Review of Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe by Gregory Arnott

My broadest respects and thanks to Gregory Arnott for the kind generous and brilliant review and for sharing a part of his journey alongside and within the theme park.

And thanks to Tom Jackson of RAWillumination for the BLOG POST.

--Steve Fly

Artwork by Bobby Campbell

Gregory Arnott reviews Fly’s ‘Tale of the Tribe’

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

I was a latecomer to Maybe Logic Academy — I was there for its final hurrah in a semester that saw one of the classes I enrolled in cancelled and another with only two active students and an absentee teacher. I can’t even remember how I found out about it — something to do with how one can wander over the Internet while working a boring office job. Anyways, that was where I first heard about The Tale of the Tribe.

Later, after I had read more about the Tribe and had read TSOG where the most complete piece of information on the book was in print at the time, I was talking about it to my friend as we stood outside looking at the stars on a hot West Virginia night; Robert Anton Wilson was basically going to explain communication, the Internet, and what was going on. My friend laughed — “finally!” he exclaimed. Robert Anton Wilson had been dead at least five years.

To say that Wilson’s unfinished Tale felt like a loss is an understatement. In one issue of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong the perfect man finds his heart’s desire as an illusion conjured up by a malignant alien intelligence; a copy of Joyce’s sequel to Finnegans Wake, Finn Wakes Agen. In Steven Moore’s Somnium the protagonist in the protagonist’s novel finds himself in a library of unwritten novels. There’s something sublime about an unpublished work or some valuable manuscript lost to time; it has been easy for me to remain tantalized by the lost promise of the Tribe.

This is all a rather lengthy way to say I was excited when I saw the release of Steven “Fly” Pratt’s Fly On The Tale of the Tribe. Pratt’s book is slim but dense with information — it’s playful and thought provoking. Fly deals with the Current Situation and how Wilson’s ideas have endured into our young century; appropriately for one of the torchbearers of model agnosticism, the book is full of promise and puzzles. Like Higgs at the end of Stranger Than We Can Imagine, Pratt seems to bank on agnosticism as a solution to the increasingly chaotic information climate: but that’s beside the point as I believe Pratt is more interested in inspiration than pontification.

Much of the book is invitational — Pratt repeats throughout that it is critical to create one’s own “tale of the tribe.” One excellent example is given earlier in the book when Pratt points out that his and RAW’s cast of characters are all male — Pratt gives an example of a female “tribe” beginning with Ada Lovelace. Later in the book Fly lays out the schemes for two later tale of the tribe courses that could be reconstructed by the intrepid student. Pratt also gives a healthily circumspect view of Ezra Pound and his complicated life; at one point Pratt seems to decide upon using Ernest Fenollosa as the primary touchstone for Pound’s contribution to the tale of the tribe, ideogrammic language,  as a deft sidestep when the fascist taint becomes too much with Pound. Of course Pratt makes sure to mention that Pound’s antisemitism was a phase that the poet regretted in later life. Everyone’s happy.

The most interesting ideas, for this reader, were the discussions of the hologrammic prose exemplified by Finnegans Wake and, this part really hooked me, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. Fly is one of the few commentators I’ve seen who have given Moore his due: Jerusalem is a monumental masterpiece that will rank high among our race’s literary achievements if Providence is kind enough to ensure some sort of posterity. Fly is able to explicate how breathtaking the scope of the work is, as it encompasses art, magic, and the facets of our reality, and we seem to have similar tastes, go figure, since we both consider the chapter “Round the Bend” as the crowning achievement of the novel. (He even shares my love of Moore’s The Black Dossier!) In many ways “Round the Bend” serves as a magnificent realization of Tom Strong’s lost novel — it is a sequel or a continuation of Finnegans Wake. The whole of Jerusalem could be seen as something similar or as an essential commentary on Joyce’s goals but that would belie the empirical majesty of Moore’s work.

While talking about the epic Cosmic Trigger play produced and directed by Daisy Eris Campbell Fly waxes rhapsodical: “Co-create a Universe, a theatre of the mind where each and everyone of us can work on many levels of synchrony, consider set and setting, speech and place. Make the invisible visible.” Marching orders to make one’s head turn.

Pratt’s little book will give the reader a lot to think about and chew on — it is a text that is meant to send you into the hinterlands of language to find the foundations of our reality. I’ve brushed over a lot of Fly’s work in the book, partly for the sake of length and partly because I am still figuring out my thoughts and plans for the ideas he brings to the table. Suffice to say that this is an indispensable piece of scholarship for the RAW fan and an all around Important Book. RAW’s original book may have not been able to come to life but Fly proves that the tale of the tribe is still being told and is ready to be explored at any moment. Personally, I’m just grateful Fly made sure to include Moore in RAW’s canon. The book’s cover art is by, the Tenniel to RAW’s Carroll, Bobby Campbell whose illustrations implicitly make a connection between Fly and the green-skinned Mescalito. Pay attention.

As a postscript to the Maybe Logic story — it was through Maybe Logic that I found Tom’s blog so even when the initial attraction is in bits and pieces it can lead to something satisfying. The tale of the tribe isn’t over until the last monkey stops squawking.

http://www.rawillumination.net/2019/05/gregory-arnott-reviews-flys-tale-of.html

Support me at www.patreon.com/stevefly

Rockers, artists pay tribute to James Joyce with massive project

“What I found out,” says Pyle, “was that there were all these niches and subcultures — dead heads, punk rockers, out-there artists, avant-garde classical musicians, Robert Anton Wilson fans — and within their subcultures ‘Finnegans Wake’ has a lot of importance. ... What I think happened was we were able to bring together a bunch of niches, people who were interesting and also supportive — that cult thing, when you’re really into something, you’re really into something. We brought together those people as both audience and contributors.”
http://www.telegram.com/entertainmentlife/20170510/rockers-artists-pay-tribute-to-james-joyce-with-massive-project

INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE - Michael André Bernstein

Michael André Bernstein

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE "I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase 'a long poem' is simply a contradiction in terms. . . . If at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality—which I doubt—it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again." —Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle"

1 "A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform." —John Dryden, "Dedication Of The Aeneis"

2 In 1920, Georg Lukacs published a critical study entitled The Theory of the Novel. The subtitle of this work, "A historicophilosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature," announces Lukacs' decision to treat the novel as the fundamental form of epic literature in modern writing. Subsequently, he justifies this decision, explaining: The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature differ from one another not by their author 's fundamental intentions but by the given historico -philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.

3 The conviction that verse could no longer deal adequately with "the extensive totality of life" (while the novel was now 

4 · INTRODUCTION regarded as uniquely suited to attempt such a task) was by no means original with, or restricted to, Lukacs. Rather, he is representative of a widely shared attitude: a narrowing of the sphere regarded as "appropriate" for verse, which any poet seeking to equal the breadth of scope and subject matter of great novelists was compelled to confront. In 1917, when Ezra Pound began to publish his long modern verse epic, The Cantos, he was distinctly nervous about the problematic nature of his undertaking, and in the unrevised version of Canto I, he speculates whether it would not be wiser to "sulk and leave the word to novelists."

4 As late as 1922, after he had already completely revised the poem's opening and published the first eight Cantos, Pound's correspondence reveals a man still anxiously defending the ambitious intentions of his work-in-progress: "Perhaps as the poem goes on I shall be able to make various things clearer. Having the crust to attempt a poem in 100 or 120 cantos long after all mankind has been commanded never again to attempt a poem of any length, I have to stagger as I can." (L:180) Underlying both Lukacs' critical pronouncement and Pound's initial self-doubt is a questioning of the essential nature of poetic discourse, of the formal limits within which the special language of verse must move if it is to remain faithful to its fundamental character as poetry. The question is really one of "decorum" in the full classical sense, an attempt to discover anew which modes of literary presentations are intrinsically most suitable to the different areas of human experience. By the end of the First World War, a verse epic was not so much a form as an oxymoron, an anachronism that seemed to violate what many poets as well as critics had come to regard as the characteristic structure and horizon of poetic discourse. Edgar Allan Poe's strictures against the long poem in "The Poetic Principle" (1848) exercised a profound influence throughout the nineteenth century, especially upon the decisive figures in the development of modern French verse— Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Arthur Rimbaud —but, in their own writings, Poe's argument was taken up as only one aspect of a fundamental upheaval in the connection between language as a literary, poetic artifact and the INTRODUCTION · 

5 world of quotidian reality. At bottom it was the representational nature of artistic language that was challenged, the traditional conception of verse as a mimesis of some external, and consequently independent, event. For Mallarme the poetic text was neither the discoverer nor even the celebrant of previously existent values: it was their sole originator, at once the source and only locus of meaning. The words of a poem, an incantation and hieroglyph, were absolutely divorced from their usage in the mundane world, and art, rather than offering an articulated duplication of reality, was seen as itself conferring the only reality, the only authentic and absolute form of being attainable.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1258462
.

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia | The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome by Bob Dobbs

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia | The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome

ListenBob Dobbs at “Legacy of McLuhan Symposium,” Lincoln Center, Manhattan, sponsored by Fordham University, 28 March 1998
by Bob Dobbs
(published in The Legacy of McLuhan)

Phase 1
"…much of III.3 (Book Three, Chapter Three-ed.) is telephone conversation… As III.3 opens with a person named Yawn and III.4 displays the ingress of daylight upon the night of Finnegans Wake, the note on VI.B.5.29 is interesting:
'Yawn telegraph telephone Dawn wireless thought transference.' "
Roland McHugh,The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, p.19, 1976

"…Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, your brutest layaman with the princest champion in our archdeaconry, or so yclept from Clio's clippings, which the chroncher of chivalries is sulpicious save he scan, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends,…"
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.254, 1939

(In McLuhan's private library in one of his copies of Finnegans Wake he has pencilled in the words "me" and "moon child" next to Joyce's "Meereschal MacMuhun".)
"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today."
(the first sentence in the first article McLuhan wrote for Explorations-ed.)
H. M. McLuhan, Culture without Literacy,Explorations Magazine, Volume1, p.117, December, 1953

"Entertainment in the future may have quite different patterns and functions. You'll become a yogi, you'll do your self-entertainment in yoga style."
Marshall McLuhan,Like Yoga, Not Like the Movies,Forbes Magazine, p.40, March 15, 1967

"T. S. Eliot's famous account of 'the auditory imagination' has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world."
Marshall McLuhan,Letter to Playboy Magazine, p.18, March, 1970

"At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation."
Marshall McLuhan, Libraries: Past, Present, Future(address at Geneseo, New York-ed.), p.1, July 3, 1970

"The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.227, 1972

"And do you know," he (Eric McLuhan-ed.) enthuses, "there are actually (four-ed.) laws governing media communications? At last we can prove to people that we aren't just theorists. This is a real science.... We know there is one more law," says Eric. "And we'll find it. Sooner or later."
Olivia Ward,Now! Son of Guru!,Toronto Star, p.D1, March 30, 1980

Marshall McLuhan made two decisions in 1937: one was the spiritual strategy of becoming a Roman Catholic, and the other was the secular strategy, after intensive study at Cambridge, of translating James Joyce's Work-in-Progress (later given the title of Finnegans Wake in 1939) into an aesthetic anti-environment useful for countering and probing the cultural assumptions of a practicing Catholic.
For the next twenty years he refined his understanding of, first, the Thomist concept of analogical proportionality as the expression of the tactile interval, and second, its usefulness in perceiving the cultural effects of the new electric technologies, through an ongoing dialogue, analysis, and sensory meditation on the nature of metaphor and consciousness (including extrasensory perception) as an artifact. Since McLuhan defined "metaphor"(1) as the act of looking at one situation through another, each situation constitutive of figure-ground interplay (a concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology), then a metaphor was an instance of mixed media, or two figure-grounds. And so was consciousness - because of its essential subjective experience as doubleness, which is doubled again as the objective effect of its autonomous interplay with other consciousnesses. Metaphor, for McLuhan, was hylomorphic(2). In retrospect, the equation McLuhan was playing with could be flattened out as:

metaphor=mixed media=doubleness =consciousness=tactile interplay=the Christian Holy Cross=figure/ground=analogical mirror=iconic fact= cliché/archetype=resonant field= hendiadys=menippean irony,

each and all (except for "metaphor") squared. However, after he made personal contact with Wyndham Lewis in 1943, their dialogue enhanced his appreciation of adopting Wyndham Lewis' social probing style as a political anti-environment to McLuhan's own commitment to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Hence, his own studies simulated the doubleness he was observing technically. For the rest of his career McLuhan juggled the artistic approaches of these five artists in miming the tactile qualities of the analogical drama of proper proportions - the drama of being and perception. For him, language was the drama of cognition and recognition, or consciousness.

"The measure of our (Catholics-ed.) unawareness and irrelevance can be taken from the fact that no Thomist has so far seen fit to expound St. Thomas's theory of communication by way of providing modern insight into our problems."
H. M. McLuhan,The Heart of Darkness(unpublished review of Melville's Quarrel with God by Lawrence Thompson, 1952-ed.), p.8, 1952

"The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)... It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for 'simple explanations' is the yearning for univocity."(p.36-7)
Marshall McLuhan,James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969

Fenollosa - Pound - Yeats: (Certain Noble Plays of Japan)

From The Manuscripts Of Ernest Fenollosa,

Chosen And Finished

By Ezra Pound

With An Introduction By William Butler Yeats

Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats are all members of Robert Anton Wilsons 'all star cast' for The Tale Of The Tribe.

Here we have one document which features 1/4 of the stars. Well worth the read i presume. In particular for anyone interested in Theatre.

Keep on truckin'

--Steve Fly

CERTAIN NOBLE PLAYS OF JAPAN:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8094/8094-h/8094-h.htm 

INTRODUCTION

NISHIKIGI

HAGOROMO

KUMASAKA

KAGEKIYO

NOTES

Introduction by William Butler Yeats, April, 1916.

In the series of books I edit for my sister I confine myself to those that have I believe some special value to Ireland, now or in the future. I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think they will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement.

Pound to Joyce: ‘Wall, Mr Joice, I recon you’re a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’

ON THIS DAY…19 DECEMBER

December 19, 2013

ON 19 DECEMBER 1917 POUND WROTE TO JOYCE PRAISING ‘TELEMACHUS.’

Pound, who had already been responsible for getting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into print, was impressed by the first episode of Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses. For the next three years, Pound was editor, critic, and even censor of Ulysses.

Shortly after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man started to appear in serial form in the Egoist in February 1914, Joyce started work on Ulysses, a novel he may well have been thinking about since his time in Rome in 1906-7. However, he put off work on Ulysses in favour of his play Exiles, and it was not until June 1915 that the first episode of Ulysses was written.

However, even in April 1917 Joyce still maintained that the only part of it that might be ready for publication was the ‘Hamlet’ chapter, and he was reluctant to see that cut to fit the space available in the Egoistmagazine. He told Pound in June that he had finished the ‘Hades’ episode and was working on ‘Aeolus,’ and by August he was telling Margaret Anderson that he hoped to send some of Ulysses to Pound for the Little Review.

A severe attack of lumbago and glaucoma meant that Joyce had to undergo an eye operation at the end of August, and in mid-October he moved to Locarno to recuperate. The first three episodes of Ulysses were finished there, and sent to Claud Sykes in Zurich for typing. The first episode was then sent on to Pound who hoped to publish it in the Little Review and the Egoist.

In his letter of 19 December 1917, Pound declares that the opening chapter is ‘echt Joice’ and though there was a passage on the third page that made him question it for a moment, he reread it, and could find nothing wrong. There were some words that he wondered about, for instance ‘merry’ in the phrase ‘merrying over the sea,’ but again these were not a matter for concern.

The one thing that seemed to occur prophetically to Pound was that the novel was sure to be suppressed but, he declared, ‘it is damn wellworth it.’ Unwittingly, Pound had a dig at Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and promoter of a bill that made it illegal to deliver obscene, lewd or lascivious material. It was Comstock’s law and his Society for the Suppression of Vice that got Ulysses suppressed in 1920.

Pound concluded his letter in a voice imitative of an American drawl: ‘Wall, Mr Joice, I recon you’re a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’… You can take it from me, an’ I’m a jedge.’

Sources & Further Reading:

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. II edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

Pound, Ezra: Pound/Joyce – The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, edited and with Commentary by Forrest Reid, London: Faber & Faber, 1968.

 December, Significant Joycean Dates  Anthony Comstock, Ezra Pound, Margaret Anderson, New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Telemachus, The Egoist, The Little Review.  permalink.

Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi BIG in CHINA

By what miracles of linguistic mastery and literary imagination could Chinese characters be made to capture Joyce’s mind-bending manipulations of the alphabet? By what subtleties of cross-cultural understanding could the specificities of Ireland and its mythologies be translated for a Chinese audience? -- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/james-joyce-china-bloomsday-chinese-reputation

...the alphabet vs. the equation....?

The Medium is the Massage--Marshall McLuhan (FULL FILM)

A member and nodal point within the tale of the tribe, Marshall McLuhan made a great impact on the thinking and writing of Robert Anton Wilson. McLuhan, like Wilson performed by example the role of an 'intellectual celebrity' (sadly missing in 2015 pop culture?) as Richard Metzger put it, at Dangerous Minds. McLuhan speaks VOLUMES about political showbusiness (election show-business) and hundreds of other cultural phenomena that can help all of us process the billions of signals we have to deal with today, in our hyperconnected global village.

I find the number of views on youtube of this video very very sad indeed. To me this experimental TV show from 1967 acts like a unique time-capsule (a sharable time-capsule) capable of describing the genius of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Norbert Weiner, Buckminster Fuller and Robert Anton Wilson, all-at-once. You really should try and find time to watch this, or at least bookmark it. (you might want to open a new tab and use your search window to search some terms and names)

Perhaps I am over sensitive?

--Steve Fly

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

Cosmic Trigger Play and The Tale of The Tribe

PART 1: TTOTT and PLAY

"Fuck God In The Ass"--Ed Sanders

"If you can't say FUCK in public, then the terrorists have won.--D. Scott Apel.

Towards the radical abolition of time as history, in favour of a more flexible playtime where 1994 and 1977 (for example) feedback to each other through the porthole of stagecraft. The Strange Intimacy in the dramatic plays of W.B Yeats, partly influenced by Ernest Fenollosa and his contact with the Noh play tradition of Japan. Within, the accumulation of techniques taken in the Poundian' sense of that phrase. The exploitation of lighting, stage projection, sound effects and costume all-at-once in a Wellesian' fashion, sharp transitions. Ritualistic and ceremonial jams with space for improvisation and embellishment, yes. The fair and rare scientific language of higher states of consciousness, further clarified and made new by actors and stage magix, singing, dancing, shouting.

The process of time and humans gathered together: actors, props, lights, sound, projections, choreography, costume, writing, production, promotion, not to mention food travel shelter and personal hygiene. All this, ALL THIS came together in a unique intersection point, or series of intersection points, to lean on a phrase from Burroughs. The words and the lights and the sounds and the ears hearts minds and bodies of both performers and co-conspirators, the audience co-mingled, wrestled together with a Robert Anton Wilson Universe.

Often times i felt the words jump of the script and into the walls, or the mouth or face of another. Letters are OFF the wall. Language of poetry thrown up onto the stage, balls and all. Total transformation of mind and ALL that resembles it. The sheer rush of hearing the wise words of RAW, and many of his cohorts projected into the air with such finesse, attention to inflection, cadence, the swing of the word, amped-up expressive decoration and embroidery.

Cosmic Trigger Play, in my humble opinion, and to curve your ear a little, might have been to the delight of RAWs tribe. I mean to say, RAWs unfinished great work 'The Tale Of The Tribe' criss-crosses with Cosmic Trigger Play in that TTOTT players William Butler Yeats, Marshall McLuhan, Orson Welles, and Perhaps Joyce and Pound may have enjoyed the stage play IMHO...Bruno, Vico, Nietzsche, Fenollosa, Shannon and Bucky too (google em' & git bck. to me with yr/ thoughts) I'm getting at, or digging into an idea about the hermetic nature of theatre, the multi-media of it ALL, and how the new play satisfies many of the quality critters that Robert Anton Wilson invoked in his last great unfinished work TTOTT. At least TTOTT represents the direction i would like you, dear reader, to ramble into. Please excuse my using it as a playful spring board to get into reviewing the play itself.

RAW would have been moved and inspired if he were around to see the Cosmic Trigger Play. He would have loved it. Sorry to invoke a cliche' yet i think it important to consider RAWs position on current events, and not just political and or metaphysical but concerning the creative arts and new media, to attempt to reconsider some of his critical thoughts on the art and culture, social psychology and a further refined focus on theatre. Makes sense right? (you can find all the details about the who to the what now if you type 'Cosmic Trigger Play' into any search engine. But wait.

Okay, maybe the best way to push onwards is git' the 23K (x4) and do it all again. Cosmic Trigger pulling remains an open game, the new Universe sits gleaming in the moonlight. Sparkling, full of stars orbiting planet word. A Cosmic Trigger Play pulled off and etched into the mind-body-speech of a sleepless crew of initiates. A crew ready to roll. Let's go get em'. (Already feeling terribly confined here in word-world, trying to talk a bit about Bob and the TTOTT and the play and ALL).

Tom Robbins once stated words to the effect that if roughly 15% of the population were reading and acting upon the works of Robert Anton Wilson we might see a new enlightenment/renaissance, or something equally epic and encyclopedic. Of course i agree, and you can find loads of my writings across the web echoing this sentiment. READ HIM. Go to the source.

The tale of the tribe brings together a dozen innovators from history, reaching back to Giordano Bruno (16th century) and into the 21st Century (Claude Shannon). A current of renaissance men, who share a part to play in both the gestation of ideas and influences upon Robert Anton Wilson, and upon Internet. Yes, INTERNET. RAW seemed to be a BIG fan of Internet. I feel he would have supported Wikileaks, Snowdon, EFF, Open Source Projects, Chaos Computer Club meetings, Anonymous, Aaron Swartz, Jacob Applebaum, Cory Doctorow and most Internet rights activists. And i think he would find facebook an amusing distraction from his hologrammic prose.

Lets co-create a new Universe or theatre of the mind, where each and everyone of us can think and act in multiple dimensions, working on many levels, in synchrony, considering set and setting, speech and place-time. Making the invisible visible. Let's do it again to the gates of eternity.

---

PART 2: THANKS TO ALL THE COSMIC CREW

Thanks to those wise beings who donated food to the backstage area and those who were kind enough to buy a cast or crew member a well deserved drink. Greg and Wolfy and the Liverpool crew. Mario Dimaggio of Immersive Dome Theaters, and Toby Philpott who helped manage the Maybe Logic Dome at the Find The Others Festival, and all the other performers and exhibitors. The London Film crew who set up at lost, the random helping hands all over the place, the Cosmic Trigger Band, optimistic ideas from Harvey Webb, music and good vibes from Youth, and the phalanx of other musicians and DJs who performed at the 'Find The Others' festival, and those who played in London. My friends Emily, Scott Groves and Kev Lane for showing up. Lisa Lovebucket and crafts, Beccy Strong photography, Jonathan Greet photography. And on...

All the strong willed ones who helped transport the entire set and many of the crew back and forth to locations in Liverpool, and in London.Special thanks to John Sinclair, Caleb Selah, CHU and all those who supported the crowd fund launch party and donated time, services, equipment and money to the whole trigger pulling process. Alan Moore for continued support. All the supportive video clips from Douglas Rushkoff, Nina Conti, Irving Rappaport, Alan Moore, Jamie Reid, Bill Nye, John Higgs and those i forgot. To Jack Sarfatti for agreeing to meet with Nic Alderton for an interview in S.F. Special thanks to Rick Rasa, Sandhya Sanjana, Michael Ray, Matt Black, Youth, Tim Eggmond, Dominick Clementson, Caleb Selah and all the voices of the cast for all the musical contributions.

A standing ovation for the hundreds of cuddly crowd-funders and thousands of supporters across the planet who re-tweeted, forwarded by email or better yet spread the word-by-mouth of the impossible play made possible. Big up. And a nice one to the reviewers and those who published in support of the project, in particular the Liverpool Confidential and the Independent. And, finally, to those who did not get a mention, it really sits with you now, so thanks in anticipation. I feel fortunate to have had such a schooling process collaborating with the following sleepless crew:


Actors
Oliver Senton - Robert Anton Wilson
Kate Alderton - Arlen /Jano Watts / Miss Portinari
Dixie Mcdervitt - Luna / Ensemble
Lee Ravitz - Kerry Thornley / Simon Moon / George Dorn
Andrew Mackbean - Dr Timothy Leary / Hagbard Celine
Josh Darcy - Ken Campbell / Gary Kerstein / Greg Hill / Ensemble
Tom Baker - Aleister Crowley / Robert Shea / Ensemble
Daisy Campbell - Mavis / Prunella Gee
Claudia Egypt Bolton - Eris / Ensemble
Robert Wells - Slim / Goat Boy / Ensemble
Katy-Anne Hellis - Karuna Wilson / Angel / Paula / Ensemble
Larry Sidorczuk - Albert Hoffman / Ensemble
Nick Helweg Larson - Postman
Irving Rappaport - Jaques Vallee / George Harvey Webb / Ensemble
Peter Wilson - William Burroughs
Nick Marcq - Alan Watts
Michele Watson - Lead Ensemble
Amanda Maye Steele - Ishtar (wed/thu/sat mat)
Elizabeth Sandford-Richardson - Ishtar (fri)
Katy Claire - Ishtar (sat)
Robert K.G Temple - As himself (sat)

Team
Daisy Eris Campbell - Writer and Director
Michelle Watson - Conferestival Director
Dominic Search - General Manager & Webtech
Nadia Luijten - Stage Manager & Social Media
Claudia Boulton - Production and Popery
Nic Alderton - Production, perks and Film
Polly Wilkinson - Graphic Art & Merchandise
Scott McPherson - Projections and Virals
Steve Fly - Music Director
Chris Farncombe - Lighting Design
Sadie Spencer - Lighting Desk
Padrigo Brown - Scenery & Props Maester
Dominick Clementson - Sound Desk (wed/thur)
Josh Chedwin Evans - Sound Desk (fri/sat)

Credits
Christian Wach - Website Design
Jonathan Greet - Stills Photography
Andrew Ab - Stills Photography
Adam Clark - Stills Photography
Bobby Campbell - Initial Artwork
CHU - Illuminatus Set Painting
Gary Acord - Initial website hosting
Lee Isserow - Camera Liverpool
Michelle Olly - Promotions & Vibes

---

PART 3: RE:VERSE-RIGGER

thus was it in time
here with discordian sounds
of Sun Ra and Tim Leary
in my head 1973 1993 to infinity
time has come ready

1950s & 1990s mixed with
Nixon era cointelpro paranoia
3 stooges of interplay
on many levels

Bogart and Saul Goodman
totally Orson unhinged
gates of eternity
hyperreal investigation

trigger pulled
lasagna launched
comets and interstellar
regions crossed
acid Crowley Lilly love scene

timespace and speechspaces
reshaped to travel-time
the eternal nowness of
Robert Anton Wilson
Universe breathing
chanting enochian

captured and shored by
Daisy Eris and her pirate ship
of initiates bound for planet mu
mu unbound from the page to
the stage pulling it all
off

blowing minds out of time
into-starseed-spaces
light body voice speech
enactments towards
decohere...
cosmic trigger
with claritas humanitas
and hilaritas

Black Mass Scene - Visual Projections and Photo by Hagbard Celine

PART 4: SOURCES AND RESOURCES

http://cosmictriggerplay.com/

http://www.rawillumination.net/2014/11/cosmic-trigger-play-news-roundup.html

http://maybelogic.blogspot.nl/2014/11/cosmic-event-in-london.html

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/17/raws-the-cosmic-trigger-as-a.html

http://maybelogic.blogspot.nl/2014/09/cosmic-trigger-re-play.html

https://www.flickr.com/search?text=cosmic%20trigger%20play&sort=relevance

Steve Fly at the drums - Photo by Jonathan Greet

Frances Yates and the Mnemonic Works of Giordano Bruno

Frances Yates and the Mnemonic Works of Giordano Bruno

After Warburg's death in October 1929 and the migration of the Institute to London in 1933, Brunian studies at the Warburg Institute took a very different direction thanks to the research of Frances Yates (1899-1981). While Warburg's interest in Bruno and image-based thinking brought his philosophy towards the present, Frances Yates' hypothesis of an Hermetic Bruno rooted his thought in a distant and partly mythical past at the antipodes of modern times. Nevertheless, while her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) takes a different path from that traced by Warburg, her other Brunian study, The Art of Memory (1966), is perhaps her book closest to Warburg's preoccupations. Indeed the history of mnemonics practices, by means of which mythological figures lived from the Antiquity onwards as animated bearers of learning in the intimacy of the human brain, had everything to interest Warburg. In fact the Art of Memory was written in close consultation with Gertud Bing as confirmed by this excerpt from the preface: 

Now that the Memory Book is at last ended, the memory of the late Gertrud Bing seems more poignantly present than ever. In the early days, she read and discussed my drafts, watching constantly over my progress, or lack of progress, encouraging and discouraging by turns, ever stimulating with her intense interest and vigilant criticism. She felt that the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images – problems ever present in the history of the Art of Memory – were close to those which preoccupied Aby Warburg, whom I only knew through her.

Frances Yates expounded the first results of her research on Bruno's art of memory in a seminar at the Warburg Institute in 1952. She showed her reconstruction of the wheel described in the De Umbris Idearum, Bruno’s first mnemonic work published in Paris in 1582. The two wheels illustrated below are part of the same work and serve as an introduction to using the larger wheel.

In the first fixed ring the practitioner will assign a mythological or heroic figure to each letter. Bruno provides some examples : A Lycaon; B Deucalion; C Apollo; D Argos ... (see De Umbris Idearum, pp. 107 ff). The letters of the second ring correspond to an action or a scene associated with each figure. The examples provided are: AA Lycaon at a banquet; BB Deucalion and pebbles; CC Apollo and Python; DD Argos and some cattle (ibid, p. 112). Thus rotating the first inner ring operates permutations between the figures and their action. Further permutation occurs when the third wheel is set in motion. It contains attributes or enseignes which can be easily passed from one figure to another. Bruno provides only four examples and leaves the rest to the imagination of his reader. These are : AAA, Lycaon at a banquet with a chain; BBB, Deucalion and pebbles with a headband; CCC, Apollo and Python with a baldric; DDD, Argos and some cattle with a hood. This way the systems makes it possible to create combinations of letters representing words, acronyms or syllables to be remembered by means of animated images mixing the attributes and accustomed actions of familiar mythological figures.

BAA: B Deucalion A at a banquet A with a chain
MAD: M Perseus A at a banquet D with a hood
CAD: C Apollo A at a banquet D with a hood
COD: C Apollo O and Proserpina D with a hood

To approach the larger wheel Bruno advises his reader that `...it is necessary to dilute the printed page into an immense space'. The last section of De Umbris idearum describes the content of  the larger wheel over 40 pages. It consists of five concentric rings divided into 150 rays each subdivided in 5 cells. On the outer rings are numbers, letters, the name of inventors followed by four more wheels of words corresponding to the categories of agent, action, enseignes, attributes (adstans) and circumstance.

Frances Yates reconstruction of Giordano Bruno memory wheel from `De Umbris Idearum' - Click the image to access full version (PDF 1.5 mb)

`How did the system work? By magic of course, by being based on the central power station of the … images of the stars, closer to reality than the images of things of the sublunar world, transmitter of the astral forces, the `shadows’ intermediary between the ideal world above the stars and the objects and events in the lower world.’ (The Art of Memory, p. 223)

This interpretation, based on a misplacing of the images of the planets, was first revised by Rita Sturlese in her critical edition of the De Umbris  of 1991 (pp. LXVIII ff.) and later by Francesco Torchia (‘La chiave delle ombre’, Intersezioni, 1, 1997, pp. 131-151).

Both scholars strip Bruno’s construction of its magical character. According to Sturlese the wheel is in fact an adult toy conceived to learn foreign words. Here each ray corresponds to a set of syllables combining one consonant with one vowel. Thus reconstructing a word with its phonetic constituents amounts to combining the various elements of each section. The addition of the images described in the last ring before the hub creates in the end a mnemonic background by means of which new words can be remembered. For instance to remember the word Numeratore you should pick the first syllable in the outer ring, NU, which corresponds to `Apis’; the second syllable in the second ring, ME: `in tapeta ’; the third syllable, RA, in the third ring: `deploratus’; the fourth syllable, TO, from the 4th ring: `compedes’; and finally RE in the 5th ring. This last ring  provides a background against which to set the image thus created:  `…mulier super hydram tres cervices e quarum singulis septem exiliunt capita habentem, vacuas antrorsum tendens manus’ (De Umbris, p. 151). 

READ MORE:

tale of the tribe and the sirius mystery

The tale of the tribe contact high.

Fuck off, and welcome to another installment of my blog--a tale of the tribe--that aims to offer a resource of specific information related to the great complex and generally hidden project (unfinished) tale of the tribe, by the late Robert Anton Wilson.

Since a recent positive explosion of interest in Robert Anton Wilson across the United Kingdom due, in part to the brilliant book by John Higgs about the the KLF featuring much RAW wisdom and context for a UK audience. Plus, the Cosmic Trigger stage play looks to make agents sweat when it launches in Liverpool, November 23rd 2014. Revisiting Cosmic Trigger the book, the current author was bowled over again by gazillions of new connections, and a new deeper love for RAW and his life story, and a willingness to look at the tale of the tribe from a new angle, which sets the basis of the following piece of writing i gathered onto the paper page a few hours ago, here in Vondel Park, Amsterdam.

Fire!
x

pg. 1

TTOTT and the Sirius mystery

what if
RAWs great unfinished symphony
the tale of the tribe
were more than a guide to 13 of
the greatest human minds
who helped humanity find
peace
through communication

what if
TTOTT
were also a guide to contacting
higher intelligences
from alternate dimensions
or wherever
what if the tale of the tribe
were really a key
to the sirius mystery
and itself a cosmic trigger?

pg. 2

take Girodano Bruno
his new languages
for new communications with
higher intelligence
development of angelic languages
so called

foundations of
enochian vision magick
contemporary with John Dee and
Edward Kelly

maybe
Bruno and his works hold keys
to early contact with E.Ts
angels entities as you wish
and denizens of the sirius
triple star system

strange holy guardian angels
but somehow
communicating through timespace
through the nervous system of
Robert Anton Wilson
into the tale of the tribe
a modern critique
of scripture
holy binding contractual poetic
does it work?

pg. 3

Yeats Joyce and Pound
also made
contact
in some sense with higher
intelligence
some might say muse
others artistic inspiration
but what

if Yeats...
(a butterfly landed with all six mittens onto
the page while writing this
two antenna
deep burnt orange and woody
choco' brown hairs with dashes of
white)

what if
William Butler Yeats
picked up on the magickal hermetic
current and methods for contacting
higher intelligence
either from his own study of Bruno
Dee Kelly Ficino
or

from Aleister Crowley
the great beast
who diligently practiced
enochian magick

pg. 4

and so
maybe Yeats passed on the
invisible bug or knowledge
a tiny magickal starseed
to his associates
James Joyce and
Ezra Pound?

the Chinese written character
and ancient imagist sensibility
in resonance with contacting
higher intelligence
how did that language strike up from the past?

(contact between the widow of
American scholar of Japanese arts and
oriental culture: Ernest
Fenollosa and Ezra Pound cc. 1912)

the hermetic current
tirelessly innovating culture
art and science with
humanitas

pushing out beyond language
into total communication
magick keys to open invisible doorways
geometry poetry mathematics
and good will

pg. 5

and a will to power
to the people
special languages of poetry
to awaken the reader
to the ignorance in knowledge
firm trust in the universe to provide
flying on the wings of
imagination

what if
contact with higher intelligence
disguises itself as creative impulse
and the spark of ingenuity?

Joyce and Pound each
made a revolution in
communications scripture
and systems

a good guide to contacting your
own deeper shadow self
your private muse
angel
or sirian servant
invoked for good intentions
on behalf of all around the world
humanity
a doorway for friendly ET intervention
ummm...

pg. 6

deeper still we have
the Polish genius who contacted
higher intelligence through the
intensive work and innovation of
language:
general semantics

a refinement of language structure
toward a science of meaning
contact with multiple entities
a lesson for self centered
naive realists
in non-Aristotelian language systems
of limited communications
Alfred Korzybski

key to magickal workings
a 20th century extension of core
hermetic wisdom
scientifically presented as
a system

deployed by William S. Burroughs
a possible way to interpret the nova mob
practiced and mastered by
Robert Anton Wilson himself
the epic vortex
of imagination and good
willed humour

pg. 7

what if
Buckminster Fuller were a
primary key figure to
understanding and making use of the
hermetic wisdom in
contacting higher intelligence

innovation of geometry
so as to benefit all humanity
design science revolution
in the hermetic tradition
not for weapons of war
but knowledge systems and new
communications languages
for peace

toward universal abundance
of technology in the
minds of the people
the natural abundance of
carbon 60
or bucky balls
throughout the universe

serious cosmic economics
extraterrestrial technology
and contact
through the medium of geometry
maybe some Giordano Bruno
wisdom
geodesics and dymaxion
architecture for the people
buckyballs and the mad
carbon 60 mystery of the
universe:
ubiquity of c60 throughout it!

pg. 8

what if
the father of information sciences
and the mathematical theory of
communication
Claude Shannon
were perceived as another
unforeseen link to opening the
invisible doorways through which
higher intelligence
crept

to lead much of humanity in 2014
into contact
with everybody and everything
imaginable:
the global internet of things

a basically hermetic ideaspace:
shared knowledge and a
scientific tool for discovery
and information processing
and
feedback

Shannon dangles keys
to as yet undiscovered
rooms without walls
mind boggling complexity
negentropy
building a new cypher language
to help deduce and evaluate
information
through innovating the equations
binary electrical switching circuit
contact

pg. 9

what if
the tale of the tribe
by Robert Anton Wilson
defines another order of
methods and systems
required for any thinking individual
who really wants to make contact
with higher intelligence
here it is
cosmic trigger
study it

and with luck ideas and inspiration
may emerge to lift up humanity
and instigate newer and faster
technological innovations
of the living
livingry

once contact is established
how the to ask
a meaningful question
how to interpret the information

quantum mechanics
and taoism
both
systems for deeper study
on contemplating a holy
guardian angel
entity
shadow self
how to?

pg. 10

magickal workings in the
enochian language seem
to me to be more effective
way to contact higher intelligence
without tears
with good reason healthy skepticism
and a playful soul

based upon evidence from
RAWs books such as Cosmic Trigger vol. 1
and from RAW himself in my interviews
i now feel today that
there exists a particular contact
procedure
based on RAWs experiments detailed in his
book
methodology that includes
magickal occult ceremony
and tantric rituals
together with strange drugs

Aha
i hear the skeptic shout accusingly
drugs!
i knew it
all this babble about contact and angels
he's high on acid

well yes what you thought
the psychedelic experience
mimics the magickal experience
and the experience of art too
getting beyond language
into epiphany and cosmic coincidence
or better yet synchronicity

pg. 11

to innovate the priest craft
while keeping two feet
grounded on earth
in the sewer
maybe the message from the stars
seeds is to evolve and mutate?
get back to the primary source of
a kind of
decentralized (Bruno)
perception

unlimited and unbounded by belief
beliefs unlimited
freedom of thought
as Crowley and Leary
and Philip K. Dick demonstrated

we are not alone but
surrounded by a network of sentient
beings
a love macrocosm
teaming with life and things to
communicate and
probably not in english

simply tune in
RAW tuned in while also turned on
and quickly got dialled into
sirius.raw broadcasting network 23

since getting in touch
RAW crafted ingenious magickal
communication devices
or books
utilized to help
other make contact
and possibly take the plunge and
attempt the tale of the tribe
for themselves

pg. 12

TTOTT
a modern verse epic
an epic including history
a global epic for the entire
human race
from the perception of
an individual stuck in time
space

a spirited attempt to
redeem oneself from the
mostly violent
wreckage of history
the history of men
empire warfare greed
and nightmare bushit' whirl

a new book of the day
contact for all who read
to provoke freedom of thought
and sympathy and forgiveness
for all mankind

the gods never left us'
we must knuckle down and
create this kind spirit of open
communication for all entities
both gods and insects
we must become the
magick
we wish to see manifest
in the word/world

pg. 13

two examples of
the tale of the tribe
the cantos of Ezra Pound
&
Finnegans Wake by James
Joyce

both epic and encyclopedic
global
tragic comic
multi lingual
crated a whole new style
ideogrammic prose
hologrammic prose

both in the hermetic tradition
heavy on math
geometry and esoteric symbol
systems innovated and
unified in the minds of
the people who read them

keys to holding a kind sanity
in the facebook of a
pop culture apocalypse
love and light of acknowledgement
that nothing is what it first appears to be

pg. 14

and slowness is beauty
good access to the data for all
helps build a clearer picture
global webnet search engines
unleash much occulted information and
wisdom hidden within the cantos
and the wake
even today

and so the global
hermetic revolution is underway
and has been for thousands of years
artists
scientists
hackers
magicians

untied against fundamentalist
materialists
religious and scientific dogma
state sponsored bully boy tactics

and against mean spirited
greedy actions for the exclusive
benefit of the few

a planet spaceship earth
with 7.6 Billion passengers
using over 750 languages
requires a certain sympathetic
and tolerant individual
who attempts unity in verse
including history
without loosing sight of
the guiding principle of compassion
and kindness for all sentient beings

--Steve Fly Agaric 23
Amsterdam. 6.50 P.M, 11th June, 2014.


(on my way back from the park this afternoon i made a decision that when i got home i would google "Yeats and "butterflies" to see what might turn up. Of course, in 1934 Yeats wrote a drama titled 'Wheels and Butterflies' adding some spice to this mini-drama unfolding within a drama triggered by a butterfly landing on my open page as i wrote the word Yeats.)

Astral Projective Verse: Olson, Ophiel and Sun Ra

Astral Projective Verse

By Steve Fly Agaric 23

For Eric Wagner and John Sinclair. Thanks for inspiring these wild speculations which are really notes that shall be reshuffled into a more coherent whole at some future point.

"The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” --Poetry Foundation, introduction to Projective Verse.

"This book, an occult book, deals with the subject of how to enter this Astral plane, function there, and then return to the physical plane, with a great deal of memory-knowledge of the “trip” retained in the memory and available for study and research. This book is a practical Occult book in that it gives all the theory necessary to understand the subject AND THE DEFINITE DIRECTION PRACTICES AS HOW TO DO IT.--Orphiel, The Art of AstraProjection.

"Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence … common to all the living. Music is existence, the key to the universal language. Because it is the universal language.--Sun Ra, The Neglected Plane of Wisdom (1966)

Astral Planes And New Moon Beams by Sun Ra (at discogs)

Astral Source History

The system of projective verse as defined by Charles Olson and the magical occult Art of Astral Projection, here as defined by Orphiel, twist themselves together to produce astral projected verse, a new kind of magical poetics, or roughly a poetic technique to remote-view (using the astral body) the spaces and places and the time period under investigation. 

I have dabbled with some of these ideas in a previous writing project called Open Source History. I created a target area based upon 48 hours of historical time set between July 31st and August 1st 1936. I picked this date due to the special intersection point that I perceived here based upon the life-span of characters from 'the tale of the tribe,' as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, who was 4 in 1936. William Butler Yeats and James Joyce were alive, so were Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, Ezra Pound, Orson Welles and Alfred Korzybski. This group of innovative critters who exerted a special IMPACT on Dr Wilson are pulled into a fictional vortex of history spread over 48 hours.

The ideas and innovations from the individuals are projected into the historical period under observation by using another fictional tool: tribetablism. An occult system of astral projection based up utilizing the instruments and sensibility of a disc jockey, the discs in this case contain the speech of the tribe or the speech of the historical characters, together with sounds effects and embellishments more conventionally associated with the art and craft of the DJ. The tribetable method takes a lot from the Enochian Vision Magick as defined by Lon Milo Duquette, and is the tool by which the historical tale is telling itself. The novel cuts between occult astral projecting DJs in 2012, and the targets from 1936: New York, Rapallo, Berlin. 

Pound, Olson, Baraka

At the time of writing this novel in 2008 I had not yet come across the essay by Charles Olson, Projective verse. Since discovering this essay and reading it over due to encouragement by my friend John Sinclair, I became convinced that it embodies much of what RAW was getting at, in particular the influence of Ezra Pound and to a lesser extent James Joyce. 

Furthermore, I have recently been moved by the passing of poet Amiri Baraka and tuned back to one of his recent lectures, drawing insightful parallels between the work of Charles Olson and of Sun Ra. Listening back to the lecture, i was stunned by his description of Projective Verse by Olson and how much it resonated with 'process oriented' ideas explored by RAW. 'I see no nouns, I only see verbs.' Bucky said.

I was moved to reshape some ideas of Ernest Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats around what Baraka was saying about Olson and Sun Ra. Projective verse seems to be a very important document and resource for research into the tale of the tribe, and thankfully, unlike many of the other gigantic texts, Projective verse is relatively short, super concise and generally optimistic and informative. It lays down another way in/out of the vortex, a way to navigate the maelstrom of thought and language and action in the world we dream in. The lineage of Projective verse and trajectory into history from that point of publication in 1950 demonstrates how strong and time-tested the contents are. 

I mean to say that Projective Verse is still NEWS today in 2014, its power and dormant potentials expanding at an exponential rate, and i wish to add a little something to that by presenting the concept of astral projected verse. I should add that within the context of the myth, magic and music of Sun Ra, astral projected verse resonates with him more than any other musician either living or dead. 

We have the costume of the historical figure Maximus, put on by Olson and projected into his local space-time manifold, and we have the literal costumes of Sun Ra and his band, put on by Ra and projected into the performance space. Both these systems of using costume could be compared with Yeats and his descriptions and investigations of masks. 'The nature of reality is the reality of masks'. And let’s not forget the brilliant Novel by RAW called 'Masks of the Illuminati' that further explores costume, theatre, drama and layers of identity, with special focus on James Joyce, Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley.

Astral Planes Language APL

Astral Projection is a psychological magickal technique and has many different variations and no single inventor or definitive text. Unlike projective verse, Astral Projection as far as i am aware is not such a popular field of interest to poets, probably due to its renaming and adoption by many fringe groups as remote viewing, many fringe groups that included intelligence agencies around the world, such as those from Russia, America and England. There are lots of publications based around remote viewing and secret government projects and so called psychic spies, there is also a Hollywood blockbuster movie about some of these events in the USA, called 'Men who stare at goats'. All the drama of psychic spies, clandestine magickal operations and the possible global hidden hand of spooks with special powers can divert the focus from the art and craft of Astral Projection itself.

As with all and any technology, both physical and psychological it can be used to forward the shared resources and knowledge base of all-around-the-world humanity, or used to constrict, consume and paralyse humanity. Astral Projection provides a tool that can be used for an infinite variety of uses.

You may have noticed that i am talking about Astral Projection as if i know for sure that it works, which may bring much contention from armies of skeptics, critics and the ignorant who, as with the argument against full legalization and availability of drugs, would never try, and have never tried, the things they are so certain are so dangerous and threatening to life.

Anybody who has an active imagination and a healthy inquisitive mind can bypass this kind of bigoted ignorance, and recognize it in most authority figures and systems of control. Some may see how the language used to project the authority of knowing, itself, is a mechanism used to distort the picture, frame the information and prevent those trapped in linguistic cells from realizing the infinite flux of being, out there, beyond language...ish

I am biased though, i must confess, after seeking and devouring the works of Robert Anton Wilson i have practiced the arts and crafts of positive thinking and critical analysis, resulting in a high sensitivity to my own projections, a kind of general awareness that 'I'  like every other 'I' cannot know everything, for example. I mean to say, i feel humble to the fact that everything you and 'I' know is wrong, yet i do not feel nihilist and serious enough about this to throw the baby out with the bath water.

To use the imagination, in tandem with the scientific reasoning faculty of the mind-body-language interface to get out there beyond language. Into telepathy, faster than light, everywhere and nowhere at once, the paradox of time-travel etc etc. Into the paradox, and out through the side door, taking bits and pieces of whatever the individual might think can help them on their journey, on the road of life to discover for themselves what the hell is going on. 

I think Astral Projection, in particular, is the kind of future technology that can really level the playing field regarding the age long questions about the individual and the state. The walls between the world in here and the perceived world out there are pulled down, if and when an individual can ignite the infinite potentials of the human mind-body interface and no longer be limited by the physical location of the body, able to travel anywhere, anytime, see and possibly act upon other psychic entities. The internet is a good metaphor that shapes one aspect of astral projection, or travelling the space ways in search of information, yet maybe with a hidden longing for a sense of experience, for an extra-sense of being there. 

Can you distinguish the boundary between your astral plane and your physical plane, where one starts and the other ends? A good place to start thinking about astral projected verse is to look at your own belief-system, how it is constructed, and why. This leads me back to the beginning of this essay. The mixture of ideas and methods from Projective Verse by Charles Olson with techniques and approaches to Astral Projection by Orphiel, topped off with the Astral jazz music of Sun Ra. Together, i believe that these three disciplines can produce some innovative, state of the art, poetic technology capable of handing individuals the free tools for self liberation, and for gaining agency in the world around them.

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”--Charles Olson, Projective Verse.

--Steve Fly
Amsterdam

Email To The Tribe (A Youtube Playlist Refresher)

Email to the tribe is my research class into the tale of the tribe, paying tribute to the last great work of Dr Robert Anton Wilson.…

http://ettt.wikispaces.com/
www.raw360.net

--Steve Fly

 

Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly

 Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly


Robert Anton Wilson spent over 50 years producing original thoughts and ideas, criss-cossing academic boundaries like a flock og migrating birds. All-at-once an independent scholar, social critic, comedian, playwright, poet and novelist. RAW lived through WWII, the cold war, the 1960s counter culture explosion, the digital technological millennium and the globalization of humanity by way of the world wide web. RAW kept a front row seat next to other great scientific philosophers of the 20th/21st century, observing patterns and communicating with great care and attention to language, meaning and clarity, what he suspects is going on.

RAWs approach to the questions confronting all American citizens, and so by default the entire planet, currently under the boot of the U.S.A, are critical alternative perspectives and insights desperately lacking from both the public and academic discourse, and that have new roads into almost every department of any existing academic center you care to think of. Yet, what i find most stimulating about RAW and his ideas circles around his fierce independence and adherence to the principle of thinking for oneself, questioning everything and constantly reformulating based upon new data.

Every human being on earth can benefit from literacy, and RAWs particular take on the human condition features the development of language and critical reasoning as tools to enable good functioning in a chaotic universe, inhabited by shadows, distractions, illusions and disinformation. I feel that RAW left us all with examples of how best to confront confusion, propaganda and low level information warfare, his life as a case study and scientific experiment, in the tradition of R. Buckminster Fuller and Dr John Lilly, where they're own mind-body system is recognized to be a scientific laboratory itself, and so the nervous system and linguistic operating system also can be seen as scientific instruments.

It strikes me, when i surf around the web and more often read newspaper headlines and/or watch TV shows, that in 2013 a large proportions of professional scientists, and almost ALL politicians seem to have not picked up on this principle of 'inprobable objectivity' at all. On the contrary, the direction of most political and popular scientific discourse seems to be skewed towards materialist ideology and a 'bad' use of language, manipulated and squeezed through various filters to attract either/or investors, voters, or whatever ends maybe required, e.g, higher carbon monoxide limits, or the use of genetically modified seeds. There are an increasing amount of people waking up the coercion and trickery played by authoritarian structures, so as to keep the position of authority right where it is, with a centrist, top down, capitalist model. An Aristotelian war-head.

RAWs ideas and special writings smash away hundreds of rotten foundations that support these authoritarian monsters, often targeting the strongest parts of his opposing arguments, so as to be sure to totally demolish them. RAW has referred to himself as a libertarian anarchist, and a 'guerrila ontologist' in the past. I think these descriptions help distinguish his kind of constructive and cheerful criticism from the dull speculations and sensational garbage i detect in many of today's so called 'exposers of the truth' not least those who claim to be uncovering the all powerful 'Illuminati'. A hugely popular meme in 2013, largely due to the bastardization of RAWs ideas, along with a handful of others during the 1960s war on some culture.

 --Steve Fly Agaric
23 November 2013.
Amsterdam

Quotes from Ezra Pound Guide To Kulchur

I am currently reading Ez's guide again and find it very stimulating with great ball of genius striking in the direction of the 2008-2013 global recession, music, painting, sculture and poetry. --Steve fly

Full text at Scribd.

Quotes from...

EZRA

POUND

GUIDE
TO
KULCHUR

“To put it another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant.”

“I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it… That perhaps is the first clue the reader has had that these are notes for a totalitarian treatise and that I am in fact considering the New Learning or the New Paideuma… not simply abridging extant encyclopedias or condensing two dozen more detailed volumes… May I suggest (not to prove anything, but perhaps to open the reader’s thought) that I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez, a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis, a Praedis from an Ingres or a Moreau…”

"Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to the development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius… At any rate, I need ideogram. I mean I need it for my own job…"

“Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling… Usura slayeth the child in the womb”

“Dante uses che sanno in his passage on Aristotle in limbo. He uses intendendo for the angels moving the third heaven… Our Teutonic friend, what’s his name (Vossler is it?), talks about schwankenden Terminologie des Cavalcanti’s. I believe because he hasn’t examined it. Till proof to the contrary overwhelms me, I shall hold that our mediaevals took much more care of their terms than the greeks of the decadence.”

“This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford a university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.”

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_Kulchur