Anas’s Blog

I just read on Media Underground that the great Robert Anton Wilson passed away yesterday. Writer, futurist, self-styled guerilla ontologist, and renowned wit, Wilson, had been desperately ill of late and had come perilously close to death on previous occasions. He (and his family) had also to reckon with not being able to meet the financial costs of his healthcare; though thankfully his fans rallied to his aid en masse and, through their donations, were able to make his last few months and his passing more comfortable — as well as to show their appreciation for Wilson’s gargantuan talent and his crazy, relentlessly iconoclastic wisdom. I’m guessing his death will be deeply felt by what’s left of the counterculture and by those interested in free thought, but that he will continue to be overlooked by the wider mainstream. Not really surprising when you consider how subversive his writings were, to the extent that appropriation by a cultural mainstream so warped by corporate propaganda was nigh on impossible.

Wilson has been a profound influence on me in the past few years. Indeed I believe his writings have helped me to better adjust myself to an insane, chaotic cosmos, as well as making me a much cleverer person (relatively speaking) than I would otherwise have been. The only other contemporary figure who’s had anything like as deep influence on me is Noam Chomsky — although Chomsky has nowhere near as many good jokes in his books as Wilson put in his. So I have a lot of gratitude to offer Wilson, a man who was once described completely justifiably by Brian Aldiss as a genius with a capital Gee!, and who was and remains through his written works a consummate sceptic (and indeed a sceptical sceptic who was sceptical of his own and other’s scepticism).

Wilson is probably most well known as co-author (with the late Robert Shea) of the epochal countercultural phenomenon Illuminatus! A work which Timothy Leary (a close associate of Wilson’s) claimed was more important than Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, and which is notorious for its wildly convoluted plot which manages to feature every major contemporary conspiracy theory going at some point, as well as some particularly inspired conspiracies Wilson and Shea themselves invented for the occasion.

Wilson recognised the seductive nature of conspiracy theory as an alternative to prevailing orthodox historical narratives and exploited it in order to undermine his readers’ notions of reality, in fact, to encourage them to see these as constituting merely one reality tunnel among many. Similarly Wilson made widespread reference and discussion of the theories of quantum physics, fuzzy logic, Korzybski’s work in general semantics, Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and Aleister Crowley’s magickal ideas, in order to introduce and reinforce his multi-model approach to self-orientation and self-development with respect to what is ultimately a fundamentally chaotic and fuzzy reality — and most importantly to have fun in the process. Wilson used various strategies and models to discuss reality but was clear that he never saw these as anything other than as helpful models and strategies — in other words, “the map is not the territory”, “the menu is not the meal”.

He encouraged his readers to adopt this multi-perspectival approach and to cultivate an appreciation of just how perception and belief is conditioned as well as the strategies by which individuals could transcend and understand at least aspects of this conditioning – and in so doing use their brains for fun and profit — through a number of masterpieces, not least Prometheus Rising (PR). In PR, Wilson used Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness to model the different kinds of conditioning human beings received at different stages of their development and in different societies, as well as to suggest a framework for the further evolution of personal consciousness, one which incorporated concepts and conscious alteration practises from yoga, zen, Sufism, the teachings of Gurdjieff and Crowley, and even Christian Science. PR is perhaps the ideal introduction to Wilson’s work and was the book I myself was recommended by several of the chatters at disinfo.com.

The fact is that Wilson opened a whole new world for me, offering accessible perspectives on the very difficult and sometimes obscure themes that writers/philosophers such as Joyce, Nietzsche, Pound, Reich, de Sade dealt in, setting me on an intellectual path which I would likely not have taken otherwise (though one that hasn’t been without its blind alleys). Actually I think the main thing for me was not just that Wilson inspired me into reading some pretty heavy books, it’s that he gave me the confidence to do it, he gave me a way in. His books though full of deep and powerful ideas, were always beautifully written, perspicuous, full of clarity and an infectious intellectual curiosity – in short a real pleasure to read. And – yes this last statement is clichéd as fuck, but — that’s why his work will continue to inspire the curious for decades, maybe generations, to come.

RIP RAW