"What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises," Simon had said, "and insanity is the only viable alternative." That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.
"About that 23," Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.
"It's everywhere," was the instant reply. "I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists died on the 23rd day of some month or other—Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23—and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot on 23rd Street—and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did, in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days, you'll find he couldn't get away from the 23 Principle, because 23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. 'Nova heat moving in,' dig?
And the world began on October 23, in 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and—"
There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter W—23rd in the alphabet— and its presence in the words "woman" and "womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.
"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax— original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction myths— all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course— nobody is nutty enough to deny that—but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the founda tions. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."
"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true. .
. ."
"It's all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the deeds in the government offices, and they won't dare move onto a square of ground if one of the deeds says somebody else owns it. It's a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. That's the unpredictable elements, dads: the erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: 'People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.' They can't feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else.
If you don't want to call it magic, call it counterconditioning, but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology, demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig? Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto: 'total transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.' They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge, founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street and Hitler and Stalin, through witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they've cast on everybody's mind. All hail Discordia! Do you read me?"
When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I've been listening to a spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I will believe him. And that's how insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative.
With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud Cuckoo Land.
--from The Illuminatus Trilolgy, we got it in pdf if anyone wants/needs it:
http://brainsturbator.com/pdf/Robert%20 ... rilogy.pdf
by Rigorous Intuition » Tue May 02, 2006 10:01 pm 
