Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"I Am The Robot."

Hagbard made a face like a baboon and George laughed again, at last. "When you get tune," Hagbard said, "look into my little book, Never Whistle While You're Pissing- there are copies all over the ship. That's my ego tip. And keep it in mind: you are the robot and you'll never be anything else. Of course, you're also the programmer, and even the meta-programmer; but that's another lesson, for another day. For now, just remember the mammal, the robot."

"I know," George said. "I've read T. S. Eliot, and now I understand him. 'Humility is endless.'"

"And humanity is created. The… other… is not human."

George said then, "So I've arrived. And it's just another starting place. The beginning of another trip. A harder trip."

"That's another meaning in Heracleitus. "The end is the beginning.'" Hagbard rose and shook himself like a dog. "Wow," he said. "I better get to work with FUCKUP. You can stay here or go to your own room, but I suggest that you don't rush off and talk about your experience to somebody else. You can talk it to death that way."

George remained in Hagbard's room and reflected on what had happened. He had no urge to scribble in his diary, the usual defense against silence and aloneness since his early teens. Instead, he savored the stillness of the room and of his inner core. He remembered Saint Francis of Assisi called his body "Brother Ass," and Timothy Leary used to say when exhausted, "The robot needs sleep." Those had been their mantras, their defenses against the experience of the mountaintop and the terrible arrogance it triggered. He remembered, too, the old classic underground press ad: "Keep me high and I'll ball you forever." He felt sorry for the woman who had written that: pitiful modern version of the maddened Saint Simon on his pillar in the desert. And Hagbard was right: any dog or cat could do it, could make the jump to the mountaintop and wait without passion until the robot, Brother Ass, survived the ordeal or perished in it. That was what primitive rites of initiation were all about- driving the youth through sheer terror to the point of letting go, the mountaintop point, and then bringing him back down again. George suddenly understood how his generation, in rediscovering the sacred drugs, had failed to rediscover their proper use… had failed, or had been prevented. The Illuminati, it was clear, didn't want any competition in the godmanship business.

You could talk it to death in your own head as well as in conversation, he realized, but he went back over it again trying to dissect it without mutilating it. The homosexuality bit had been a false front (with its own reality, of course, like all false fronts). Behind that was the conditioned terror against the Robot: the fear, symbolized in Frankenstein and dozens of other archetypes, that if it were let loose, unrestrained, the Robot would run amok, murder, rape, go mad… And then Hagbard had waited until the Alamout Black brought him to freedom, showed him the peak, the place where the cortex at last could idle, as a car motor or a dog or cat idles, the last refuge where the catatonic hides. When George was safely in that harbor, Hagbard produced the gun- in a more primitive, or more sophisticated, society, it would have been the emblem of a powerful demon- and George saw that he could, indeed, idle there and not blindly follow the panic signals from the Robot's adrenalin factory. And, because he was a human and not a dog, the experience had been ecstasy to him, and temptation, so Hagbard, with a few words and a glance from those eyes, pushed him off the peak into… what?

Reconciliation was the word. Reconciliation with the robot, with the Robot, with himself. The peak was not a victory; it was the war, the eternal war against the Robot, carried to a higher and more dangerous level. The end of the war was his surrender, the only possible end to that war, since the Robot was three billion years old and couldn't be killed.

There were two great errors in the world, he perceived: the error of the submissive hordes, who fought all their lives to control the Robot and please their masters (and who always sabotaged every effort without knowing it, and were in turn sabotaged by the Robot's Revenge: neuroses, psychoses and all the tiresome list of psychosomatic ailments); and the error of those who recaptured the animal art of letting the Robot run itself, and who then tried to maintain this split from their own flesh indefinitely, until they were lost forever in that eternally widening chasm. One sought to batter the Robot to submission, the other to slowly starve it; both were wrong.

And yet, on another plane of his still-zonked mind, George knew that even this was a half truth; that he was, indeed, just beginning his journey, not arriving at his destination. He rose and walked to the bookshelves and, as he expected, found a stack of Hagbard's little pamphlets on the bottom: Never Whistle While You're Pissing, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H. He wondered what the H.M. and S.H. stood for, then flipped open to the first page, where he found only the large question:

WHO

IS THE ONE MORE TRUSTWORTHY

THAN

ALL THE BUDDHAS

AND SAGES

??

George laughed out loud. The Robot, of course. Me. George Dorn. All three billion years' worth of evolution in every gene and chromosome of me. And that, of course, was what the Illuminati (and all the petty would-be Illuminati who made up power structures everywhere) never wanted a man or woman to realize.

George turned to the second page and began reading:

If you whistle while you're pissing, you have two minds where one is quite sufficient. If you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote, "A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him."

That was all, except for an abstract drawing on page three that seemed to suggest an enemy figure moving out toward the viewer. About to turn to page four, George got a shock: from another angle, the drawing was two figures engaged in attacking each other. I and It. The Mind and the Robot. His memory leaped back twenty-two years and he saw his mother lean over the crib and remove his hand from his penis. Christ, no wonder I grab it when I'm frightened: the Robot's Revenge, the Return of the Repressed.

George started to turn the page again, and saw another trick in Hagbard's abstraction: from a third angle, it might be a couple making love. In a flash, he saw his mother's face above his crib again, in better focus, and recognized the concern in her eyes. The cruel hand of repression was moved by love: she was trying to save him from Sin.

And Carlo, dead three years now, together with the rest of that Morituri group- what had inspired Carlo when he and the four others (all of them less than eighteen, George remembered) blasted their way into a God's Lightning rally and killed three cops and four Secret Service agents in their attempts to gun down the Secretary of State? Love, nothing but mad love…

The door opened and George tore his eyes from the text. Mavis, back again in her sweater and slacks outfit, walked in. For a proclaimed right-wing anarchist, she sure dresses a lot like a New Leftist, George thought; but then Hagbard wrote like a cross between Reichian Leftist and an egomaniacal Zen Master- there was obviously more to the Discordian philosophy than he could grasp yet, even though he was now convinced it was the system he himself had been groping toward for many years.

"Mmm," she said, "I like that smell. Alamout Black?"

"Yeah," George said, having trouble meeting her eyes. "Hagbard's been illuminating me."

"I can tell. Is that why you suddenly feel uncomfortable with me?"