part0007

So, anyway, the incandescent and exquisitely mad Daisy Eris Campbell sent me the requested photo of her rainbow-coloured knickers as worn by the bronze bust of Carl Gustav Jung, which stands not far from the converging Liverpudlian streets glimpsed in Jung’s vision of the city as the pool of life itself. Where once the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool had stood, this was also the former site of both the Cavern Club and Eric’s – Bunnymen and Beatles within spitting distance of the man who built a theory of coincidence from ordinary pun-free beetles tapping at his study window. It was also the location from which Daisy had elected to announce her epic follow-up to her late dad Ken Campbell’s legendary 24-hour-long production of Wilson and Shea’s three-part Illuminatus! , this being a similarly complex piece of psychedelic theatre modeled upon Robert Anton Wilson’s subsequent and equally hallucinatory Cosmic Trigger trilogy. Following the announcement and in company of our friends the delinquent authors Ali Fruish and John Higgs, Daisy intended to pop down to the Swiss archetype-wrangler’s bust, there to deposit the aforesaid undergarments on his brazen head. She’d told me of her plan while we were filming and recording my own contributions to her new extravaganza, in the roles of the omniscient I-Ching slinging computer FUCKUP – voiced in the original production, I’m sure adequately, by this country’s previous leading thespian, Sir John Gielgud – and the fallen angel Satan, both performances for which I was undoubtedly born ready. The reason I was so keenly supportive of Daisy’s polychromatic act of vandalism, and had asked for photographic evidence, was a longstanding grievance that I had with the professor over his unseemly cavalier approach towards a valued fellow long-term resident of my own town, Northampton, but we can come back to that at some point later. I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I first encountered Robert Anton Wilson’s writing in the Day-Glo punk fizz of the middle 1970s, a period when I was reconnecting with my teenage mentor, cherished friend and, it turned out, card-carrying Discordian pope Steve Moore after some years of bill-paying office work and marriage on my own part, during which we’d been less frequently in touch. Steve seemed, to me, to be continually positioned at the very centre of the latest and most interesting fringe ideas, and was at this point heavily involved with that heroic nexus of intriguing oddness, The Fortean Times . In getting reacquainted we were keen to trade enthusiasms cultivated since the last time that we’d seen each other, with me anxious to communicate my love for Edward Gorey, Richard Brautigan or Brian Eno, while Steve brought me up to date with an array of Fortean considerations, I-Ching scholarship, and the Illuminatus trilogy, which Steve was kind enough to loan me and which, I’m ashamed to say, I don’t recall returning to him. In my own defence, my consciousness had just been processed through the blender of Wilson and Shea’s uproarious work, surely a gateway drug for postmodern anarcho-occultism, and my moral compass may have been disrupted by the resultant electromagnetic pulse.

Being a standard issue counterculture remnant of that period, I was primed to some degree by my previous readings – Burroughs, Leary, Pynchon, Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence – but was still staggered by the authors’ dazzling act of synthesis; the way they’d reinvented the neurotic sucking-bogs of paranoia and conspiracy as an illuminating intellectual game; how they’d transformed the debris of the psychedelic Left, its by-then threadbare touchstones and cannabinated folklore, into an exhilarating and empowering conceptual mosaic which connected previously isolated notions in a crackling synaptic web. Also, the scandalously funny narrative appeared to offer a new and sophisticated way of viewing magic which did not involve forfeiting rationality in favour of some frankly ludicrous pseudo-philosophy or other, and which apparently did not require an amputation of the sense of humour. Smitten, as in retrospect so many others must have been, I launched myself on an obsessive quest for any fresh Wilson material I could find, including any publications to which he’d appended an obliging cover-blurb. At this point, let us introduce a training montage in which I’m depicted gazing cretinously at a run of Robert Anton Wilson titles for some twenty years, until a slowly-dawning smile of comprehension breaks across my features and all my associates laugh and cheer and slap me on the back. This brings us up to 1996 and my discovery of RAW’s Coincidance .

The intervening decades had seen many startling changes in the wider world and in my own personal circumstances, not the least of these having been my partially Wilson-influenced decision just a couple of years earlier to redefine myself as some variety of practicing magician. The shift of perspective, which had been perhaps the most immediate consequence of this experience, meant that I was at that time re-examining occult works which had previously been opaque or only partly understood to find they now made sudden, vivid sense. This, arguably, was the best possible humour in which to approach Coincidance – not as a piece of intellectual theory to distantly contemplate, but as a practical guide to the stupefying Hermann Hesse Magic Theatre of the mind that I’d but lately blundered into. Recommended by its jacket copy as a personal favourite of the author, this new volume promised much and, as I soon discovered, massively over-delivered on those promises.

This, for my money, is the most spectacular non-fiction work that Wilson ever penned, breathtakingly adventurous in both its content and its strikingly experimental form. Uncertain and demonstrably uncaring whether it’s a piece of literary criticism, metaphysical discussion or anthology of diverse esoteric writings, this remarkable compendium is best seen, in the spirit of its title, as a glorious accidental dance of meaning, modernism and mythology. Just as Wilson reveals the dizzying multivalent scope of Joyce’s masterpiece, with every highly localised remark or incident somehow unfolding into the entirety of human history and culture, so too does Coincidance extend its remit into ostensibly unconnected fields of study – Monroe, Sean MacBride, de Sade, computer-generated literature – only to demonstrate their relevance to the book’s overarching thesis in the swoops and the cerebral pirouettes of an exquisite, seemingly spontaneous choreography. As with Finnegans Wake , the reader finds herself caught in an effervescent neurologic rush as disparate areas of information spark together and forge new connections, pointing to a hologram-like vision of reality as Indra’s beaded net, where every bead reflects and is reflected in all of the others.

Count Alfred Korzybski’s work implies that almost all human experience is linguistic in its nature, while recent research has indicated that a scanned brain lights up neurologically when exposed to a new or different use of language. Given that upon examination magic also seems linguistic, as in Aleister Crowley’s (actually J.R.R. Tolkien derived) formulation of it as “a disease of language”, in Coincidance ’s pyrotechnic display of both Joyce and Wilson’s vertiginous prose we are allowed to see and feel that process in dynamic action, with the whirling dervish discourse altering the reader’s consciousness and therefore their reality, using no more than the remarkable and magical technology of some couple of dozen symbols and a peppering of punctuation to accomplish this, a genuine act of sorcery. In Wilson’s phosphorescent reading, the experience of Finnegans Wake becomes almost the direct, inclusive and informed experience of the whole human universe, with its workings less the causal and predictable watch-mechanism of Sir Isaac Newton than they are the mind-like and acausal operations posited by David Bohm; a shimmering web of interlinked events entangled by the principles of something very much like Kammerer, Jung and Pauli’s ‘synchronicity’...which brings us back, via Joyce’s RAYNBOW girls, to Daisy Campbell’s multicoloured knickers and the grievance that I mentioned earlier.

Of the many female presences, corporeal or imaginary, that Joyce folded into the sublime plurality of his embodied River Liffey, Anna Livia Plurabelle, surely among the foremost was the only member of his household who shared his delight in arcane Humpty Dumpty wordplay, this being his daughter Lucia (who referred to a visiting Ezra Pound as “Signor Sterlino”). Lucia Joyce, an Isadora Duncan-schooled dancer who set Paris alight in the 1920s – it was predicted that James would be best remembered as her father – had undisclosed anger issues with her mother, Nora, and her older brother Giorgio that would see her, perhaps too hastily, characterised as mentally unstable and condemned to a life of institutionalised care and apparently unhelpful psychiatric examination. James Joyce perished of peritonitis while still trying frantically to extricate his sanatorium-stuck daughter from a France that had been occupied by Nazis promising to cull the mentally and physically substandard, following which her mother and her brother never got in touch with her again. Passed from asylum to asylum, Lucia finally landed in St. Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, in the March of 1951 and would remain there till her death in the last month of 1982, there all the years when I was a reluctant pupil at the Grammar School next door, since then at rest in Kingsthorpe Cemetery near her fellow inmate Violet Gibson, committed after shooting Mussolini in the nostril, and a surely coincidental Mr. Finnegan. This, by the way, is where my wife Melinda Gebbie and I hope to be eventually interred, among this dancing, language-mashing, fascist-blasting company.

One of the many psychiatric sages charged with analyzing Lucia’s behaviour was Carl Gustav Jung, and her impression of his working practices left much to be desired. It seems that Jung had fundamental disagreements with James Joyce about the way that dreams should be portrayed, and criticised the author’s (purely literary) use of dreams and dreaming on the grounds that Joyce’s artfully constructed phantasms did not adhere to Jung’s own theories with regard to the unconscious mind. In Lucia’s opinion, rather than perceiving her as a young woman in dire need of psychiatric help, Jung had instead preferred to treat her as another opus of her father’s, one requiring criticism and correction rather than compassion. There’s an irony in Carl Jung, one of synchronicity’s godparents, being also a pair of the careless hands that let a fluid, dancing spirit slip into a dead grey purgatory of phenothiazine, and let the riverrun, eventually, to earth in Kingsthorpe Cemetery by a commodious vicus of recirculation. Certainly, since re-reading Coincidance , it is an irony that I’m more able to appreciate, although I still think the professor thoroughly deserved a symbol of prismatic womanhood pulled down over his eyes like a Freemason’s hoodwink.

Coincidance , like Joyce’s book before it, is an ecstatic, circling pavane that effortlessly spirals outward to contain the reader’s own world in its widening orbit. Inspiring, revelatory, ridiculous, insightful, this is perhaps Wilson’s finest work and, like all of his others, its enlightenments and its profundities are caught up in a circus cavalcade of extraordinary characters and startling information, a magnificent complexity that’s made immediately explicate by Wilson’s playful, deceptively casual and beautifully lucid style. Reagan and Crowley and Monroe gavotte and tango through these pages: Fools, Magicians and High Priestesses in a torrential pro/confusion, but in Robert Anton Wilson’s hands, why, all of it is rendered as semper as oxhousehumper.