(Previously posted on MySpace May 20, 2008. I don't know about you, but it's one of my personal favorites.)
Some time ago †Ra's Al Ghul† asked me about how Robert Anton Wilson affected my life and thought. I'd never gotten around to answering it, so here's my first attempt at doing so.
First, an aside: Some psychologists seem to think that how we process the information we get from the world around us, how we determine what is and is not important, just how important is that information or experience, etc is a sort of flexible until we reach the age of ten. At that point, according to this idea, how someone learns something is then set for life. Note that the proponents of this idea aren't saying that we really stop learning new things at the age of ten, but that HOW we learn new things (and perhaps how enthusiastic we are about doing so) gets "hardwired" around that age.[1]
Anyway, when I was ten I spent the summer with my father in MA and was not looking forward to returning to live with my grandmother in MS during the school year. During one of my usual little ten-year old funks I came across Mad Magazine Super Special 25 lying around on my dad's coffee table. I'd always been curious about Mad Magazine as I passed it in the stands in the supermarket, so I had taken this opportunity to satisfy my curiosity.
It should be said at this point that this was in 1978, a summer that even a year later would stick in my mind as something quite pivotal in my life. MAD Magazine (supplemented by Saturday Night Live which I'd discover a short time later) was my introduction to political and social satire and the finger that pointed ten-year old me towards establishing an identity distinct from that of parents' generation. As a ten year old who had a large chunk of his childhood in the conformist south, MAD jammed a wedge into a door in my brain that life in the South just might have tricked me into closing for good. Before innocuously opening those pages—no before even setting my eyes on Don Martin's rock music cover, I had no idea just insipid advertising really was, how idiotic political leaders and other authority figures could be, and just how moronic (one of the many words I learned from MAD, thank you very much) popular culture often was when someone simply SAW it instead of just passively allowing it to enter your sensory organs and wash your brains out your ears. In short, it showed me just how much the things I'd previously been encouraged to accept as normal were actually stupid, bland, and/or (perhaps most importantly here) woefully unimaginative. And the artists and writers did it in a manner that made a ten-year old kid LAUGH, guaranteeing that those seeds of subversive thought would stay planted inside his head in a way that no amount of serious revolutionary pedagogy (this was still the seventies, after all) ever could and ever did since then.
It hit my brain like a drug. No, let's drop the metaphors; it WAS a drug. It did some real electrochemical rearranging in my head the way a drug would have done. There was no way I was going to go back to being normal, especially since my brain hit that ten-year mark I was telling you about earlier. Even though, I had made a half-hearted show of joining my grandmother's church when I was 11, organized religion never really had much of chance inside my skull. The conflict between questioning everything (often in a rather smart-alecky way) and the guilt-and-fear-driven brand of charismatic religion I encountered growing up caused too many internal conflicts for me. Guess which one got to keep the really cool penthouse studio loft in my head.
During that same year, I discovered "Saturday Night Live" and this was back when it still irked, shocked, and sometimes made a wee bit nervous the kind of people more sympathetic to authority and normalcy. I really dug it too, but SNL was a really good chocolate-loaded mocha latte with extra caffeine laced into the whip cream. A great stimulant, but that MAD Magazine Super Special 25 was my first acid trip.
Walking through that door in my head, going through that transition from non-awareness to less non-awareness, when I was 10 had become a major (if subconscious) motif of my life. Much of the type of writing I'd done and the things I'd say to people at time were done in the spirit of inducing just a little of that spirit in others. Those attempts were often clumsy and off-the-mark, as one could expect from a kid just beginning to learn about life and relating to people (as opposed to an adult just beginning to learn about life and relating to people).
But things changed. Maybe it was because I'd gotten older or maybe it was because certain other elements had gained control of MAD and SNL. Maybe it was simply the case that I had learned that certain something from them and it was time for me to move on to the next class. Whatever the reason, that body of work and I had amiably parted ways. After creatively and emotionally acknowledging the foundations laid, I set about slowly building the house that was my reality tunnel (a term that I really wouldn't learn until I was twenty, but I'm getting ahead of myself).
Happily during the eighties (from junior high school to early college years in my life), newspaper funnies like Bloom County and the Far Side filled roles in my life almost isomorphic to MAD and SNL. By the time, I'd discovered Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker books, Heller's Catch-22, Richard Pryor concerts, and many of Vonnegut's works; MAD had already gotten me mentally ready for them.
Eventually, I'd graduated high school and attended Mississippi College(owned by the Mississippi Baptist Convention). After two years there, I transferred to Oberlin College because of that aforementioned epiphany that I was never going to cut it in God's army (and MC at the time of my attendance was far less strict about things than, say, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, a big a contradiction in terms as I've ever heard).
At Oberlin, I lived most of the time at Lord-Saunders, a.k.a. the African Heritage House (or most affectionately, simply "The House"). It was here I managed the extremely difficult feat of somehow failing to get laid while being a student at Oberlin College (Trust me, if you're a twenty-year old male with normally functioning hormones and are not actually trying to maintain your virginity, accomplishing this requires that you be a TREMENDOUS loser. Here's a hint: hanging out Friday night alone in a booth at the Rat and hoping some female comes along and offers you a pity fuck does NOT work very reliably).
Another thing I learned is that I'd have made a very lousy revolutionary in the typical Black Power movement. For those of you who knew me way back then, please understand that I love (well, some of) you folks and I know much of my material hadn't been all that great at the time, but some of those so-called revolutionaries gave me the creeps. I got (and sometimes still have) the funny feeling that if the radical thinkers I'd come across in the House ever managed to get the world the way they'd wanted it, I'd be among the first people they'd want to be rid of. There was no way in hell I'd want to live in the world of their dreams. Took themselves WAY too seriously. Just thought I say.
Anyway, my life (good and bad) with the House, the campus political protest de jour (one wit there who wasn't me once quipped that holding protesting Reagan's Contra War on the steps of Wilder Hall [2] was like the Baptist Church sending missionaries to the Vatican), Spartacus Youth Club (supposedly a pro-socialist group that was so smug and obnoxious that student were sure was a front for the CIA), and certain other parts of being an Obie had pretty much ruined any chances the Left had of ever getting me to join the cause heart-and-soul. Likewise, my time at Mississippi College (which capped my earlier childhood growing up in the Bible Belt) had pretty much killed any chances of me ever aligning myself with the conservative crowd. Due to much of my experience had been sifted through the interpretation mechanism set up by the all the satire I'd absorbed into my head, it had become viscerally clear that there was something wrong with the whole left/right political dichotomy. It was too much of a Procrustean bed for my way of thinking. It seemed that other people around were feeling the same way but were succumbing to the drive to fit in [3]. This was my social and psychological world when I encountered Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy.
This is the book that reminded me (without my realizing it until then) that I'd been wishing for another "aha" moment evocative of that mind-blowing one that MAD magazine had surprised me. Of course, my brain had soon accustomed itself to the experience and I'd long since accustomed myself to the fact that there'd be no way that I could replicate the frisson I'd gotten from the "newness" of the whole thing (I wonder if this was what McKenna meant by novelty).
It turned out I was wrong. This book not only served as the adult version of that experience, it set me on the road to learning how to use my brain to create my own (I really hadn't started to figure out that bit until my early thirties, but the book pointed me in the right direction). It was how I not only really began learning how to critical consider other people's ideas but how to catch myself when I'm full of shit. I don't mean an intellectual's type of humility. I mean the kind of self-examination that makes you want to sneak past mirrors without making eye contact.
While MAD and SNL showed me that the orderly and normal weren't necessarily always good, Wilson and Shea showed me that chaotic and unusual were not necessarily always bad. Again, I had known that kind of thing somewhat intellectually from before, but now I'd been shown how stream of consciousness, Burrough's cut-and-paste approach, and certain aspects of postmodernism could be beneficial if used conscientiously. Wilson's writings opened my head to subjects that I had passed .. such as the works of the aforementioned William Burroughs, Discordianism, the occult, cognitive psychology, history, ontology (the works of Wilson is where I first heard of the phrase "reality tunnel"), modern art…you can fill in the blanks here with whatever you choose.
A point I'd like to touch upon here is that I learned to use ideas instead of letting them use me. My own experience with postmodernism, for example, is that it's great for breaking up old thought patterns that simply don't serve much of a purpose for me any more. As someone with a little scientific background, I think rigor and structure in one's thinking is vitally important. But too many people's mindsets get so calcified that it constricts their thinking. Philosophical attacks on old ways of thinking can be great for breaking up and clearing out obsolete mental scaffolding. But the point of that is so that I can then build up a newer kind of internal structure that would work better for me. I don't stick with the same old worldview, no matter how obvious it's become useless; that seems to me to be letting the idea of traditionalism (or its worst exaggeration) use me. And I don't just demolish an old idea no matter how useful it is and claim that any world view is as good as another; that seems to me to be letting postmodernism (or its worst exaggeration) use me.
Anyway, that's one of the influences Wilson's works had had on my life. And he made me laugh while he did it.
You can wake up now, Ra's. I'm finished for the day.
[1] This idea seems related (but certainly not the same as) the idea suggested by a scientific study that after the age of ten a child's peers have more influence on a child's personality than the parents. Some of you may have heard of it. I noticed that the Common Senseless Brigade got all up in arms about this (I'm not trying to mock people who actually use common sense; I'm talking about the more benighted among us who confuse common sense with a lack of patience for nuance, thinking beyond the superficial and the extremely obvious, or just plain PAYING ATTENTION TO WHAT OTHERS ARE ACTUALLY SAYING RATHER THAN SOME MORE EASILY DISPUTED DISTORTION OF IT). Building up their usual straw man of the stereotypical scientist with no grip on "reality", this CSB got the story all twisted, claiming that these psychologists were saying that parents had no influence at all. I've lost track of how many times I had to remind some of the people around me that "No, no, no. They didn't say that. Listen carefully." In fact, the study seems to me to suggest that parents have a lot of influence on their kids BEFORE they reach the age of ten." And in this matter, I really ought to defer to the opinion of my readers who are actually raising children. But I'm taking a wild guess that if someone had neglected his or her child for the first ten years of life, it's probably going to be very difficult (at best) to talk them out of taking that starring role on the next episode of Cops or America's Most Wanted.
[2] Oberlin College's Student Union
[3]This was 1988, an election year. It was the Democrats' chance to put someone in the White House to undo all the Reagan years. And except for around the seven openly Republican students, Reagan was Anathema Personified among the Oberlin College student body. Lenora Felani, an African-American woman had managed to pique a little interest among the more really radical students here with her presidential campaign, but the social pressure was on to hold one's nose and vote for Dukakis. Even before that photo tanked Dukakis's election chances and he subsequently got his ass kicked in the election, a lot of the leftists and progressives around Oberlin when I had been attending had seemed like such a cheerless and humorless bunch (and being humorless is NOT the same thing as being serious.)
© Copyright 2006-2010 Anthony Anderson
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