TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. By Robert Anton Wilson

Ez TSOG YALE and SPIES.

“The scholar who works for a government intelligence agency ceases to be an independent spirit, a true scholar,” stated a Boston Globe editorial in the mid-1980s.

My Ezra Pound 'Google Alert' just alerted me to an article from the Yaledailynews by Ava Kofman that outlines the history of the CIA's relationships with Academia, and therefore criss-crosses with 'The Tale of the Tribe' material and helps to refresh our minds to Dr. Wilson's brilliant essay 'TSOG: The Thing that ate the Constitution, 2001' and information concerning Ezra Pound, James Jesus Angleton and the impact the Spycraft had on Modernism, poetry and the arts. Wilson writes:

But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and "interpretations." These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.--http://www.rawilson.com/tsog.html

Ava Kofman writes in ANNONYMOUS ACADEMICS:

"James Jesus Angleton ’41, breeder of rare orchids and disputably a paranoiac, founded and edited the short-lived but reputable literary magazine, Furioso, during his time as an undergraduate at Yale. Beginning a series of enthusiastic correspondences with Ezra Pound after the two met in Italy during the summer of 1938, Angleton published Pound’s poems along with the work of Cummings, MacLeish and Williams in his magazine the next year. But more ink has been spilled describing Angleton’s life than those of his beloved poets. Returning to Washington after World War II, Angleton would go on to help found the Central Intelligence Agency."http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

"Varsity crew coach Skip Waltz recruited for the OSS what he saw as the best of Yale’s white Anglophile protestant males from its population of mostly white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. Following the conclusion of war in 1947, OSS alumnus Walter L. Pforzheimer ’35 contributed to drafting the act that would establish the CIA.

And still today, some recent alumni from both campuses include CIA directors Porter J. Goss ’60, R. James Woolsey Jr. LAW ’68, and George H.W. Bush ’48. Now a visiting lecturer at the Jackson Institute, John Negroponte ’60 served as the first Director of National Intelligence under President George W. Bush ’68. William F. Buckley ’50, founder of the National Review, wrote one of the many aforementioned fictionalized accounts of Angleton’s life, and served a stint in the CIA as well." http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

 “Why learn how to write a policy memo on preventing nuclear proliferation if you can’t even convincingly make a case that the human race — much less the United States of America — is a good thing that’s worth protecting,” laments the anonymous source. “Does the U.S. government exist to merely protect us and clothe us and feed us or to foster public and private virtue? These are questions that the Yalies of yesteryear could tackle quite easily and eloquently. Today, almost no one can.” http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

The skills that most Yale majors teach students well — namely, close reading, critical thinking and strong writing — are the same valuable assets that make its graduates good analysts. Or for that matter, good at any job.

“An analyst job is like writing a paper except its called an intelligence report,” said a senior government official, who requested to remain anonymous citing government policy. “But instead of using a book or a person as your evidence, you’re using classified intelligence.” He points to this as to why Yale turns out so many journalists and policy makers as well. The only difference in what those jobs consist of, the senior official argued, is in the subject matter and sourcing of what they’re writing on. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

 

"In 2001, following the attacks of September 11, around 750 students expressed an interest in the CIA when they passed through the agency’s career fair booth. For some years thereafter, interest in the agency was at a new high.  http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

"With the rise of cyber-espionage, it would seem that the CIA’s interest in Computer Science and Math majors who can write and break code might balloon.
Regardless of their background — whether it be in C++, the classics or both — applicants need to be realists and understand, the senior official warned, that for many it’s a “desk job.”
“Your cover is going to be a dark close-up of the shadow of Nathan Hale’s face,” a senior government official teased, “but the reality is that people [in the CIA] work in cubicles that look like a Proctor and Gamble office — and it’s mostly a bunch of Mormons.” The senior official paused dramatically, letting the reality of his vision of the CIA sink in.http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

 Borrowing a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion, Angleton often described the inner workings of the agency as a “wilderness of mirrors.” Angleton’s means of ordering the world moved along so many deceptions that it ceased to be real.  http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

One that could recast, for better or worse, the arbitrary boundaries drawn between literature and the classroom, reality and a dream, poetry and analysis. Our fascination with the CIA, with its mythical figures and failures, as a national legend — as a genre of fiction — may be of just as much interest for learning about the intuitions of the modern mind — as it is for learning about the institution itself. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

The spy world then, turns accident into meaning and so frees us to imagine and presume in broad leaps and strokes.
“For in [the spy] profession there is no such thing as coincidence,” writes Le Carre in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
And consider an illustration of these two approaches to thinking: Most of the American public would prefer to watch say, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a fictionalized account of the spy world, than read the continually growing number of now declassified documents made readily available, or, for that matter, the adapted book. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

Twenty RAW quotes for 2011

ALL QUOTES FROM DR. ROBERT  ANTON WILSON.

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING—TSOG

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to preexisting theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece, because masterpieces make their own rules.—Illuminati Papers, pg. 12.

Ez, McLuhan and associates reprinted Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry " As part of their Square Dollar Series. It Anticipates some formulations of General Semantics and NLP.--Recorsi

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another.
After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said,
"Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give
you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat.”
Little Tony replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old."
The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?"
Little Tony answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business.--Guns and Dope Party.

Just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that "contain" and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form.--Coincidance.

Green plants, alive, like
the stone Buddha — rock solid –
— as twilight descends.

In 2012, if the McKenna scenario is right, comes Omega point.--Cosmic Trigger, pg. 223.

What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of negentropy out of stochastic processes. Our understanding of this is chiefly due to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon.--Prometheus Rising, page 110.

Like Joyce, Vico believed that poetry arose out of creative etymology ("incorrect etymology," in Academese). Like Joyce--and also Whorf and Korzybski--Vico believed a radical change in language could alter our perceived reality tunnels.--Coincidance, Pg. 22.

I distinguish between information—all that humans can check by experience—as distinct from noise—those “things” (or non-things, or nothings) that thye can only make noises or chatter about.—Another faith-based organization, TSOG, pg 89.

The two philosophers most frequently mentioned in the Wake, Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno of Nola, taught a dialectic of resolution of opposites. Joseph Needham in his monumental Science and Civilization in China, repeatedly mentions both Bruno and Nicholas as the only two Occidental philosophers before Liebnitz to have a basically Taoist outlook.--Joyce and Daoism.

Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.--The Historical Illuminatus.

New bud on the vine:
But three thousand miles due East
Wall Street still smolders--Haiku

R. Buckminster Fuller, in his Synergetic-Energetic Geometry, which he claims is the "co-ordinate system of the Universe," reduces all phenomena to geometric-energetic constructs based on the tetrahedron (4-sided), the octet truss (8-sided) and the coupler (8-faceted with 24 phases). Fuller argues specifically that the 8-face, 24-phase coupler underlies the 8-fold division of the chemical elements on the Mendeleyev Periodic Table. --Octave of Energy, Cosmic Trigger.

Every government that employs secret-police agencies must grow more insecure, not more secure, as the strength, versatility and power of the secret police grows.—Celine’s Laws, Illuminati Papers.

Two of the giants of quantum math, Schrödinger and Dirac, both spent time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. Schrödinger, in fact, wrote his most important nonmathemetical book there -- What Is Life? [1948], in which he defined life as a function of negative entropy. This thought seemed so radical and far-out that nobody began to grasp it until Wiener and Shannon showed that information also behaves like negative entropy. Information = that part of a message you didn't expect; the unpredictable part.--Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory (essay)

Like marijuana, a Wellsian long shot creates an information overload and provokes you to enlarge your reality-tunnel to accommodate it.—An Information Rich environment, Cosmic Trigger III. Pg. 88

I think it’s time to abolish politicians entirely and let everybody participate in self-government via internet. We needed ‘representatives’ in the 18th century because we couldn’t all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our ‘representatives’ have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don’t need ‘representatives’ anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves.—TSOG. Pg 162

In the present context, Korzybski's mathematized language structures, like the Fenollosa/Pound emphasis on Chinese ideogram helps us perceive/conceive Internet in alternative ways, not possible for those restricted to Indo-European semantic structures.--Recorsi.

Sweet! Sweet!" sings a bird--
Old Ez in Virginia
Heard one cry "Tulip!--Haiku

The tale of the 'high' tribe

The tale of the tribe

High Time and the Counter-cultural hall of fame.

"A ganachakra (Sanskrit: gaṇacakra, or 'gathering circle'; Tibetan: tshogs kyi 'khor lo) is also known as tsog, ganapuja, chakrapuja or ganachakrapuja. It is a generic term for various tantric assemblies or feasts, in which practitioners meet to chant mantra, enact mudra, make votive offerings and practice various tantric rituals as part of a sadhana, or spiritual practice. The ganachakra often comprises a sacramental meal and festivities such as dancing; the feast generally consisting of materials that were considered forbidden or taboo in medieval India, where the tantric movement arose. As a tantric practice, forms of ganachakra are practiced today in both Hinduism, Bön and Vajrayana Buddhism. --TSOG

I like the idea of the Counter-cultural Hall of Fame, as developed by High Times and Steven Hager, and I’m happy that the legendary characters from America’s exulted tradition of counter-cultural revolutionaries, artists, poets, musicians and humanitarian activists in the fullest sense of that term: revolutionary. High Times magazine seem to have developed a good selection process for the Hall Of Fame and the Celebrity Cup judges, besides all the weed, the poetry and scholar activism blooms.

In his essay - T.A.Z - from the book TSOG: The thing that ate the constitution. Robert Anton Wilson writes about being picked to be a celebrity judge for the High Times Cannabis Cup in 1999 and his experiences in Amsterdam. I read this essay again recently and found all sorts of cross links and descriptions of the Cannabis Cup and Amsterdam that I find irresistible to share.

1. T.A.Z or Temporary Autonomous Zone invokes Peter Lamorn Wilson, another brilliant bearded anarchist 'scholar activist philosopher' of the American tradition, who RAW often criss-crosses paths with when musing upon cultural revolution. Peter Lamborn Wilson’s TAZ seems to be used here as the title of Bob’s essay [see excerpt below] to help describe the unique red-light and coffeeshop Zones of Dutch tolerance here in Amsterdam, and some other parts of the Netherlands, and a generally intelligent and exemplary model.

2. William S. Burroughs was inducted into the High Times Hall of Fame in 1999, and RAW participated in the induction ceremony by reading parts from NOVA EXPRESS, a small clip of this event can be found on you tune in a video compiled based on the induction of the Beat generation into the High Times Countercultural Hall Of Fame. It was Burroughs who turned Wilson onto the 23 enigma' and Wilson compared WSB with James Joyce as the two greatest literary entities of the 20th century.

3. The name Simon Vinkenoog was familiar to me by way of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, like so many things; who noted Simon’s work in his books, such as the tale of the Sage of Dalkey in his last published work – email to the Universe. When I arrived in Amsterdam Simon was active and a strong part of the Dutch resistance to Bullshit, mediocrity and Tsarist Occupation Government. Simon passed onwards into outer-hyperspace July 12th, 2009. Simon was recently featured upon John’s 10 show holiday extravaganza, and for me this fact makes yet another loop between American and European counter-cultural anthropology, bound together by John’s choice of musical artefacts, that continue to delight the air-waves.

4. The current editor in Chief of High Times and Grand Wizard of the Cannabis Cup – Steven Hager – wrote a book called ‘The Octopus Conspiracy’ that for me, brings together much of the work and playful confidence found in RAW’s occasional work with the High Times Magazine. This book helps one enter the process of engaging in counter-cultural information theory, in my humble opinion – the art of social historicism on the furtive cusp of Conspiracy Theory. I’m not going into the area of conspiracy research with this article, but instead I choose to honour research. This may also be translated as independent journalism - thinking for yourself and following your sense for truth and knowledge - no matter which rabbit hole your tricky senses may lead.

The following excerpt brings together James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and John Sinclair into an Amsterdam synchro-mesh that seems a perfect example of RAW's hologramic prose' - in which every part contains the whole - here we have the Moderns, the Beats, the Post-Moderns, and, the sense of ambiguity that has haunted the 20th century, all in a paragraph that could equally be in resonance with "the tale of the tribe'.

Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. by Robert Anton Wilson, [excerpt]

“John Sinclair started talking about his days with the MC-5, a great Rock group of the 1960’s. My brain did a quantum jump and reorganized the whole world. This was not the John Sinclair I once knew, who wrote a brilliant column for the Village Voice. No wonder he didn’t look like ‘himself’: he wasn’t ‘himself’ at all. He wa the other John Sinclair, from Detriot, who founded the White Panther Party and served a few years in prison for generously giving a joint to an undercover narc. (Under Michigan law at that time, giving somebody a good high for free was punished with the same imprisonment as selling it.) I had mixed up two different John Sinclair's. I felt relieved. Mixing all that fucking pot hadn’t fucked up my fucking brain after all. They led me to the stage. (Was it the same day or another day?) I was giving a speech, inducting William S. Burroughs into the Cannabis Hall of Fame. I told them reasons I consider Burroughs the greatest writer since Joyce, but they seemed restless, so I quoted them a bit of unpublished Burroughs:

“A coprophile named Scott
Who lived in Aldershot
Said, “I’m unbeatable-
My shit is eatable!
Perpetual motion I’ve got.

”I went into a flashback...... November 1968, at the Playboy Club in Chicago, having lunch with Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. We had been Demonstarting against the War all week, but now we were enjoying a pleasant meal, and Allen was telling us about his recent meeting with Crazy Uncle Ezra Pound in Rapollo. He had told Ez he considered the Cantos the greatest poem of the 20th Century, and Ez said, “But it is all vitiated by that stupid, suburban anti-semitism.”
“Suburban,” Burroughs repeated, considering the connotations of the word; I was more fascinated by “vitiated.”
I snapped back to Amsterdam. – Robert Anton Wilson, Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution.

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?" - Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus Trilogy, page 78.

“Robert Anton Wilson learns about the significance of the number 23 from William Burroughs:

William Burroughs introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was still at Playboy. I had said, on first seeing the unpublished manuscript of Naked Lunch in 1956, This man is the greatest prose writer since James Joyce. (I am still rather proud of being the first to make that comparison) I did not meet Burroughs until 1966, and found Bill a more charming and ordinary individual than his books suggest - one had been prepared for a mad genius and found instead a rather prosaic, almost academic, quite gentlemanly genius. His story of the 23 mystery went like this... In the early 60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that hed been running the ferry 23 years without incident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody on board. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Easter Airlines plane on the new York-Miami, and the flight was listed as Flight 23. Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in many of them.

Sean Halligan tells distant cousin Peter that he has heard that expression somewhere before, in a dream he recalls. It was a dream reported by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. He had written about the dream in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, strangely enough, on page 223: -- http://www.poee.org/living/GetPage.aspx?ID=180