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[From The James Joyce Review, vol.3, 1959, pp.8-16]

Joyce and Tao

by Robert Anton Wilson

   Throughout the long day of Ulysses the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus and Mr. Bloom repeatedly return to the East; and this is not without reason. Ulysses is so profoundly Oriental in mood and conception that Carl Jung has recommended it as a new Bible for the white race. Molly Bloom's fervent "Yes" mirrors the author's acceptance of life in its entirety - an acceptance that transcends the dualisms of light and dark, good and evil, beautiful and sordid.

   But every sensitive reader of Ulysses knows that this "acceptance" involved only part of the author's sensibility. The agony, the misanthropy, the (at times) neurotic satire, all testify to Joyce's incomplete realization of what his instincts were trying to tell him. Only in Finnegans Wake does the true Oriental note sing uninterruptedly from beginning to end. The morbid rebel against the most morbid Church in Christendom had to go the long way round to reach the shortest way home. The affirmation of Ulysses is forced (not "insincere" any more than the neurotic's desire to be cured is "insincere"); the affirmation of the Wake engages every level of the author's sensibility, from cortex to cojones - the whole man affirms, as in Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

   The purpose of this present brief essay is to show that the Chinese philosophy of the Tao contributed largely to the shape of Joyce's affirmation. "Laotsey taotsey" (page 242), or Lao-Tse's doctrine of the Tao, explains a great many things about Finnegans Wake : the river -woman symbol, the Shem-Shaun dualism, the special quality of Joyce's humor, the "time" philosophy underlying its form.

That Old Black Magick

             Say the magick word and the duck will come down and pay you S100.     -Marx

In NLW 65, Phil Osborn raises some objections to Bonnie Kaplan's article "Libertarian Magick" (NLW 55). While I am quite sure Kaplan can defend herself, and probably will, I can't resist homing in on the debate myself.

Osborn objects to Kaplan's remark, "And like technicians, magicians do not completely understand why what they do works, but they know it often does." In what follows, I will give Osborn's objections and my comments in the form of a dialogue.

Osborn: Oh, really?

Wilson: Yes, really. Some technicians may think they know why what they do works, but this is due to their defective education. If they questioned a physi­cist about the assumed entities with which they are dealing, they would soon find themselves adrift in an aggravated agnosticism as far from Objectivist dogma as anything in Cab­ala or Tantra is. For instance, Bell's Theorem (1964) quite adamantly de­monstrates that, if quantum mech­anics is true, then we must surrender either objectivity or Einstein's speed-of-light barrier or, quite possibly, both. Since nobody can imagine a physics without quantum mechanics, or without objectivity, or without the speed-of-light barrier, physicists are in a much worse ontological quandary than mere magicians. And yet the technology based on this physics works.

Osborn: How do they know it does? (I.e., how do magicians know magick works?)

Wilson: In the stupidest way possible, by sheer empiricism. This, of course, was the only way anybody knew any­thing (although philosophers had a lot of opinions) before the Revolution of the 17th Century, in which modern science was forged by synergetically combining such primitive empiricism with mathematical-logical method.

The great magicians of that epoch – Paracelsus, Dr. John Dee, Giordana Bruno – were pioneers in this syner­getic wedding of empiricism with mathematics, and offered the best scientific models of how magick works that anybody could produce in that era. Those models are now out of date and magicians are looking for better ones. Meanwhile, empirically, magick continues to work, whether we have a good theory for it or not.

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BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Robert Anton Wilson comments:

I define my writing as guerilla ontology--that is, a literary expression of the discoveries of physical relativity (Einstein), cultural relativity (anthropology), neurological relativity (Korzybski, Leary) and the new head-spaces opened to us by psychedelics, bio-feedback, scientific study of yoga, etc. Each of my books presents not one map of reality, but several; the humor, the suspense, and the philosophical meaning (if any) derive from the search for the one reality, never quite found, which will synthesize or include all the alternative reality-tunnels presented. As in quantum physics, the isolated observer or omniscient narrator does not exist in my world; it is a participatory universe in which each entity projects/creates its own surrounding experiential continuum.

"George, you're too serious. Don't you know how to play? Did you ever think that life is maybe a game? There is no difference between life and a game, you know."

Games of all kinds and at all levels abound throughout Robert Anton Wilson's books. The most famous of his books, Illuminatus, is on one level a detective story, the most formal of literary games, as is Masks of the Illuminati (with a denouement revealed by Albert Einstein and James Joyce yet!) Simultaneously he plays the game of parody (Tolkien, Ian Fleming, and Ayn Rand to name but three) and his own mind-game with the reader, Operation Mindfuck, which tries to break down "the mind-forged manacles" of unconscious dogma, to make the reader move into new points of view: "reality-tunnels" to use Wilson's terms.

Some readers will find that last level, Wilson's philosophical pretensions, ludicrous and absurd. But insofar as he is serious about anything, Wilson is serious about showing people the limits that their own assumptions place on them. To this end Wilson makes a mockery of all political viewpoints (including the capitalist anarchism he espouses) and all religions (including the Discordianism he helped popularise). In his nonfiction he does his best to justify the "Trancedental Agnosticism" that came to him as a result of drinking too deeply of too many Springs of Ultimate Wisdom, from hearing too many Ultimate Truths. Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology are practical handbooks of his peculiar philosophy although The Illuminati Papers and Coincidance may be more easily accesible to the casual reader.

The True Believers who infest these more dogmatic decades may find Wilson's relativism too, too "sixties," but they too are clearly depicted in Wilson's hilarious disection of "normal primate behaviour." He is especially funny concerning "scientific" dogmatism in The New Inquistion, The Widow's Son, and the article "The Persecution and Assasination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi" (reprinted in Right Where You are Sitting Now).

And for those who find the quantum physics (which provides the structure, such as it is, for the Schrodinger's Cat sequence), the philosophy, the literary references and history a little heavy you can just lie back and enjoy the scenery, while Wilson, stealing from any source that pleases him (from Lovecraft and Tolkien to "Elephant Doody Comix") and throwing out the lunatic touches of characterisation that make the patchwork structures of the novels shine.

Wilson's viewpoint is determinedly optimistic (as his subjectivist philosophy would advise) as shown by his essays (in The Illuminati Papers) on the conquest of stupidity and on Buckminster Fuller. Yet there is in his novels alongside the jugglers and buffoons a sense of pain and tragedy that is not diminished by his belief in the pointlessness of suffering. To quote Wilson again: "It isn't true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't
understand it until it makes you cry."
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Protocol I: Highlights of the First Hashish Impression [by Walter Benjamin:] Written 18 December [1927]. 3:30 a.m. http://www.wbenjamin.org/protocol1.html#Protocol%20I

5. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.

6. The comical is not only drawn out of faces but also out of situations. One searches out occasions for laughter. Perhaps it is for that reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as "arranged", as "test": so that one can laugh about it.

7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: for a while at one point, no sooner had I made an assertion than I'd have used the very word in answer to a question merely by the perception ( so to speak) of the length of time in the duration of sound in either of the words. I sense that as poetic evidence.

8. Connection; distinction. Feeling of little wings growing in one's smile. Smiling and flapping as related. One has among other things the feeling of being distinguished because one fancies oneself in such a way that one really doesn't become too deeply involved in anything: however deeply one delves, one always moves on a threshold. Type of toe dance of reason.

9. It is often striking how long the sentences one speaks are. This, too, connected with horizontal expansion and (to be sure) with laughter. The arcade phenomenon is also the long horizontal extension, perhaps combined with the line vanishing into the distant, fleeting, infinitesimal perspective. In such minuteness there would seem to be something linking the representation of the arcade with the laughter. (Compare Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing power of reflection). [2]

10. In a moment of being lost in thought something quite ephemeral arises, like a kind of inclination to stylize [a few words here illegible] one's body by oneself.

11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of transport. Considerable sensitivity towards open doors, loud talk, music.

12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The entrance gates to a world of grotesques seem to open up. I simply prefer not to enter.

13. Heating-oven becomes cat. Mention of the word 'ginger' in setting up the writing table and suddenly there is a fruitstand there, which I immediately recognize as the writing table. I recalled the 1001 Nights.

14. Thought follows thought reluctantly and ponderously.

15. The position which one occupies in the room is not held as firmly as usual. Thus it can suddenly happen --to me it transpired quite fleetingly --that the entire room appears to be full of people.