Illuminatus online reading group, Week Six

Antioch Hall at the reopened Antioch College

This week: Page 52 "Saul picked up the ninth memo" to Page 63 "the shadows of Maya."

This section of Illuminatus! introduces one of the major themes of the novel. Given the fact that libertarians and anarchists are doomed, at least in the short term, to live in a statist world ("those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers" page 58) there is only so much that the libertarian or anarchist can accomplish in the world around him; the task therefore becomes to free yourself, or at least free your mind.

Here is the key passage on pages 62 and 63, after Simon Moon has listened to  his anarchist parents argue:

"You're both wrong," I said. "Freedom won't come through love, and it won't come through Force. It will come through the Imagination." I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. 

Libertarians always have plenty to complain about, of course, but 1969, when Wilson and Shea began Illuminatus!, was a particularly bad time. The Indochina war raged in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and Americans were being drafted to participate in a war that many of them regarded as unjust. Science fiction writer William Gibson was among those Americans who went to Canada to avoid participating in the Vietnam War; years later, RAW read Gibson at the behest of a friend who was trying to keep RAW current on the science fiction scene.

Perhaps partially because they were reacting against a horrible war, many anarchists and artists in the 1960s had a renewed interest in surrealism, which was at least in part the stepchild of dadaism, which was born amid the horror of World War I. Moon alludes to this on page 62, "The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city [of Chicago, where Shea and Wilson lived and worked] were in their first surrealist revival just then ..."

Here is a quote from Surrealism founder Andre Breton, "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself." (That's from "The Politics of Surrealism.")

The book is explicit about Simon Moon's use of sex magick as a brain change agent and as a means of escape (page 57) but other libertarians also have talked about the need to escape, or at least separate themselves from everyday reality.

This has given rise to (so far) Utopian schemes such as migrating to space (something that RAW advocated, of course) and setting up libertarian communities in floating cities. A more practical approach was advocated in the late Harry Browne's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, and see also Bryan Caplan's blog post advocating creating a "bubble" for yourself, "Create Your Own Bubble in Ten Easy Steps." (I've tried to follow some of Caplan's advice.)

Neither of these gentlemen were isolated from day to day libertarian issues. Browne ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate. Caplan is very active campaigning for open borders and pacifism. But both have offered practical counsel for living in a statist world with tasks appointed by rulers.

RAW's "mentor" James Joyce had an autobiographical hero, Stephen Dedalus, who adoped "silence, exile and cunning" as a defense against the twin oppressions of the state and the church. Joyce spent much of his exile from Ireland in neutral Switzerland.

The Internet has for years provided a means for escape, not just for libertarians but for many other interest groups who have been able to use it to find each other. The cypherpunks in particular saw encryption as a means to escape the attention of the authorities, although the cypherpunk project has been hampered by the apparent reluctance of even many libertarians to actually use encryption. (Anyone interested in this topic could consider using TAILS and other tools, such as PGP email. If you want to try encrypting your emails, I suggest using Enigmail with Thunderbird as a relatively easy method.)

A few notes on the text:

Page 54, Arthur Flegenheimer. Better known as mobster Dutch Schultz. Expect to read more about his last words.

Page 57, "everything else in my life has been a hallucination." Simon is trying to get her to "wake up."

Page 58, Malaclypse the Younger, e.g Gregory Hill.

Page 61, " ... the orders will still come from Wall Street."

Page 62, "Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs." Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

RAW lived in the Yellow Springs area for two years, an experience he talked about in Cosmic Trigger Volume 2: Down to Earth and  the Lewis Shiner interview:

You grew up in New York, then moved to Ohio. Why Ohio?

I was offered a job editing a magazine for a place called the School for Living, which later moved to Maryland. The School for Living had a very interesting philosophy, which was "back to nature, live on the land, eat health food" — and a bit of anarchism and Wilhelm Reich. I agreed with about half of that and thought the over half was kind of flakey, but it was interesting. I thought it would be a great idea to live on a farm and see how I did at it.

I enjoyed it. We were there for two years.

Were you influenced by your years on the farm?

Yeah, I think so. My children were very young then. I guess the oldest was about eight when we left Ohio. I used to look at the grass and crops and trees and goats and cows and at my children and my wife and myself and think about evolution — all these different types of intelligence. I got fascinated by the intelligence of insects. It turned me into a pantheist. No, pantheist is not correct. The technical word is pan-psych-ist. I became more and more convinced that everything was intelligent.

Next week: Page 63 ("Dad was the first to recover") to Page 73 ("he began thinking of alternate plans.")