Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter W- 23rd in the alphabet- and its presence in the words "woman" and "womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.

"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax- original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction myths- all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course- nobody is nutty enough to deny that- but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the foundations. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."

"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true…"

"It's all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the deeds in the government offices, and they won't dare move onto a square of ground if one of the deeds says somebody else owns it. It's a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. That's the unpredictable elements, dads: the erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: 'People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.' They can't feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else. If you don't want to call it magic, call it counter-conditioning, but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology, demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig? Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto: 'total transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.' They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge, founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street and Hitler and Stalin, through witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they've cast on everybody's mind. All hail Discordia! Do you read me?"

When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I've been listening to a spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I will believe him. And that's how insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative. With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But when he arrived at his hotel door, and noticed for the first time that he had Room 23, he had to fight the impulse to call Simon on the phone and tell him about the latest invasion of surrealism into the real world.

And he lay awake in his bed for hours remembering 23s that had occurred in his own life… and wondering about the origin of that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, "23 Skidoo…"

After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood, Clark Kent and His Supermen finally found Ludwigstrasse and got out of Munich. "About forty miles and we'll be in Ingolstadt," Kent-Mohammed-Pearson said. "At last," one of the Supermen groaned. Just then a tiny Volkswagen inched past their VW bus, like an infant running ahead of its mother, and Kent looked bemused. "Did you check out that cat at the wheel? I saw him once before, and never forgot it because he was acting so weird. It was in Mexico City. Funny seeing him again, halfway around the world and umpteen years later." "Go catch him," another Superman commented. "With the AMA and the Trashers and other heavy groups we're going to get buried alive. Let's make sure that at least he knows we were in Ingolstadt for this gig."

JUST LIKE A TREE THAT'S STANDING BY THE WAAAAA-AATER

The morning after the Wobbly meeting Simon telephoned Joe.

"Listen," he asked, "do you have to fly back to New York today? Can you possibly stay over a night? I've got something I'd like you to see. It's time we started reaching people in your generation and really showing you instead of just telling you. Are you game?"

And Joe Malik-ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic-heard himself saying, "Yes." And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound "yes" deep inside himself. He was game- for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.

(WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED)

"God is dead," the priest chanted.

"God is dead," the congregation repeated in chorus.

"God is dead: we are all absolutely free," the priest intoned more rhythmically.

"God is dead," the congregation picked up the almost hypnotic beat, "we are all absolutely free."

Joe shifted nervously in his chair. The blasphemy was exhilarating, but also strangely disturbing. He wondered how much fear of Hell still lingered in the back corridors of his skull, left over from his Catholic boyhood.

They were in an elegant apartment, high above Lake Shore Drive-"We always meet here," Simon had explained, "because of the acrostic significance of the street name"-and the sounds of the automobile traffic far below mingled strangely with the preparations for what Joe already guessed was a black Mass.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," the priest chanted.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Joe repeated with the rest of the congregation.

The priest- who was the only one who had not removed his clothes before the beginning of the ceremony- was a slightly red-faced middle-aged man in a Roman collar, and part of Joe's discomfort derived from the fact that he looked so much like every Catholic priest he had known in his childhood, It had not helped matters that he had given his name, when Simon introduced Joe to him, as "Padre Pederastia"-which he pronounced with a very campy inflection, looking flirtatiously directly in Joe's eyes.

The congregation divided, in Joe's mind, into two easily distinguishable groups: poor full-time hippies, from the Old Town area, and rich part-time hippies, from Lake Shore Drive itself and, no doubt, also from the local advertising agencies on Michigan Avenue. There were only eleven of them, however, including Joe, and Padre Pederastia made twelve- where was the traditional thirteenth?