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dayface's review against another edition
4.0
I wish I'd known this centered around Joyce's Finnegans Wake so much before going in, as I would have read it beforehand. As it stands, I'll be returning to this book upon reading that one; such is the charismatic, intellectual power of this book. At times as absurd as it is prophetic, it encapsulates on many of the liberties of the counterculture movement to provide a truly mind-boggling exploration of synchronicity. One day, I hope to rival it - God knows I have the materials, already. Another stellar book from Robert: I may bump it up upon re-read, we will see.
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Part One
The essay on synchronicity and isomorphism in Finnegans Wake is equal parts absurd and inspiring. Some of the connections are genuinely profound, others seemed stretching - but what do I know? I've only just ordered the novel, now. Either way, I've been recognising more and more overlaps between the writings of Joyce and I. Portrait and Dubliners are also on the way. Either way, I appreciate this essay. It's a brilliant demonstration of synchronicity and strange loop recursiveness (and, perhaps, some apophenia).
Werewolf Bridge kicked ass for a lot of reasons.
He opens The Motherfucker Mystique discussing his first book - the Playboy one on naughty words - and now disappointed he is with it's final form. This chapter comprises some of the erudite and witty parts cut from that book at the editor's request. I love the anecdote on Stagolee - I've got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind. I'm a bad motherfucker and I don't mind dyin’ - and Shine - You're the king of the ocean, the king of the sea, But you gotta be a swimmin' motherfucker to outswim me particularly entertaining.
How to Read / How to Think is rife with fascinating and cutting commentaries, moments that make one stop and reconsolidate what they know with what they're learning.
I'm just going to make a collage of my favourite quotes:
Kaddish is a fantastic closer to chapter one.
Part Two
He begins chapter two with a lengthy, incredible sequel essay concerning Joyce once more. Then he segues into three essays from The Realist - which comprises insulting Death of a Salesman (I can't disagree with his takes) and praising works which stare death, reality, and life in the eyes (Saturn Devouring his Sun, King Lear, Moby Dick).
The Marat/Sade essay is viciously good. I didn't understand large swathes of it, unfortunately (unacquainted with the subject matter), but have had my interest piqued quite a bit.
Equally fascinating is Wilson's portrayal of Marilyn Monroe as 'one of the great artistic engineering feats of U.S. history' - how Norma Jeane Mortenson evolved herself through force of will into the 'Goddess' of design she envisioned (and how this façade concealed the real Normal, nonetheless suffering). This spirals into, ostensibly, a series of conspiracies involving Leary, the Kennedy's, and LSD rife with mafia involvement. Believe what you want of it - these are only coincidances, of course.
The following chapter, The Physics of Synchronicity is perhaps the best chapter yet. In it, he denotes numerous examples of coincidences. Now, what astounded me and my father, is that when I read the part on Freud and Jung's synchronicity experience in 1909, me and my dad experienced a moment of 'coincidence' involving the postman. My father was quick to reject it as coincidence, but I broke down the chance until he was willing to concede the probability of what happened happening as it did when it did had a higher probability than he first assumed.
Only to return to the text and find similar incidents of people experiencing coincidence midway through reading the same anecdote. Uncanny.
Kammerer's work seems fascinating, it's a shame Jung and Pauli never read his work -
He then goes onto discuss Bell's theorem on entanglement and causality.
Sounds remarkably like the Urizenic hemispheral disconnect denoted by John Higgs in his book Blake vs The World which I've just finished reading. All of my reading is synchronised by this point.
I agree profusely. In every way.
For over a decade, I've analysed the latent and manifest content of my life's story as if a dream, and have discovered plenty in the process.
This can't be ignored: the division is not as dimetric and absolute as believed, but there is still a division of labour where some faculties are concerned. For instance, speech comprehension and production (Wernicke/Broca areas (which, granted, are often found in the left hemisphere)).
Part Three
I absolutely need to return to the pertinent essays upon reading Finnegans Wake.
The essay on religion is insightful, least of all because I was born into the Mormon (never truthfully believed) religion and am, myself, ordained by the Universal Life Church (and the Church of Dude). Quite coincidental, eh?
And here we are - 2023!
Wiser words were never spoken.
Likewise hilarious are the Society of Fred Mertz (wherein the founder believes all wisdom can be attained by rewatching Love Lucy and paying extra attention to what Fred says), and the Camp Crusade for Cthulhu -
And I genuinely laughed at this part of Robert's breakdown of the Discordian Society -
This chapter was hilarious.
Part Four
Again, I NEED to return to this book upon reading Finnegans Wake. I have some other Joyce books lined up for me, as I never realised how alike we are in sombunall ways. Either way, I yelled, "YES!" when Wilson said Joyce's 'W' denoted a particle aspect and also means 'Mountain' in Chinese - as that's the second thing I thought upon seeing the article, itself (namely due to my recent reading of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei which defined that character among others). The first thing I thought, upon seeing it, was the symbol for PSI [Ψ] which has been repurposed to mean Wave Function Ψ in Quantum Mechanical terms. How interesting a coincidence; slightly frustrating that △ is used by Joyce, instead, to stand for the wave aspect of matter, though.
I've not even read the novel and know a masterpiece essay of analysis and investigation when I see one. Absolutely stellar; every page yells fascination.
And then we are taken to an interview with Robert Anton Wilson included by the editors -
I'll end on that last quote. I learned a large amount of Esperanto, and outside of equipping me with the psycholinguistic skills to understand various facets of learning a language, it hasn't served me much and mostly slipped into willing decay in my memory storage.
---
Part One
The essay on synchronicity and isomorphism in Finnegans Wake is equal parts absurd and inspiring. Some of the connections are genuinely profound, others seemed stretching - but what do I know? I've only just ordered the novel, now. Either way, I've been recognising more and more overlaps between the writings of Joyce and I. Portrait and Dubliners are also on the way. Either way, I appreciate this essay. It's a brilliant demonstration of synchronicity and strange loop recursiveness (and, perhaps, some apophenia).
Werewolf Bridge kicked ass for a lot of reasons.
He opens The Motherfucker Mystique discussing his first book - the Playboy one on naughty words - and now disappointed he is with it's final form. This chapter comprises some of the erudite and witty parts cut from that book at the editor's request. I love the anecdote on Stagolee - I've got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind. I'm a bad motherfucker and I don't mind dyin’ - and Shine - You're the king of the ocean, the king of the sea, But you gotta be a swimmin' motherfucker to outswim me particularly entertaining.
How to Read / How to Think is rife with fascinating and cutting commentaries, moments that make one stop and reconsolidate what they know with what they're learning.
It is so short because No Governor is a very tiny magazine and cannot print long pieces; it is so mordant because I wrote it at a time when I was beginning to suspect that the younger generation of Americans are so ill-educated that one virtually has to write in baby-talk before they can understand anything one is saying.and, of course, funny. He dissects interpretation - the purely superficial and the extracted latent content - via Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
I'm just going to make a collage of my favourite quotes:
Yeats's great poem on the 1916 Irish rebellion contains the line, "A terrible beauty is born." Stress "terrible" when reading it aloud; then stress "beauty." Which meaning did Yeats intend? Or did he intend both? [...]
Blake wrote, "May God us keep / From single vision & Newton's sleep." Leaving aside for the moment his animus against Newtonian mechanics, could "single vision" refer to what I have been calling mechanical reading and mechanical thinking? [...] "To ascribe predicates to a people is always dangerous.”
—Nietzsche, unpublished note, 1873 [...]
"all women," "all men," "all plumbers," etc. are fallacies because the world consists of a phalanx of individuals. In Korzybski's handy notation, we never meet the groups; what we encounter are woman1 – woman2 – woman3 – etc. [...]
One Zen master, when asked what Zen "is," always replied with the single word, "Attention." What the hell did he mean? [...]
In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as "exciting." In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as "dull." Is the excitement or dullness "in" the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?
Colin Wilson argues that when we say, "Life is boring and meaningless," it means that we are boring and meaningless. Can there be any truth in this? If it requires work and re-reading etc. before the reader finds the clues that reveal the narrator is (consciously or unconsciously) deceptive, is that "unfair" to the reader? Is it unfair to try to provoke the reader to work and thought? Should all books be for the lazy?
Kaddish is a fantastic closer to chapter one.
Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
Part Two
He begins chapter two with a lengthy, incredible sequel essay concerning Joyce once more. Then he segues into three essays from The Realist - which comprises insulting Death of a Salesman (I can't disagree with his takes) and praising works which stare death, reality, and life in the eyes (Saturn Devouring his Sun, King Lear, Moby Dick).
"All these people who go around protesting against the nuclear tests," a friend of mine once said to me—"they never have the guts to face the problem in the only place where it can be handled—by facing the thing in themselves, in all men, that wants the Bomb to go off."
The Marat/Sade essay is viciously good. I didn't understand large swathes of it, unfortunately (unacquainted with the subject matter), but have had my interest piqued quite a bit.
Equally fascinating is Wilson's portrayal of Marilyn Monroe as 'one of the great artistic engineering feats of U.S. history' - how Norma Jeane Mortenson evolved herself through force of will into the 'Goddess' of design she envisioned (and how this façade concealed the real Normal, nonetheless suffering). This spirals into, ostensibly, a series of conspiracies involving Leary, the Kennedy's, and LSD rife with mafia involvement. Believe what you want of it - these are only coincidances, of course.
The following chapter, The Physics of Synchronicity is perhaps the best chapter yet. In it, he denotes numerous examples of coincidences. Now, what astounded me and my father, is that when I read the part on Freud and Jung's synchronicity experience in 1909, me and my dad experienced a moment of 'coincidence' involving the postman. My father was quick to reject it as coincidence, but I broke down the chance until he was willing to concede the probability of what happened happening as it did when it did had a higher probability than he first assumed.
Only to return to the text and find similar incidents of people experiencing coincidence midway through reading the same anecdote. Uncanny.
Kammerer's work seems fascinating, it's a shame Jung and Pauli never read his work -
He concluded that coincidence represents an acausal principle in nature, as distinguished from the causal principles science had hitherto studied. He compared the acausal coincidental principle (ACOP, we shall call it for short) with gravity, noting that gravity acts on mass, while ACOP acts on form and function. [...] The ACOP (acausal coincidental principle) Jung and Pauli called synchronicity because they assumed it was at right angles to causality and structured in space, not time. That is, the synchronicities (from the Greek, syn, together, and chronos, time) happen at the same time. The relation between synchronous events, according to Jung, is basically psychological. [...] ACOPs are by no means only synchronous. They are often separated by days or even years.
He then goes onto discuss Bell's theorem on entanglement and causality.
Honegger believes that the right hemisphere ego consciousness is continually trying to assert its existence and communicate with the left hemisphere ego, which Western adults think is their only ego. The right-side ego usually communicates via dreams, as noted by Freud and Jung, but if the left-sided ego remains deaf to these messages, the right hemisphere creates Freudian slips or hysterical symptoms to get the ego's attention.
Sounds remarkably like the Urizenic hemispheral disconnect denoted by John Higgs in his book Blake vs The World which I've just finished reading. All of my reading is synchronised by this point.
This would explain a great many of the ACOPs collected by Jung, Kammerer, Koestler and others; it might even explain the Hardy-Harvie experiment, in which randomizing led to more order rather than more disorder. And it throws all of the data of parapsychology into a new perspective: instead of separate paranormal abilities such as ESP, precognition and telekinesis, there might just be one ACOP—acausal coincidental principle—appearing to us in many forms to which we give those names. [...] According to Honegger, we should analyze such ACOPs the way Freud and Jung analyzed dreams to see what unconscious messages they contain.
I agree profusely. In every way.
For over a decade, I've analysed the latent and manifest content of my life's story as if a dream, and have discovered plenty in the process.
The uncanny, then, is just the right hemisphere's way of violently . capturing our attention. Of course, recent evidence suggests that the right brain-left brain dichitomy is not as absolute as once believed; Honegger's model is only the latest, not the last, word on this subject.
This can't be ignored: the division is not as dimetric and absolute as believed, but there is still a division of labour where some faculties are concerned. For instance, speech comprehension and production (Wernicke/Broca areas (which, granted, are often found in the left hemisphere)).
Part Three
I absolutely need to return to the pertinent essays upon reading Finnegans Wake.
The essay on religion is insightful, least of all because I was born into the Mormon (never truthfully believed) religion and am, myself, ordained by the Universal Life Church (and the Church of Dude). Quite coincidental, eh?
Oddly, the belief that the world is on the edge of a revival of goddess-worship has been expressed by some eminent scholars, including historian Arnold Toynbee, psychologist Carl Jung, poet Robert Graves and anthropologist Joseph Campbell. Witches know this and are fond of quoting these authorities when being interviewed on TV.
And here we are - 2023!
The Javacrucians, a group which looks suspiciously like a parody of the Rosicrucians, has selected the less-controversial caffeine as its sacrament. It also has the simplest theology in history, teaching that one thing only is necessary for salvation, the American Coffee Ceremony—a variation on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. This is performed at dawn, and you must face east, towards the rising sun, as you raise the cup to your lips. When you take the first sip, you must cry out with intense fervour, "GOD, I needed that!" If this is performed religiously every morning, Javacrucians say, you will face all life's challenges with a clear mind and a tranquil spirit.
Wiser words were never spoken.
Likewise hilarious are the Society of Fred Mertz (wherein the founder believes all wisdom can be attained by rewatching Love Lucy and paying extra attention to what Fred says), and the Camp Crusade for Cthulhu -
The Campus Crusade for Cthulhu generally appears on the scene at any university where the Campus Crusade for Christ is well entrenched, and is mostly devoted to annoying the former. [...] The Campus Crusade for Christ has bumper stickers which members flaunt on their automobiles declaring "I Found It." The Cthulhu-ists have their own bumper stickers saying "It Found Me."
And I genuinely laughed at this part of Robert's breakdown of the Discordian Society -
Discordianism shuns dogma but has one catma, the Syadastan Affirmation, which reads,
"All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."
Discordians call this the Free Mantra—unlike the Transcendental movement, they charge no fees—and insist that if you repeat it 666 times you will achieve Spiritual Enlightenment, in some sense.
This chapter was hilarious.
Part Four
Again, I NEED to return to this book upon reading Finnegans Wake. I have some other Joyce books lined up for me, as I never realised how alike we are in sombunall ways. Either way, I yelled, "YES!" when Wilson said Joyce's 'W' denoted a particle aspect and also means 'Mountain' in Chinese - as that's the second thing I thought upon seeing the article, itself (namely due to my recent reading of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei which defined that character among others). The first thing I thought, upon seeing it, was the symbol for PSI [Ψ] which has been repurposed to mean Wave Function Ψ in Quantum Mechanical terms. How interesting a coincidence; slightly frustrating that △ is used by Joyce, instead, to stand for the wave aspect of matter, though.
Joyce was paying close attention to modern physics while writing FW . On page 51 he alludes to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: "that sword of certainty which would identifide the body never."
I've not even read the novel and know a masterpiece essay of analysis and investigation when I see one. Absolutely stellar; every page yells fascination.
The curious reader may pursue this isomorphism further in my book Prometheus Rising , (Hilaritas Press, 2016) or simply by meditating on the fable of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. [...] Joyce, an anarchist, probably knew the favorite English anarchist joke, which was to urge people to vote for Guy Fawkes, “the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions.”
And then we are taken to an interview with Robert Anton Wilson included by the editors -
The word “Coincidance,” is a Joycean word and signifies the dance of coincidences in nature similar to the Jungian concept of synchronicity, or an acausal event unlikely to occur by mere chance. [...]
There are two opposites that keep conflicting all through Finnegans Wake : one represents space and dogma and the other represents time and music. The spaceman is always trying to prove there is something wrong with the timeman. The timeman feels that both of them are necessary and he is not trying to prove that there is something wrong with the spaceman. [...]
Well, Guerrilla Ontology is a term I coined several years ago. I recently found out that Edward de Bono has been teaching the same sort of thing for many years. He calls it lateral thinking . What it amounts to is: most thinking is a continuation from your initial premise and you draw more and more conclusions which is the way a system of mathematics develops. But mathematicians discovered over a hundred years ago that there is another way of thinking: that’s to start off from a different set of assumptions and build up a different system which is what de Bono calls lateral thinking. It’s to get out of the set created by your original assumptions and move sideways, as it were, and start from different assumptions and build a different system. That’s what I’m always doing in my books. I call it Guerrilla Ontology. [...]
Interviewer: You’ve talked about loops. How does one break out of his or her loop and change their reality?
Wilson: By doing what you’re afraid of. That is one of my basic principles – progress is only made by what Kierkegaard called a leap in the dark. He had a different meaning than me, now that I think of it; he didn’t mean quite what I mean. He leaped into a very snug, safe place. But the real leap in the dark is to try to find out what has conditioned you all your life and how much of that you can kick over, and try to become your own opposite.
Getting back to Nietzsche, I think that’s really what Nietzsche was trying to do. I think one of the funniest things about Nietzsche is the realization that he was a very shy, timid, celibate man who was so nervous and sensitive he couldn’t even drink coffee, much less alcohol. Most of Nietzsche’s books are an attempt to shake himself up. He was also a very compassionate man. [...]
Literal artificial languages like Esperanto and Ido, and so on, have never caught on because the time wasn’t right for them. They were premature. My hunch, and it’s just a hunch, is that they are not going to catch on. I think the international language will emerge organically from computer networking. It will be a computer language.
I'll end on that last quote. I learned a large amount of Esperanto, and outside of equipping me with the psycholinguistic skills to understand various facets of learning a language, it hasn't served me much and mostly slipped into willing decay in my memory storage.
felecia's review
4.0
Quite the wild ride. Not my normal fare, but it was a recommendation by the hubby, who has a bit of a fascination forr Robert Anton Wilson.
felecia's review against another edition
4.0
Quite the wild ride. Not my normal fare, but it was a recommendation by the hubby, who has a bit of a fascination forr Robert Anton Wilson.
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