Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

The streets were full of zombies at that time. The Religiosophists were the most robotic; not for nothing had Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of Religiosophy, spent five years studying with B. F. Skinner at Harvard. The Religiosophists had all been operant-conditioned to be tireless proselytizers, and Blake Williams had even invented a mathematical puzzle based on calculating the probability of crossing any American city without being accosted by one of them, which turned out to be harder than the old problem of crossing Dublin without passing a pub.

*Terran Archives 2803; Interest was a charge for the use of the circulating medium (money). Primatologists have found similar money fetishism on hundreds of planets where hominid types evolved; money and barter themselves are typical primate behaviors which can easily be taught to chimpanzees and other anthropoids. In addition to Aquinas, Pound, and Naismith, early Terrestrial philosophers who suggested more human alternatives to this apelike economics included Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, C. H. Douglas, Benjamin Tucker, and several others. Since primate behavior changes only under the impact of new technology (Moon's First Law), the money-and-interest fetish continued until the third stage of the RICH Economy abolished the need for a circulating medium.

The Ganesha Freaks were almost as android. Led by Swami Mammonananda, they had also been conditioned to be superpersistent hustlers and to believe that the world would reach samadhi on May 1, 1984, if 100,000,000 people were paying funds directly into Mammonananda's bank account by that date in return for bronze emblems of Ganesha, the Hindu Papa Legba, or Opener Between the Worlds.

The worst pests of all were the Loonies, disciples of Neon Bal Loon, an English eccentric originally born Albert Pike in Gaotu, Wobblysex, Buggering-on-the-Thames, Lousewartshire, England. Pike claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan and insisted that Neon Bal Loom was a real Tibetan name, his in his former incarnation. He averred further that the earth was hollow and a gang of naked women, witches, lived inside and were responsible for all the evils on the surface. His followers prayed in pig Latin, while standing on one leg like storks. Pike claimed that was the language of Lemuria.

Mary Margaret Wildeblood snuggles all comfy and cozy in her bed, swallows a female hormone tablet with water poured neat from a silver-sheened pitcher beside the clock and opens a well-thumbed edition of The 120 Days of Sodom remembering the foot beneath the chin the ropes the nude figure of Cagliostro tied to the bedposts and begins to read, Jesus watching with those reproachful hurting eyes as her hand sneaks back to the table gropes over the pitcher and clock down to the drawer to remove stealthily (Perfect Sin, with Jesus watching) the vibrator Here's the part tortures especially for pregnant women.

But Marvin reads in total confusion

Chromosome reduction (meiosis) occurs in early divisions of the synkaryon

Synkaryon? What the stereophonic fuck is that? Skip a bit.

from which the sex cells (gametes) are produced (gameto-genesis) which undergo nuclear reorganization (autogamy) occurs in formaniferans

Syngamy may be between similar gametes (isogamous) or between obviously different gametes (anisogamous) But are they the same amoeba dammit why can't they tell us in plain words have the extraterrestrials taken over the Britannica too?

Marvin Gardens is sniffing just a little bit more coke, only a tiny bit, really, turning the FM dial in search of some music as accelerated as his own nervous system, thinking: At the fifth generation you've got ah um 64 amoebas a full-blown ecosystem now what I want to know is would they all be permutations and combinations like the 64 hexagrams in the I Ching or would they all be the same like the Creative repeated 64 times? Jesus maybe just one more snort one little tiny teensy-weensy itiy-bitty snort yes with cloning now in laboratories there may be 64 of me someday outbreed the extraterrestrials that way maybe Jesus yes but Linda Lovelace oh Christ if I ever did meet her I'd be too shy to say, to say, I mean like with Picasso you could just walk right up and say "I'm an admirer of your work and I'd like to commission a small sketch" perfectly normal an artist and a fan but to say "I admire your work could you give me a personalized blow job"

went on to organize

went on to organize

"I think the record is stuck," Natalie said, finally getting a word in edgewise.

"Urn yes my dear just a sec but Ignatz I was saying is very simple-minded he thinks he just hates cats"

went on to orggggprp

"Whereas Krazy on the other hand knows that each brick is actually a phallic gift [Herriman must have been aware of the Freudian associations of that marvelous monosyllable, brick]. Krazy remembers, or things she remembers, a previous incarnation in which she and Ignatz were lovers…"

But in the split second of orgasm in the orgonomic plasma, ego dilated to crash wave after wave floating in the astral as taught by Hagbard via Miss Portinari in potentia faster than the speed of light full-blown on each side of the boundary, Joe Malik in terror sees the glaring red Eye and the golden triangular frame 3x3x3 the sign of Choronzon, 333, whose name and number signified the Great Lie.

The debate about the Vlad Enigma gave birth to a general interest in problems of disinformation. The Prisoner's Dilemma was dragged out of heavy mathematical tomes and popularized. The Turing Machine was reexamined in tabloid newspapers. The Empedoclean paradox even got mentioned on the Johnny Carson show.

Two Berkeley acid-heads, known on Telegraph Avenue as The Cat and The Dog, dreamed up a more intense disinformation matrix in 1980. "What would happen," The Cat asked one day in the Cafe Mediterraneum, "if we bought a truck and painted on the side of it INTERNATIONAL COCAINE IMPORTERS INC., and drove it around the streets?"

"In Berkeley," The Dog said, "the cops would just laugh. They'd be sure it was another put-on by the Hog Farm or the Merry Pranksters or somebody. But in San Francisco they wouldn't take a chance. The first cop would stop the truck and search it."

"Nah," said an unsuccessful poet named Robert W. An-ton. "They're more hip than that in San Francisco. But in L.A…"

The debate spread from the Med to Moe's, from Moe's to Sather Gate, leapt the Bay to appear in Herb Caen's column, eventually spread from coast to coast as a tag-end poser to cap all discussions of the Vlad Enigma. Finally, taking the logical experimental step, a San Francisco theologian named Malaclypse the Younger actually painted a truck in very tasteful and professional lettering and drove it around the Bay Area for all to see:

He was stopped and searched three times the first week-once in Sausalito, which is the cocaine and Vaseline capital of Unistat and has particularly suspicious cops. He was never stopped in Berkeley. After the second week he was no longer stopped in San Francisco. Immediately a whole fleet of similar trucks began to appear.

Disinformation had been incarnated. "All hail Eris," said Malaclypse, a pious man in his own odd way. Virtually none of the trucks was stopped and searched after the first month. Cops who had made horses' asses of themselves in the joking phase of this uprising of surrealist politics refused to take the risk of being laughed at again. Nobody cared to guess how many of the trucks were really carrying cocaine.