It's always a pleasure to meet someone who isn't normally
recognized and tell them you know who they are and that you're an admirer of
their work. Tell Tom Cruise how much you admire his work and yeah, so what else
is new. He's heard it a million times. But I was at a party and the host
introduced me to someone named Gatz Hjortsberg. I asked him if he was any
relation to William Hjortsberg, one of my favorite writers. "I'm William
Hjortsberg," he said, "my friends call me Gatz." Nothing like
getting a compliment from someone who doesn't even know that they're
complimenting you.
Yeah,
we met cute, just like in the movies.
Man
oh man, have you ever read Gray Matters?
Takes place in a giant repository of brains, the only remains of the human
race. Since no one can move, the whole book is thought. An amazing,
entertaining, and very serious piece of science fiction about the workings of
consciousness. Then there's Alp, one
of the funniest and most demented books ever written, featuring mountain
climbing, dwarves, nuns, and cannibalism. His next book, Falling Angel was made into Angel Heart, a pretty good film by Alan
Parker but, of course, not as good as the book.
Hjortsberg
lived on a ranch in Montana. He rarely came to Hollywood and was totally
stunned to meet someone who had actually read his books, which sold dismally
and were out of print. He had flown into town because Ridley Scott was making a
film of his first original screenplay called Legend. I demanded a copy and damned if he didn't give it to me the
next day.
Still
one of the greatest scripts I'd ever read, suckering you into this fairy tale
fantasy world that gets progressively more bizarre, leading to a spectacular
twist ending in which the hero goes to save his girlfriend who has been
kidnapped by a demon from hell, only to find that the demon has changed her
into a dog and is routinely fucking her, which is precisely what they're doing
when he bursts in to rescue her. Not exactly what you expect to happen.
We
hung out a bit for the next few days and I couldn't help but ask. I looked him
in the eyes. "Ridley Scott is making Legend?"
"Yep."
"And
the heroine gets changed into a dog and is fucking the demon when the hero
finds her?"
"Not exactly."
Hollywood rears its ugly head. He didn't have to tell me.
They were going to make his screenplay while incidentally leaving out the
point, the whole Orpheus thing of saving someone from hell only to find out
that they've totally lost the innocence that attracted you to them in the first
place. It was truly an intelligent fairy tale for adults.
But then Ridley Scott came aboard and it was starring Tom
Cruise and the budget was $50 million which was good news because it would look
great and bad because no studio on the planet earth is going to put all that
money into an R-rated fairy tale where the innocent, bright-eyed, unicorn
loving heroine gets fucked not just like a dog but as a dog.
Just
like that, the entire project lost its edge, its irony, its depth, everything
that made me want to see it. Hjortsberg agreed. Scott agreed. The studio
didn't. They were asking him to rewrite the script so that all the kids who
were coming to the film for the unicorns wouldn't be traumatized by the
bestiality, integral to the plot though it may be. He did what I would have
done. He took the money and ran. Hell, if he hadn't rewritten it himself, some
studio hack would have done it for him.
The
film famously bombed and I picture him years later, a bitter old man
complaining to the other octogenarian sharing a room with him in the nursing
home. "Man, Hollywood fucked me over. Legend would have been a hit if
they'd only ended it MY way."
"And
what way was that?" the tired old roommate would ask.
And
he'd tell them and they would slowly edge to the far side of the bed, pick up
the phone, call the nurse, and demand to be moved to another room.
He's been
called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him
"a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and
daring loop-o-planes on the midway of higher consciousness," he calls
himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether Robert Anton Wilson is a
philosopher or a public nuisance is now up to you. His books, The Illuminatus
Trilogy, Schrödinger's Cat, and The Cosmic Trigger all fall somewhere in
between non-fiction and pure fantasy, full of unquestionable facts and quotes
that somehow always add up to utterly preposterous conclusions. This devotion
to eccentricity and breaking down barriers reaches its zenith in The Illuminati
Papers, a book seemingly written by characters from all his other books. It
contains, among other esoterica, a whole page of Haiku by Raymond Chandler in
which Wilson has simply taken short descriptive excerpts from Chandler's work
and reformatted them into beautiful miniature poems.
With all
the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all
personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously
question any and all thoughts they hold dear. His specialty is in analyzing
systems that seem to contradict each other and trying to find the points at
which they do agree. In Prometheus Rising he synthesizes the works of Leary,
Jung, Freud, Sagan, Gurdjieff, Berne, and several others into a general system
that shows how much they have in common, where they disagree, and why. His
newest work, Reality is What You Can Get Away With, reads like a screenplay by
Picasso - it's cubist, outrageous, completely non-linear, constantly startling,
and very funny. All of his books are part of a series; they're cinematic, full
of cross cutting, montages, flashbacks, and flash forwards. But no one seems to
be able to figure out if this new one is a movie or a book since it actively
defies both definitions. He's raised the put-on to the highest art form.
Wilson
holds a Ph.D. in psychology, edited the Playboy Forum for six years, has made a
comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit
Conspiracy), the stage version of his Illuminatus trilogy has been seen in
Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Seattle, Jerusalem, and was performed recently in
Liverpool by the London National Theater in a 12 hour noon to midnight
marathon. His latest play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell has only been seen in Ireland
where Wilson has lived for the past five years. A screenwriting job brought him
to Hollywood recently, where he has been delivering lectures and running
fantasy role-playing encounter groups. These evenings are enlightening,
self-contradictory, very funny, and hazardous to your dogma. We started out
talking about one of his favorite subjects.
DARE
Do you see everything as a conspiracy?
WILSON
No. Somebody once accused me of claiming that everything is
subjective, but I don't make statements about everything, I only make partial
statements. I think conspiracy is very prevalent behavior on this planet. It
even precedes humanity. Lions conspire - one lion will frighten a herd of
antelope to get them running in a certain direction where the other lions will
be waiting there to eat them. That's a conspiracy against antelopes, and I'm
sure the antelopes are very bitter about it. Ants conspire, they seize
territory and drive off interlopers, rats have very vigorous conspiracies, when
a rat from a strange pack gets into a house they'll hunt him down and kill him.
It's just like the mafia, "Don't do anything on our territory."
DARE
Is it possible for a conspiracy to be benign?
WILSON
It would have to be open. The difference between a
conspiracy and an affinity group is that when me and my friends do it it's an
affinity group and when someone we don't like does it it's a conspiracy.
Conspiracies run the literary world, the art world, marijuana arrives here due
to conspiracies. It's a conspiratorial world.
People naturally
form groups and to the extent that they're competing with each other, they try
to hide what they're doing. The best explanation of conspiracy is in The Theory
of Games and Economic Behavior, a very thick mathematical treatise. It explains
that it's very beneficial to have conspiracies in competitive situations - the
bigger an alliance you form, the quicker you move ahead.
The function of
every alliance is to conceal information from the other alliance and to spread
false information, just like in a poker game. You don't want them to know what
hand you've got but you want them to think they know. Poker is the essence of
conspiracy. Everybody's trying to deceive one another. A benevolent conspiracy
would have to be open, without the factor of concealment, and everybody's
invited in. That's the only kind of conspiracy that could really improve the
world.
DARE
So you think that Summit Conferences should be broadcast
live to everybody?
WILSON
Of course. People are so paranoid about the Bilderbergers
because they're so secretive. For all we know they're only getting together to
look at stag movies once a year. The Bilderbergers have a lot of members in
common with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and
the Royal Institute of International Affairs. To a great extent they're
financed by the Rockefellers and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. They're
all part of one gang that meets once a year in secret. They're called the
Bilderbergers because their first meeting was in Bilderberg. They get more
coverage each time they meet because they're so secretive about what they're
doing. They say they're meeting to discuss international harmony and the
peaceful resolution of our problems, but no one's allowed to hear what they're
talking about.
DARE
Would giving away the Bilderberger's secrets make them more
benign?
WILSON
No, it would just make them more paranoid, more devious. My
business is not to expose but to collect comparative exposes so that the
readers can see that conspiracy is normal behavior and that there's no one big
conspiracy that runs everything.
In the '30s, the
Nazis were very much into the theory that the Jewish bankers controlled
everything, and that led to such horror that it became forbidden to think about
conspiracies at all for decades thereafter. The first people who said there was
a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination were all denounced as obstinate nut
cases and wandering loonies. My attitude, after looking at the evidence for a
long time, is that there is no one big conspiracy, that the historians who
refuse to admit conspiracy as a factor in history are just over-reacting to
stupid conspiracy theories.
There really are
conspiracies of varying sizes, but they're so busy fighting each other that
they have nothing to do with us. Most of them are for monetary reasons. There
are conspiracies to decide whose book is going to be reviewed on page one of
the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Often it's the same book in both,
more often than coincidence or even synchronicity can account for. There are
commercial conspiracies to fix prices. Some have ideology or mysticism behind
them. I don't think you can understand history until you understand the element
of poetic whimsy and sheer irrationality in the minds of so called practical
people.
In WW2, both
Churchill and Hitler thought they were in direct communication with God. So did
MacArthur and Patton. Hitler and Mussolini both outlawed Freemasonry in Germany
and Italy. The leaders of the war against them were Roosevelt, a 33rd degree
Freemason, Churchill, another high ranking Freemason, Hoover, the head of the
secret police in America was a 33rd degree Freemason
DARE
What exactly to those degrees stand for?
WILSON
They indicate how many initiations you've gone through.
Actually, any Freemason who is nominated to the presidency of the United States
gets elevated to the 32nd degree right away. Then if he's elected, he's given
the 33rd degree, which is only honorary. The 32nd degree in mainly concerned
with the Knights of Malta, who are the enemies of Freemasonry.
The Freemasons
claim that the Knights of Malta have sworn an oath to stamp out liberalism,
free thought, and restore the total reign of tyranny and superstition that
existed in the dark ages. It's a secret society within the Catholic Church that
doesn't seek publicity at all. Very little is known about it. William Casey of
the CIA was a Knight of Malta, Alexander Haig is a Knight of Malta. According
to Gordon Thomas, an English journalist, the Knights of Malta now act as
couriers between the Vatican and the CIA. His theory is very complicated, but
it illustrates how conspiracies operate in the real world as distinguished from
paranoid fantasy.
The Gray Wolves
are a Muslim fundamentalist group who deal heroin to get money to buy arms to
carry on their campaign to exterminate Israel. They've been very involved in
gunrunning because they have a link with the Bulgarian secret police, who are
very much into selling munitions underground. The KGB uses the Gray Wolves for
operations that, if they're ever blown, can't be traced back to Russia. Roberto
Calvi of Banco Abrosiano was taking a great deal of this heroin money from the
Gray Wolves and the mafia and running it through the Vatican Bank, which
doesn't have to show records to anybody. The Italian government can't examine
their records, it belongs to the government of the state of the Vatican, so
they're the only ones who can look at their own books. If you can get illicit
money into the Vatican Bank, it disappears forever, nobody can find any trace
of it.
The Gray Wolves
had a grudge against the Pope because of his involvement with Calvi, who
embezzled so much money that everybody got swindled. He was found hanging from
a bridge in London, his secretary was pushed from a window at Banco Abrosiano
the same day, a few more executives have died mysteriously since then. Calvi's
partner in the swindles, Michele Sindona, was convicted in this country of 65
counts of stock and currency fraud and faking his own kidnapping to escape
prosecution. Back in Italy, he was convicted of the murder of the examiner
hired to investigate his bank. After that they were going to put him on trial
for conspiracy in 80 murders, but he was poisoned in his cell. All of this is
part of how the Bulgarian secret police hired a killer from the Gray Wolves to
get the Pope.
DARE
Isn't the Pope just a figurehead without much power, sort of
the Gerald Ford of the Vatican?
WILSON
That's not true, the Pope does have a lot of power. Consider
the case of Pope John Paul I. He was a rebel who didn't like the way the church
was being run, and in 1978 he announced that he would be going through a
complete overhaul, throwing out a lot of the old crowd and bringing in new
people. Observatori Politico sent him a list of 115 Freemasons in the Vatican,
including members of P2, who had infiltrated 900 members into the Italian
Government, including the secret police. John Paul ordered an investigation,
and within a few days he was mysteriously found dead.
The Vatican has
never shown a death certificate and no autopsy was performed. They told two
different stories about who found him dead, things disappeared out of his
bedroom that have never been accounted for, including his will, his medicine
bottle, and his glasses. Pecorelli, the editor of Observatori Politico who sent
him the list of P2 and other Freemason members in the Vatican, was shot to
death through the mouth, Mafia fashion, on the streets of Rome a few weeks
later. You can't explain that in terms of one big conspiracy, there are
obviously interlocking and feuding conspiracies - the Mafia, P2, the
Freemasons, the Bulgarian secret police, the CIA, and God knows who else.
Liccio Gelli, the
grandmaster of the P2 Lodge, was on the payroll of the CIA and the KGB. He was
that kind of operator. He disappeared from Italy, which shows how many friends
he had in the police. He showed up in Switzerland a few months later to take
some money out of a bank account, and he was recognized and arrested. The Swiss
put him in a maximum security prison but he was out within two days. One guard
claimed he was hypnotized. The fascinating thing is that if you look at
pictures of Reagan's second inaugural, you'll see Liccio Gelli right next to
Reagan.
Most of this
information can be found in two books, In God's Name by David Yallop, and In
Banks We Trust by Penny Lernoux, which explains how the whole international
banking system interlinks with the heroin and cocaine laundering business that
the Vatican has been running.
DARE
Are you saying the Pope is a drug dealer?
WILSON
The biggest drug laundromat ever busted in this country was
the World Finance Corporation in Miami. The president and several other senior
executives were convicted. Two directors of the bank were allegedly former CIA
agents, but the prosecutors were blocked in Washington when they tried to
investigate the connections between the bank and the CIA.
In any case, the
WFC had all this money going into it from South American countries that are in
the cocaine business, and they sent it to the CIS Alpine Bank in the Bahamas,
which is owned by Archbishop Marcinkus who runs the Vatican Bank, which is
where the money ended up. After that it's in a black hole, it disappears from
human vision forever, most likely ending up in Swiss bank accounts. The profits
from this go towards keeping those dictators in power, maintaining the secret
police and the death squads.
After the second
world war, Liccio Gelli was shrewd enough to start an escape route for Nazi war
criminals, getting them to South America for a fee, giving them new identities,
and complete cover. He kept in touch with them as they found jobs as organizers
of the death squads, doing the same sort of things they did in the '40s, only
now they're doing it for Ronald Reagan and the money is going into the Vatican
Bank. Obviously you can't run a church on just Hail Marys.
The only reason
cocaine is illegal is because there's so much money to be made out of it while
it's illegal. If it were legal, the prices would go way down.
DARE
So Nancy Reagan's whole JUST SAY NO campaign is just a ploy
to keep the prices up?
WILSON
Or sheer stupidity. There's so much money in the cocaine
business that a lot of Latin American governments depend on it for their
survival. The CIA has been in the cocaine business for 20 or 30 years now, and
it's very useful for them to keep it illegal. That way they can use it as a
form of currency that doesn't leave any records. When you hear about big
cocaine busts, those are just renegades, the entrepreneurs who were trying to
work outside of the system.
DARE
You've painted a rather bleak picture of a conspiratorial
world. Are there any positive actions we can take to change things?
WILSON
In my books, I'm trying to show people how to free their own
minds. I think that's the first step. People have got to become less mechanical
and more aware. My books are all constructed as mindfucks, to get the readers
to open their brains up, receive new signals, and come out of their conditioned
patterns of thought and perceptions.
There are a lot
of Utopian ideas in my books that I don't think are impractical at all. I call
them Utopian because they're beyond anything the human race has achieved in the
past, but we're moving incredibly fast. I think there are changes right ahead
of us that are even bigger than the industrial revolution. The human life span
will be doubled by the year 2000 and quadrupled by 2010. One man flew the
Atlantic in 1928, 200 million flew the Atlantic in 1978. Taking that fifty year
time span as a model, people started going into space in the 1960s so by 2010
we should have 200 million going into space every year.
DARE
Are there any existing political systems you admire?
WILSON
Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be
about the most admirable people in Europe. clean streets, a low crime rate, a
general air of high civilization - luxuries for all and a total absence of
slums, poverty, and ugliness. They seem very happy and productive, with one of
the most way out futurist movements in the world. They're the California of
Europe.
I hate to sound
like a Marxist, which I'm not, but the reason you haven't heard about
Scandinavian Socialism is because the media of this country is controlled by
rich people who are scared shitless of socialism. They want Americans to think
there's only one type of socialism, Soviet Communism, which is the kind of
place where dissident scientists get thrown in lunatic asylums, all of which is
true. Americans are paranoid about Russians but Scandinavians regard them with
amusement; they're those backwards people who think that you can only have
socialism by putting all the poets and painters in jail. The Scandinavians
reward their poets and they don't put anyone in jail for dissident political
opinions.
DARE
Aren't you scared of getting in trouble, of finally saying
the one thing you shouldn't have said?
WILSON
We're all living in a world in which one cannot apply one's
highest ideals without getting into a lot of trouble. I've gotten in trouble,
but I haven't gone to jail, which shows I may have more common sense than Tim
Leary. I certainly don't claim to be more intelligent than him. He's the most
intelligent human being I've ever encountered.
DARE
Do you share his conclusions about LSD?
WILSON
LSD breaks up habitual circuits of the brain. It opens new
circuits, breaks down old circuits, and there's no evidence whatsoever that it
destroys brain cells. LSD is very much a meta-programming device, it changes the
basic programs, that's why it's dangerous. It creates acute paranoid states in
bureaucrats who've never used it.
To get the best
out of it needs a scientific or religious approach, one or the other. People
who are just tripping for the fun of it are more likely to imprint a whole new
reality tunnel or personality on themselves that they weren't looking for. If
you're going to do LSD, you should decide the changes you're aiming at and
structure the trip to lead to that kind of change.
There's no doubt
that you can change every part of your personality with LSD, that's why Leary
calls it a re-imprinting drug. It changes basic imprints which are much more
rigid than conditioning. There's no doubt that I am a different person than I
am before I took it.
I was a
statistical materialist before I started experimenting with LSD, that is I
didn't believe the laws of the universe were absolutely deterministic because I
knew enough quantum mechanics to know that it broke them down. But I was still
a statistical materialist, everything could be explained by the accidental
permutations of little hunks of energy that solidify into matter. I was
perfectly satisfied with that explanation of the universe, and I never realized
that I was as dogmatic about it as any Catholic was about their faith. After
LSD impacted on me, I became a total agnostic, and I'm not dogmatic about
anything any more. I know that every system I make up is my own brain making up
a system. None of the systems is big enough to include the whole universe, so
all of my beliefs are only relatively true. Some are undoubtedly wrong because
I'm not that brilliant that I never make a mistake.
There are a lot
of people who don't realize how conceited they are. By asserting with such
certitude the things they believe in, they don't realize that they're saying
"I'm the smartest person in the world, I can answer all the
questions." People like Carl Sagan. I just don't know how he can be so
sure of everything when, by and large, the more intelligent you get, the more
you realize you can't be sure of anything.
DARE
Since Newtonian physics don't apply to sub-atomic particles,
how can you apply logic on the quantum level to objective reality?
WILSON
There's a lot of disagreement among quantum physicists on
that subject, but I am very interested in, and almost believe, the school that
includes David Boem, who was driven out of the United States during the
McCarthy era, and considered the most brilliant pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
There is a
non-locality principal in quantum mechanics, which means that things are
correlated even if they're not connected mechanically or by energy
transmissions. Up until this was discovered, everything in physics could be
explained by energy transfers. You hear me because sound waves move from my
voice to your ear, and so on.
Then they
discovered that there were things that were moving in harmony with each other,
and that there was no way that energy could be getting between them. Energy
can't move faster than speed of light, and yet these actions were instantaneously
correlated. There are several approaches towards understanding non-locality,
but, as Schroedinger put it, the sum total of all minds is one. The appearance
of separate egos is only a hallucination, like that of the flatness of the
earth or the movement of the sun around the earth. These ideas have all been
corrected, and the idea that we're different from the animals has created mass
hysteria. The appearance of separate egos is a hallucination. We are all facets
of one mind.
DARE
But it's a necessary hallucination. You can't play chess
with yourself.
WILSON
It's necessary for the game on this planet that every
organism have a sense of self and a sense of the hive, the pack, it's us
against the rest of them out there. Antland Uber Alles is the song the ants
sing in T.H. White's Merlin stories, and every gene pool has that basic
philosophy, just as every individual has its "self". You can go
through consciousness alterations by means of yoga, certain types of shamanic
magic, and various drugs that teach you how to identify with the gene pool
instead of your private ego. You can get beyond that and identify with the
whole biosphere.
DARE
Can you actually affect your own genetic structure so that
these structural changes can be passed on to other generations?
WILSON
I tend to believe in Sheldrake's morpho-genetic field, in
which he proposes that there's a non-local connection in biology too.
Biologists are denouncing him as a nut and a heretic. Though the first two
experiments to check Sheldrake have tended to very strongly support him,
they've been ruthlessly criticized.
It makes sense
that if you've got non-local connections in physics that you could have them in
biology too. Freud and Jung and Leary have all tried to account for racial
memory or our ability to remember past lives. They've had to posit that somehow
genes are carrying information from one organism to its descendants, but this
part of modern psychology has always been rejected by biologists because
there's lots of evidence that genes can't do that. Freud had racial memory,
Jung had the collective unconscious, Leary has the neurogenetic circuit, but
there's no way any of it can work mechanically, and that's why biologists
reject it. The only way it can work is with Sheldrake's non-local
morpho-genetic field, which, if it exists, would let me send signals that will
be able to effect the genes of future generations, and not just those directly
descended from me. I can control the direction of evolution through thought
forms I'm putting out, and so can everybody else.
People can't stay
in their old reality tunnels any longer, they've got to start accelerating
their brain activity. Very specifically, a world full of Islamic
fundamentalists, Protestant fundamentalists, dogmatic Marxists, and Reaganite
chauvinist Americans is moving us closer and closer to World War III, and the
only thing that's going to head that off is if people stop being mid-western
Methodist bankers or Shuto computer executives or Muslim heroin smugglers and
develop a bigger identity. They've got to get out of these narrow little trips.
Buckminster Fuller used to say that one of the consequences of the traditional
game is nationalism. Planet earth is a spaceship with 150 independent and
sovereign admirals all steering in different directions.
DARE
What is the next stage in evolution?
WILSON
The model I use is adapted from Leary. The oral-bio-survival
circuit is what the amoebas operate on - taste everything. Babies operate on
that too. That's the circuit we go back to whenever we're in danger, and
depending on what we imprinted there, we will either attack or run away.
Then there's
Freud's anal circuit, which has to do with claiming territory and status within
it. That's when we go through the mammalian rituals concerning who runs the
family, outsmarting our brothers and sisters and trying to run the whole show,
imprinting our domination and submission reflexes. It's why people can hold
jobs; their boss becomes a father substitute and they attach all their reflexes
to him.
Next there's the
rational circuit in which we do our abstract reasoning with words and
mathematics, and the sociosexual circuit where we imprint the pattern of how we
relate to people; with what degree of amity or sexuality. Everybody has a
different imprint, and society has only one general set of rules, so everybody
is a heretic as far as that circuit is concerned. Those four circuits are the
natural child, the adoptive child, the adult, and the parent in Berne's system.
Beyond that is
the neurosomatic circuit, where, through yoga or drugs or body work like
Rolfing, one gimmick or another, you are able to turn on to your own body in a
new way, and instead of just reacting to the conditioned and imprinted programs
on the first four circuits, you are able to relax and go with the flow and
enjoy life.
The sixth circuit
is the neurogenetic circuit, which has to do with morpho-genetic resonances,
coming in contact with the experience and religious symbols of your ancestors,
learning that they've been controlling you below the level of consciousness all
your life. This is what Shamanism traditionally deals with. Jungian psychology
was the first attempt to deal with it scientifically, now we've got dozens of
others trying to bring people into harmony with archetypes of the collective
unconscious or genetic heritage.
The next is the
meta-programming circuit, which is learning how the brain can work on the brain,
how you can imprint different identities and reality tunnels as you go along.
Before you get to that circuit, you have no idea what true freedom really is,
you're being manipulated all the time whether you know it or not. It's the
circuit where you develop true choice.
DARE
How do you get there?
WILSON
If you do a lot of work on the 5th and 6th circuits, the 7th
tends to click on. First you get a lot of synchronicities, meaningful
coincidences, accidental reinforcement from your environment, like someone
coming by to loan you a book that's exactly the one you were looking for. Jung
found that his patient's dreams had more and more symbols out of Greek and
Egyptian and Hindu mythology as they progressed into that circuit, even without
studying them consciously. They pulled them out of the collective unconscious,
which I think is actually the morphogenetic field.
Above that
there's the non-local quantum circuit, which is the circuit in which we get
true out of body experiences, cosmic identification with the whole of
existence.
We're learning so
much about the latter four circuits, which Leary calls the extraterrestrial
circuits, that we're moving into a new stage of evolution. More people are on
the fifth circuit than ever before in history, and there are growing sixth and
seventh circuit minorities. It's not an accident. We're changing just as we
have to change. These circuits were there, ready to be used, when we got to
this point in evolution. Earlier, mankind could just coast along on the first
four circuits, and only visionaries and mystics and poets ever turned on the
higher circuits. Now everyone does it.
DARE
How to you teach people to turn on their higher circuits?
WILSON
You've got to teach with humor to make the pill palatable.
Besides, humor is the essence of realizing our true situation in space and
time. We are these tiny fallible beings crawling around on a relatively small
planet, and anybody who pontificates dogmatically about anything is giving
evidence that they are an idiot, even if you agree with them. They shouldn't
sound that certain. We think we're so damn smart and we know so fucking little.
I haven't had a birthday party in fifty years. Sure, when
you're a kid it's exciting to add a year to your age, have your parents gather
your friends, blow out the candles, and get presents, but today I turn 63 and I don't feel much like blowing out
a fire. Nothing very special about November 10th other than it is the day that
Stanley found Livingston. Okay, I wouldn't mind a present or two, but that's
more a matter of actually needing stuff than thinking I deserve any sort of
reward just for having survived another year. I've always felt it was a wee bit
egomaniacal to throw yourself a big birthday party. Nothing wrong with
celebrating others, but when it comes to celebrating yourself, it shouldn't be
in public.
Many
decades ago today it was also my birthday and, as normal, I was doing what I
always do, what I still do, what I'm doing right now, writing at my computer, when there
was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was Timothy Leary who said
"Hi, I'm your birthday present." He wouldn't explain how or why this
came to be, or who in particular was bestowing him upon me. He was simply
there, and he would hang out for at least an hour. All he would tell me was
that he was told I was someone he should meet.
Whenever
you meet someone famous in a personal situation, it's hard to know how to
behave, particularly if they're enormous media stars. After all, you've spent
hours gazing at them, thinking about them, perhaps days or weeks staring at
their image. Imagine the hundreds of hours you've spent with certain stars
broadcast regularly into your living room. They feel like a friend, like you
actually know them. They're not and you don't, but it's a hard feeling to shake
when they're standing right in front of you, coming into your house, sitting on
your sofa, checking the place out while waiting for you to bring them a drink.
No matter how many memories you have of them, they have none of you. To them,
you are a total stranger. Act like a fan and you risk becoming
part of their teeming crowd of lookie loos. Treat them like you don't know who they
are and they could get insulted. No way to make a friend. Friendships deserve
an even playing field, so it's hard to think of yourself as the friend of a
celebrity until they know as much about you as you know about them. Which is
why celebrities are SO interested when you interrupt them somewhere in public
and tell them about your uncle Sid's gall bladder operation.
I
wanted to be friends with Timothy Leary so he had a hell of a lot of catching
up to do because he knew nothing about me and I knew a lot about him, or at
least I thought I did. I shifted into show-and-tell mode, whipping out a
book of Polaroids for him to peruse. He enjoyed my madness immensely
and demanded I loan him the book which he promised to return.
I proceeded to tell him something I'm sure he heard a million times. My
life was profoundly changed by his research into psychedelia, combined with
reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, the Beatles, and meeting a guy named Mario in 1970 who claimed
to be the husband of the actual Alice that Arlo Guthrie sang about but who
supported his acting habit by selling acid at Lee Strasberg's studio where I
happened to be studying at the time.
But
I digress. The first and foremost influence that Timothy Leary had upon me was
my art, which simply didn't exist. Before my first acid trip, I was an actor but not an
artist. I had never played guitar, had certainly never created any
impressionism, and hadn't written a single word other than school assignments.
Maybe I would have discovered these talents on my own, but if my Polaroids
remind you of acid flashbacks, welcome to the club. On acid, what I do to my
Polaroids, you can do to reality. Move it around a little. Make big things look
small, small things look big, marvel at the infinite depths you're capable of
perceiving, as though reality were a 3D comic book and for the first time you
were looking at it with the red-and-blue glasses.
Pre-acid,
I was only interested in being an actor, moving to New York to study with Lee
Strasberg, and getting in a Broadway play. On acid, I actually attempted to
give a performance from Spoon River
Anthology in front of the man himself, a performance he declared
"interesting," a performance that convinced me that acting was a very
strange profession. While personally communicating with the infinite miracles
of the universe, I had an extremely hard time convincing myself that the most
important thing I could be doing was pretending to be a fictional character
while reciting dialogue written by a writer I'd never met. Post-acid I walked
home from the Village to my boarding house at 39th and Park, picked up my
roommate's guitar and started playing. It wasn't long before I was a better
guitar player than actor, and I ended up composing music for several
off-Broadway shows. Way off Broadway. The
Company Theater at La Cienega and Pico in Los Angeles to be precise.
Other
acid trips were less eventful and I stopped taking it, but not before playing
with my first SX-70 Polaroid camera and discovering I didn't need acid to
change reality to my own specifications.
We
talked and talked. He wasn't a drug addled guru and I wasn't an acid burnout.
He was extremely intelligent, certainly one of the smartest people I ever met. My vision of Leary had been fogged by his media
image, and I had forgotten that he was a Harvard professor. Luckily, some
others forgot too and that's how he escaped from prison. The most amazing story
he told me was this one...
When
he was busted by the Feds for possession of one single joint of pot and
sentenced to 20 years in a Federal penitentiary, the prison officials did what
they always did with new prisoners, they gave him a psychological test to
determine whether he would go to a minimum or maximum security prison. He
passed the test with flying colors and was sent to minimum security where he
promptly escaped. What the officials didn't know was that Leary himself wrote
the psychological test for the Federal prison system when still at Harvard, so
he knew exactly what answers to give.
After
an hour or so, my birthday present had to leave, but in his new life as
Hollywood gadfly I kept running into him over the years at video shows and art
galleries. I'm glad he lived long enough to experience the Internet, I'm glad I got my Polaroid portfolio back five years after his death when it was found among his belongings, and I hope some day to be someone else's birthday present.
James Cameron
looks much too relaxed for a man who has just made what may be the most
expensive motion picture ever made. The fate of an entire major studio
may rest on his shoulders, but he seems to shrug it off. Maybe he's just
relieved the whole mammoth production ordeal is over. Maybe he's giddy
over getting married next week to fellow director Katherine Bigelow. But
he's probably in such a good mood because in two more years he gets to
go to his twenty year high school reunion and casually mention that he
turned a short story he wrote as a student into a $50 million sci-fi
extravaganza. (And what have you done with your high school papers?)
The Abyss, which Cameron wrote and
directed, was a massive undertaking. It's certainly the most complex
underwater extravaganza ever filmed, and 20th Century Fox could have
sunk a real oil rig for the same cost as making it. But Cameron seems to
be a safer bet than oil. When he cranks up the cinematic pressure,
everybody in the theater stops nibbling popcorn and starts on their
fingernails. His chase sequences contain so much urgency that it's
surprising more people haven't had heart attacks while watching them. He
puts you in situations you really wouldn't want to be in, and he never
goes for the easy out. We go to his movies to face some deep primal fear
we didn't know we had; there are no cheap shocks in a Cameron film,
just a neverending onslaught of supreme danger.
Cameron is a
Corman alumnus who starting out as art director and production designer
for dozens of cheapo shlockos. He made his directorial debut with
another undersea adventure,
Piranha II - The Spawning, about which
the less said the better. It doesn't even appear on his resume, and who
can blame him when his second film was such a monster.
The Terminator
was a barrage of science fiction mayhem directed with non-stop momentum,
presenting a relentlessly bleak but visually fascinating vision of
tomorrow. Up until that time, it had been considered a drawback that
Arnold Schwarzenegger's performances were robotic. But Cameron cast him
impeccably as a killer cyborg from the future, and the film was an
enormous hit, giving both their careers a boost.
After writing the screenplay for
Rambo: First Blood II,
he then wrote and directed Aliens. It was an even bigger hit than its predecessor, earning seven academy award nominations and more than $180 million.
All this paved the way towards
The Abyss, a technological marvel full
of brilliant set pieces. The world is still dangerous, things can still
go wrong in the most unlikely ways, but Cameron's focus is more on
character than it's ever been. It's the couple that counts, not the
mysterious inexplicable force surrounding them.
The idea for the
film came from a science experiment that Cameron saw performed in high
school, which he eventually turned into a short story. "There was a guy
named Frank Felacek, a human guinea pig who actually breathed a liquid
in both lungs," Cameron explained from his posh hotel suite in Beverly
Hills. "They started with one lung and then the other. He thought he was
going to die, and everyone got real nervous, so they pumped the stuff
out of his lungs. It didn't work very well because a saline solution
couldn't hold enough oxygen. But later they started experimenting with
flourocarbon, and they've done it very successfully with dogs and
monkeys. The FDA won't let them use it in human experimentation, so the
research has sort of hit a wall, but the proposition is that if there
was ever a strong enough military application for it, it would proceed
again. In the film, when the rat breathes it, it's the real stuff, it's
really happening, the rat is breathing flourocarbons."
It's one of most
disconcerting visuals in the film, when Ed Harris seems to be breathing
liquid rather than air in a diving outfit that's full of water. It
looks like a truly death defying act, and you might assume that there
was hidden breathing apparatus somewhere in the suit. Wrong. "He just
had to hold his breath for a long time," said Cameron. "Any hidden
breathing apparatus would have leaked, so there would have been bubbles
coming up all the time. Ed didn't like it. It was very uncomfortable,
but I don't think it was ever really dangerous.
"In the film,
you see the helmet seal down into a neck ring that looks like one
integral unit. In actuality, the whole faceplate popped open on a hinge
and he would just breath through a standard regulator. When we were
ready for the take, the regulator would be removed, the bubbles would be
cleared away, and the faceplate would be closed. It had a very delicate
latch that could be easily over-ridden if necessary. It took a lot of
nerve, but Ed did almost all his own stunts. The wider shots where he's
tumbling down the wall are the only places where we doubled him."
I accused Cameron of being a victim of techno-lust and he laughed it off. "In
Good Morning, Vietnam, a guy says 'In my
heart, I know I'm funny.' Well in my heart, I know I don't have to do
science fiction. I think it's all these residual images from my
childhood, when I read science fiction voraciously, like Bradbury,
Clark, and Heinlein. It's such a visual form. I was always interested in
the fantastic, like the Sinbad films, anything with spectacular
mythological energy. I tend to be less interested in pure fantasy. I
like to be grounded in a sense of the possible, or at least creating an
illusion of the possible for the audience. In science fiction, there's
always the greater possibility to take people someplace they've never
been and showing them something they've never seen, more than there is
in a contemporary story set in Manhattan."
Will he ever
make a non-science fiction film? "I'm now being forced to realize that
that's a challenge I have to set for myself. I have to take people
someplace new, given relatively mundane props and visual set pieces. I
have to do it through psychology, through performance. I think I'm over
that threshold now. The scenes that people respond to the most are not
the techno-lust scenes. The two scenes right at the heart of the picture
which are the most emotionally intense, involve absolutely no support
from any mechanisms like special effects or production design. It's two
people talking in a four foot diameter tin can."
He's got that one right. In
The Shining, Stanley Kubrick was the
first to postulate that absolutely nothing is more frightening than a
husband and wife trapped together. Cameron takes this concept one step
further in
The Abyss, giving us one of the most harrowing life-or-death scenes of all time.
He takes an
estranged husband and wife who secretly love each other but whose
passion can only reveal itself through sarcasm - and puts them under
pressure. A lot of pressure - like at the bottom of the ocean in a leaky
two man submarine with only one set of diving gear. The leak can't be
fixed, and they've only got a few minutes till the whole sub is full of
water. One of them has got to die. They've probably both secretly wished
for the other's demise, but not like this. The one who lives will have
to watch the other drown. Close up.
Ed Harris and
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are so good in this scene, their fear and
devotion so raw and vital, that I can't think of any episode in any
other picture that rivals it in emotional intensity. It's so ferociously
performed that it overshadows the big special-effects finale. The alien
force becomes just a sub-plot. (Come to think of it, the whole film is a
sub plot)
I casually
mentioned something concerning the aliens, but Cameron is reluctant to
talk about the specifics of the ending. He doesn't want it given away,
and he wants the audience to figure it out for themselves. He also
dismisses any charges that the film is too derivative. "Most people
think if you're doing a story about human contact with a bad monster,
it's going to be
Alien, and if you're doing a story about
human contact with an intelligent species from another place that's
mysterious and strange, it's going to be
Close Encounters. I refuse to accept the
idea that there are only two choices left and nobody else can make a
film on any subject even remotely similar.
E.T.
and Close Encounters
are amazing and beautiful films. This film uses the concept in a different way."
"I think this is a less cynical picture than my others. I've always
been very positive about people and negative about trends. This film has
the same kind of balance between positiveness and paranoia. There's
still the paranoia of nuclear weapons, the potential for war, even
though we're in a 'glasnost' period. As long as the president of the
United States is the ex-head of the CIA, and the premiere of Russia is
the ex-head of the KGB, there's a limit to how much you can really
relax. Ultimately, it's a more optimistic picture because it deals with
people I see as positive role models."
In an attempt to play devil's advocate, I told Cameron one of the arguments against the film.
The Abyss
is essentially about a relationship between husband and wife. People who
are into relationship films don't necessarily go see big science
fiction films, and techno-nerds who go see big science fiction films
don't necessarily care about relationships.
His reply was
fast. "The counter argument to that would be that techno-nerds need love
too, and relationship people also live in a technical world. I don't
think there's a hard distinction between those two groups. There's a big
intersecting set of people in the middle who both acknowledge that we
live in a technological world and feel all those normal human emotions
that everybody feels. They have to address that in their lives as well. I
see it as a film for anybody living in the latter half of the twentieth
century who happens to be human, male or female. I hope that's not too
narrow a band."
I wanted to ask
him why the crew referred to the film as The Abuse. I wanted to ask him
why the alien neon hairdrier saved some people but not others. I wanted
to ask him about the water tentacles and what the film was really
about, but our time was up much too quickly.
He was dragged
to the door by a publicist, but before he left, I asked him one more
question. "If there's a water that men can breath, then why isn't there
an air that fish can breath?"
"I don't know," he replied. "I guess fish aren't doing enough research in that area."
