Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called Homo Ludens in those days.

"Is that about faggots?" Sandoz asked him once.

Cagliostro laughed. "No," he said. "It's Latin. It means… uh, you know it's hard to translate… Man the Game Player, I suppose."

Sandoz grinned. "You can learn all about that just by watching the marks," he said. "I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying THIS GAME IS CROOKED,' and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark wants to lose," he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.

"No," Cagliostro said. "The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he's willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world."

"Is that what that book says?" Sandoz asked.

"More or less," Cagliostro said. "In sociological jargon."

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

Mary Margaret Wildeblood still couldn't get to sleep, and The Search for the Historical Vlad was pishposh. She got out of bed and padded over to the desk to glance at the latest volumes that had arrived for review.

Another pretentious volume of neo-Freudian film criticism by George Dorn, obviously cashing in on the current fad. Rot.

Hmm? Marshall McLuhan again. Try a page:

and the Notary Sojac sign, communicating much by its very inscrutability, is not alphabetical but ideogram-mic, bringing tribal mystery to the electronic continuum, just as Chief Cash U. Nutt, true shaman that he is

Fiddlefaddle. What else have we got?

Somebody else ripping off Marvin Gardens.

I smell a fad in the making.

Who's being dissected? Wagner, Pound, Celine, Riefen-stahl, Vonnegut… Vonnegut? Oh: It's by Kate Millett.

The latest Kennedy assassination expose. Bosh.

By who? Rebecca Goodman. Didn't she write that anthropology book a few years back, Golden Apples of something? What this time? Hm. Had her husband cryonically frozen at death. Hm.

Well, let's see. Millett, I guess.

Beneath the veneer of chic liberalism, Vonnegut's sexist prejudice reveals hm skip a bit refusal to recognize dialectic of capitalist blah blah blah a really sinister note enters with the chauvinist caricature of Montana Wildstack blah blah beneath the sentimentality a ruthless determination to subjugate and humiliate women

Mary Margaret realized that she was getting horny again; any reference to subjugation and humiliation was likely to trigger that response in her. She stealthily removed the vibrator from the bureau drawer again, climbed back into bed with Patterns of Fascist Art, and then remembered a little bit of hashish left in the living room.

"Perhaps a diagram would help," Blake Williams said, getting a sketchpad and drawing rapidly:

"This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it," he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. "A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood's party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrodinger's Cat at D. Got it?"

"Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it…"

"Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell's Theorem. It looks more like this." And Williams sketches rapidly:

"A 'causes' B, C, D, and E, but B also 'causes' A, C, D, and E, and C 'causes' A, B, D, and E… and so on. Got it…? All before the appearance of the space-time manifold."

"You mean it works everywhichway in time…"

"No, it happens before time itself appears along with space as a by-product of the quantum mesh…"

Brrrzzzzzzmmmmbrz the vibrator purrs along as Mary Margaret surrenders again to Him (to Him!) starting to compose a poem almost "Crush me in your Dionysian biceps, Jesus Lord" but that was perhaps a bit too Hopkins and the reality of it was beyond poetry (heresy: she could never admit that in literary circles) but the thrust and the purr and the agony and the ecstasy of it Lord Lord lord

because she was remembering an old Sufi proverb about the three stages of the Path which were "Lord, use me" and then "Lord, use me but don't break me" and then "Lord, I don't care if you break me"

and He was breaking her smashing her annihilating her the Great Magician of the Tarot naked on the bed as SHe rammed hir cock up his ass

To be is to be related.

–cassius keyser, Thinking About Thinking

DECEMBER 24, 1983:

"So that the brick never moves, logically," Williams says.

"Yeah I had that in a class at the New School, 'Paradox and Personality,' it's based on you know Relativistic Ego Therapy, we're all Empedoclean concepts in social topology. " Natalie actually had received an A for the course.

"In territorial topology my dear I um invented Relativistic Ego Therapy," Williams says, meaning: I created the course.

"You're that Professor Williams my God you're famous at the new School." Natalie was impressed.

"And at Esalen um yes my dear but to the world at large-" Williams demurs.

"Thank God I'm an atheist," Joe Malik said fervently. "If I considered for even a moment for even a microsecond that the pretense of a demon might be functionally equivalent to the presence of a demon… Just change the t to an s…"

But Marvin abandons the Britannica (never find what you really want in there) and undressing for bed fumbles at the radio for something bearable, only to hear

I'm in love with Vlad the Impaler

With Hitler and Nixon and Ahab the Whaler

He quickly turns the dial (after a moment of pride at new-won fame and wincing at the cacophony of The Civic Monster), finding a classical station the end of the Ninth all those heavenly choirs singringinging at the Omega Point over a century before science discovered it (always read Nietzsche and listen to Ludwig, was one of his adages, for the long-range evolutionary perspective), pops a downer to take the edge off the coke jitters before they come, and slips under the covers remembering Linda's mouth two inches four inches six inches nine goddamned inches gorgeous splat splat splat always splitting but always one, is it really? as Ludwig answers yes I will yes

I never died said he

"But the crowning insult to our simple-minded realism comes, of course, from our friends the physicists," Williams explains. "If Krazy is Schrodinger's Cat in the famous demonstration then my dear then we are really up the ontological creek without a paddle because when the brick is hurled she may be in any of several etgenstates, several mathematical probability matrices, in some of which the brick will certainly hit her and in some of which it will not."

"Oh, wow."

"Wow, indeed. To paraphrase Descartes: T think; therefore, I am confused.' "

The first fame of Cagliostro began while he was touring with the U.S.O. during the war. He had entirely abandoned mentalism by then and his act depended entirely on escaping from everything the M.P.'s could devise to restrain him.