on the sly; learned to speak from hand to mouth
till he could talk earish with his eyes shut—130
looking backwards to
unearly summers, from Rhoda Dundrums; is above the seedfruit
level and outside the leguminiferous zone; when older links lock
older hearts then he'll resemble she—135
just becups they won the egg and spoon there
so ovally provencial at Balldole. My Eilish assent he seed makes
his admiracion. 144
but without those selfsownseedlings which are a species of proof
that the largest individual can occur at or in an olivetion such as
East Conna Hillock— 160
The oakmulberryeke with
silktrick twomesh from Shop-Sowry, seedsmanchap.—221.
So see we so
as seed we sow. And their prunktqueen kilt her kirtles up and
set out. —250
Rutsch is for rutterman ramping his roe, seed three. Where
the muddies scrimm ball. Bimbim bimbim. And the maidies
scream all. Himhim himhim. —314
I advise you strongly, along quaith a copy of
the Seeds and Weeds Act when you have procured one for
your self—447
I revolucanized by my eructions: the hye and bye wayseeds I
scattered em, in my graben fields sew sowage I gathered em: in
Sheridan's Circle my wits repose, in black pitts of the pestered
Lenfant he is dummed. (Hearts of Oak, may ye root to piece! — 545.
Jeminy, what is the view which now takes up a second
position of discordance, tell it please? Mark! You notice it in that
rereway because the male entail partially eclipses the femecovert.
It is so called for its discord the meseedo.—564
The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls
that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the
carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle—4: 15 593
Look what I found! A lintil pea. And look at here!
This cara weeseed. Pretty mites, my sweetthings, was they
poorloves abandoned by wholawidey world? Neighboulotts for
newtown.— 625
Quoted from Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, 1939.
"About dogs I will write elsewhere; here I will say only that no matter how much mechanistic biology I read, no dog who ever lived as a guest in my house ever seemed like a machine to me. They all seemed like four-legged people.Every LSD voyager has his or her own unique reports to offer; here I offer only my own recollections of my own experiences, expressed in my own favorite metaphors.After my first LSD voyage, dogs not only seemed even less like machines than before, but so did bugs and trees and birds and the starry sky itself. After my 100th trip, even I seemed less like a machine.I have not embraced pantheism or even panpsychism as a philosophy; rather, I have given up on philosophies entirely. I live amid wonders, which I file under the law of general semantics which states that no map can ever show "all" the territory. In fact, I think we should ban the word "all" from ordinary speech and restrict it solely to pure mathematics.--Robert Anton Wilson, LSD, Dogs and Me.
