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Title: Robert Anton Wilson Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: obituary, Robert Anton Wilson, Fifth Estate Source: Retrieved on 7th October 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/375-spring-2007/robert-anton-wilson/ Notes: Published in Fifth Estate #375, Spring 2007.
For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive
basis–i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness–we decided we
were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the
Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister
Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone
awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S.
Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never
materialized–although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF,
together with Rudy Rucker.
There’s no doubt Bob was some sort of anarchist. His earliest interests
and experiences (the School of Living, for example) involved connections
with old-time American Philosophical or Individualist Anarchism of the
Spooner/Tucker variety, and, in fact, this shared background formed the
basis of our friendship.
When Bob was on the road a lot in the ’80s and ’90s doing “stand-up
philosophy” in cities across the US, he visited New York often and after
his lectures he drank with anarchists, libertarians and ceremonial
magicians–his fan base, as it were–although he used to say he could
never join the Libertarian Party because he couldn’t bring himself to
hate poor people enough. He called Libertarians, “Republicans who smoke
dope.”
Bob was a Futurist and I am a Luddite, but after a long series of
letters back and forth we agreed to disagree on the subject of
technology, since neither of us wanted to put ideology in the place of
camaraderie.
We got too much enjoyment out of our shared interests: the Propaganda
Due, Freemasonic Conspiracy, science fiction, “Irish Facts,” as Bob
called his favorite Celtic paradoxes and tall tales, occult and lost
history, pirates, strange science and Fortean phenomena, the Discordian
Church (co-founded with anarcho-taoist Kerry Thornley of the “Universal
Rent Strike,” rip.) — in which he appointed me Pope–because all
Discordians are Popes. (But Bob was The Pope–also his title in the
Church of the Sub-Genius.) Bob was one of the great pub talkers,
probably a lot like Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas (he somewhat resembled
both of them physically).
Liquor and weed for him were bardic fuel.
I’m proud to say I appear–under several guises, alter egos and noms de
plume in one of Bob’s last books, Everything Is Under Control (1998), a
sort of encyclopedia of his favorite conspiracies. Unlike some of his
admirers, Bob never believed in any one conspiracy as more (or less)
real than another. He simply took a chaote’s delight in humanity’s
occasional talent for genuine mystery; and for him, Imagination was a
form of reality. Was he playing or was he serious? Exactly.
In later years, when he cut down on his grueling dada vaudeville
speaking tours and retired to California, we lost touch because Bob
decided to colonize the Internet and I decided not to. Our mutual friend
Eddie Nix kept us linked with warm greetings back and forth. Eddie sent
me print-outs of Bob’s most recent web-page, the Guns & Dope Party
(“because that way we have a majority”)–one of his best stunts or japes.
Founding a political party may not seem a doctrinaire anarchist sort of
thing to do, but Bob was first and deepest a post-Nietzchean homo
ludens, playful man, perpetrator of the lusus seriosus, the “serious
joke.” In his best writing, the Illuminatis! books (starting in 1975,
co-created with the late Bob Shea) for example, R.A.W. approached his
idol James Joyce in sheer ludic intensity, and his other idol Flann
O’Brien in number of laughs per page.
Certainly his works belong to the literature of anarchy, like say Alfred
Jarry’s or Oscar Wilde’s, if not to the literature of anarchism.
Despite a good deal of suffering in life (his childhood polio and the
long sickness of his wife Arlen; the murder of his daughter; and his
dying broke), Bob always appeared cheerful, which is either very good
advertising for Neuro-Linguistic Programming (a theory he developed with
Tim Leary, but which I never quite understood), or else for the
therapeutic virtues of cannabis. For instance, some years back a rumor
was spread maliciously on the Internet that Bob was dead. Instead of
getting annoyed, he had great fun doing the
Reports-of-my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated routine.
I see in R.A.W.’s Wikipedia obituary (sent to me by carrier pigeon from
Fifth Estate’s southern HDQ)–an otherwise lackluster text–that Bob was
equally amused the second and final time as well, telling his
correspondents, “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death
seriously. It seems absurd.”
He died five days later.
Tombeau for R.A.W.
Poem & pomology — false etymology or proto-Indo-European ha-ha? The
small-k kabbalist relishes a poemogranate from the garden in Grenada.
N.E. Vavilov (later denounced by Lysenko, dies in Gulag) discovers Eden
somewhere in Kazakhstan not far from the genetic epicenter of hemp. Noon
blue apples. The Discordian Pope throws out the first ball of the season
over the fence into the Hesperides or Tir na Nog the island of Irish
Facts. Turn down gents your jiggers of Jameson’s.
–P.L.W