The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

  Except for Hagen’s girl, the Beauty Witch. It seems like she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”—finishing off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and it is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

STARK-NAKED

in a black blanket—

Reaching out for herself,

she woke up one morning to

find herself accosted on all

sides by    LARGE

                 MEN

surrounding her threatening her

with their voices, their presence, their always

desire reaching inside herself

and touching her obscenely upon her

desire and causing her to laugh

and

         LAUGH

with the utter

ridiculousness

of it...

—but no one denied her a moment of it, neither the conked-out bug-eyed paranoia nor the manic keening coming on, nobody denied her, and she could wail, nobody tried to cool that inflamed brain that was now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing goddamn—stop it!—currents of the bus throgging and roaring 70 miles an hour into Texas, for it was like it had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise up negative about anything, one was to go positive with everything—go with the flow—everyone’s cool was to be tested, and to shout, No, no matter what happened, was to fail. And hadn’t Kesey passed the test first of all? Hadn’t Babbs taken Gretchen Fetchin, and did he come back at either one of them uptight over that? And wasn’t it Walker who was calling La Honda from the Servicenters of America? All true, and go with the flow. And they went with the flow, the whole goddamn flow of America. The bus barrels into the superhighway toll stations and the microphones on top of the bus pick up all the clacking and ringing and the mumbling by the toll-station attendant and the brakes squeaking and the gears shifting, all the sounds of the true America that are screened out everywhere else, it all came amplified back inside the bus, while Hagen’s camera picked up the faces, the faces in Phoenix, the cops, the service-station owners, the stragglers and the strugglers of America, all laboring in their movie, and it was all captured and kept, piling up, inside the bus. Barreling across America with the microphones picking it all up, the whole roar, and microphone up top gets eerie in a great rush and then skakkkkkkkkkkkkkkk it is ripping and roaring over asphalt and thok it’s gone, no sound at all. The microphone has somehow ripped loose on top of the bus and hit the roadway and dragged along until it snapped off entirely—and Sandy can’t believe it. He keeps waiting for somebody to tell Cassady to stop and go back and get the microphone, because this was something Sandy had rigged up with great love and time, it was his thing, his part of the power—but instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made—“Wowwwwwwwww! Did you—wowwwwwww”—as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing, the sound of an object, a microphone, hitting the American asphalt, the open road at 70 miles an hour, like if it was all there on tape they would have the instant, the moment, of anything, anyone ripped out of the flow and hitting the Great Superhighway at 70 miles an hour—and they had it on tape—and played it back in variable lag skakkkkkk-akkk-akkkk-akkkoooooooooooo.

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooo—Stark Naked waxing weirder and weirder, huddled in the black blanket shivering, then out, bobbing wraith, her little deep red aureola bobbing in the crazed vibrations—finally they pull into Houston and head for Larry McMurtry’s house. They pull up to McMurtry’s house, in the suburbs, and the door of the house opens and out comes McMurtry, a slight, slightly wan, kindly-looking shy-looking guy, ambling out, with his little boy, his son, and Cassady opens the door of the bus so everybody can get off, and suddenly Stark Naked shrieks out: “Frankie! Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!”—this being the name of her own divorced-off little boy—and she whips off the blanket and leaps off the bus and out into the suburbs of Houston, Texas, scoops him up and presses him to her skinny breast, crying and shrieking, “Frankie! oh Frankie! my little Frankie! oh! oh! oh!”—while McMurtry doesn’t know what in the name of hell to do, reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, “Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!”— 

  —while the Pranksters, spilling out of the bus—stop. The bus is stopped. No roar, no crazed bounce or vibrations, no crazed car beams, no tapes, no microphones. Only Stark Naked, with somebody else’s little boy in her arms, is bouncing and vibrating.

  And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—which one of us even knows her?—had completed her trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad.

RIP Larry McMurtry, June 3, 1936 — March 25, 2021

RSV Endnote to the Gospel of Mark

 

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account Of Native People, Thomas King

A pervasive myth in North America supposes that Native people and Native culture are trapped in a state of stasis. Those who subscribe to it imagine that, like Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot, Natives were unable to move forward along the linear continuum of civilization, that we were waiting for someone to come along and lead us in the right direction. To free us from ourselves.

In Beckett’s play, as everyone knows, Godot never arrives. In the Native version, Europeans never leave. In some ways, I envy Vladimir and Estragon. Who knows what unfortunate turns their lives might have taken had Godot managed to land on their shores?

Off to the Side, Jim Harrison

FAMILY

Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Michigan, on the banks of the Muskegon River. When young we children were somewhat embarrassed to hear the story of our parents’ probably feverish collision on a summer evening early in the Great Depression. The river has to slide past until we ourselves are in love and bent on mating with the scant ability to lift our eyelids high enough to see that it happens to nearly everyone. Norma was a very strong and somewhat irascible character and remained that way until her death at eight-five. Winfield was obsessively hardworking, playful but melancholy. He must have been troubled at the time because he had worked his way through Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1932, but the convulsed economy only allowed him a job driving a beer truck and he was lucky to get that. I think I was twelve and we were trout fishing when he told me that I had nearly missed existing. One hot summer day on a hangover he had taken an after-lunch nap in the shade underneath the beer truck. His employer had driven by with a friend, seen his abandoned truck with its valuable cargo, and driven the truck off, a back tire slightly grazing my father’s head.

A close call with nonexistence, a vaguely stimulating idea until I think of the nonexistence of my brothers and sisters and my children. At the time, though, of first hearing the story while driving home from the Pine River, it seemed part of the carelessness of adults similar to my uncles drinking a case of beer while fishing and falling off the dock into the lake at the cabin in a semi-stupor. My father’s younger brothers, Walter and Arthur, had had a long and tough time in the South Pacific during World War II and their general behavior was never up to my mother’s high standards. My father’s side of the family was verbally witty and Walt and Artie’s talk was full of sexual badinage, some of which puzzled me at the time. Of course their wives, Audrey and Barbara, were young and you could imagine how much passion got saved up during four years in the armed services on ships with thousands of other men all mooning for home.

For a boy forced to attend church and Sunday school every week there is the fuzzy paradox of Bible lessons not jibing with what he hears and sees. One part of him feels slightly priggish about the behavior of adults. Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. And the other part of the boy is sunk in his growing knowledge of the natural world and farm life where the sexual lives of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows is an open book, not to speak of the tingly warmth he feels when there’s a glance up a girl’s skirt at school or when he sees by happenstance a lovely aunt’s breast while she’s squeezing in or out of a bathing suit at the cabin. I’ve always been a bit cynical about the existence of the Oedipus complex but having a number of attractive aunts can be tough and dreamy at the same time. Your sense of wrong and right is tenuous and you drift around in a goofy haze of instinctual curiosity with your hard little weenie an almost acceptable embarrassment. At the time I was amazed at my childhood friend David Kilmer, who would heroically pursue the quest. David was a doctor’s son with an ample allowance and would bribe certain girls with a quarter for an inspection, or their somewhat retarded housemaid a couple of bucks for a peek. I recall he wasn’t the least bit fixated, spending most of the time fishing, killing frogs and turtles, repairing an Evinrude outboard, riding his bike off a gangplank at the end of their long dock under the erroneous assumption that he would truly fly through the air. It was, however, my decision to quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books. A woman is included in the book only if something has gone “haywire,” we agreed, and the photos weren’t pretty.

There is a specific melancholy to hardship that accrues later as a collection of gestures, glances, and dire events. I don’t remember anyone ever saying life is hard but it was hard to a child in other puzzling ways, say at Great-uncle Nelse’s shack when we joined him in eating possum, beaver, and raccoon, and I asked my dad why Nelse ate such strange things and he said, “He came up short on beef.” I do remember Nelse embracing the keg of herring we brought him for Christmas, the salt brine soaking through the slats enough so that the wood was grainy with crystals to the touch. Nelse had been unhappily in love, rejected in his twenties, and retreated to the woods forever.

Neil Peart, Far & Away: A Prize Every Time

“I was ‘far and away’ riding my motorcycle along an american back road, skiing through the snowy Quebec woods, or lying awake in a backwater motel. The theme I was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and I was pretty sure I had defined it: love and respect.

Love and respect, love and respect — I have been carrying those words around with me for two years, daring to consider that perhaps they convey the real meaning of life. Beyond basic survival needs, everybody wants to be loved and respected. And neither is any good without the other. Love without respect can be as cold as pity; respect without love can be as grim as fear.

Love and respect are the values in life that most contribute to “the pursuit of happiness” — and after, they are the greatest legacy we can leave behind. It’s an elegy you’d like to hear with your own ears: “You were loved and respected."

If even one person can say that about you, it’s a worthy achievement, and if you can multiply that many times — well, that is true success.

Among materialists, a certain bumper sticker is emblematic: “He who dies with the most toys wins!”

Well, no — he or she who dies with the most love and respect wins...

Then there’s love and respect for oneself — equally hard to achieve and maintain. Most of us, deep down, are not as proud of ourselves as we might pretend, and the goal of bettering ourselves — at least partly by earning the love and respect of others — is a lifelong struggle.

Philo of Alexandria gave us that generous principle that we have somehow succeeded in mostly ignoring for 2,000 years: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

1952-2020

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

“What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?” Hiro says. “They were still running the country, right?”

“The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time there were three groups of Jews, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”

“I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices always hassling Christ.”

“They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”

“He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”

“That sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at — but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”

“Who were the other two guys?”

“The Sadducees were materialists.”

“Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”

“No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world — hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”

“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”

The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”

“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking  that I have to believe in a binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”

“How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however. Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing — this pivotal separation between being and non-being — is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European word meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”

“Tell me about the third group — the Essenes.”

“They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not by miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of the body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”

“Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”

“Speculation is not in my ambit.”

“Speaking of which — Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called nam-shub. What does that mean?”

“Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian. Used in Mesopotamia from roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.”

“Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?”

“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words — very unusual.”

“You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”

“Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.

“Has anyone figured out what the word ‘nam-shub’ means in Sumerian?”

“Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”

“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”

The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’”

High Weirdness, Erik Davis

Let's take, as an example, the attempted levitation of the Pentagon in 1967. A week or so before Halloween, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including New Left activists, pacifists, and hippies, massed in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war. After hearing speeches on the Mall by civil rights leaders and Dr. Benjamin Spock, around 50,000 people set off towards the Pentagon. Among the crowd was what the East Village Other enumerated as “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen.” The very diversity and excess of this sacral list already tells us something: not only were spiritual practitioners present in force, but they were manifesting what historian James Webb calls an “illuminated politics.” Allen Ginsberg led Buddhist chants, Hare Krishnas danced with their ringing chimes, the New York underground folk group the Fugs led a (partly?) tongue-in-cheek exorcism, while the West Coast experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger performed hidden magickal rites without the slightest bit of irony. On the one hand, the attempted levitation of the building — which somehow also involved turning it orange — fits in with what Todd Gitlin described as the Yippie “politics of display,” of ludic and media-savvy pranks. But the levitation was not just nightly news theater; for some participants at least, it was also mass ritual magic, however carnivalesque. As such, the event became an icon for heterodox politics of consciousness that was at once oppositional, playful, and enchanted.

[Robert Anton] Wilson and [Robert] Shea capture this ontological politics in one of the great set pieces in Illuminatus!: an extended scene, set at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, that takes up much of the first novel of the trilogy. During the convention, the future Confrontations editor Joe Malik — who, like Wilson, was an “ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic” — overcomes his skepticism and embraces the esoteric radicalism represented by a wild freak named Simon Moon. After his conversion, Malik “was game — for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.”

Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.