Connections to Health - Robert Anton Wilson

THE ISHTA HOLISTIC HEALTH CENTRE

CONNECTIONS to HEALTH

Robert Anton Wilson

Earlier this year my favourite living philospher died.

This book, "An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson", is a great introduction to his life and work, if you've not heard of him before. If you have then it will educate and amuse you even more.
Everyone should read this 23 times!

Hail Eris!

All hail Discordia!

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Don't take my word for it

Here's a review of the book I found. If this doesn't make you yearn to read it (even if only to try and understand the review) then nothing will.
The Review

This book, "An Insider's Guide To Robert Anton Wilson" may yield much to both Initiates and the Hopelessly Befuddled (I belong to both groups, somehow)and nearly everyone in-between who has any interest in Robert Anton Wilson at all, at all. But Caveat Lector: This seems like quite the avant work. Not that it's filled with specialized jargon or postmodern blitherscabble. (The words "hegemony" or "transgressive" don't show in the text, that I remember.) On the contrary, the prose seems lapidary to me. The avant-ness resides elsewhere.
The Author, Eric Wagner, has pulled off a difficult writing stunt I've never seen before: he writes an entire work of literary criticism in E-Prime, or English without any of the forms of "be" in it (am, is are, was were, be), thereby putting into play an epistemological-ontological gambit first proposed by the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, and fleshed out by his student D. David Bourland.
One of the main effects of using this hygenic language game: the author's assertions appear more clearly to emanate from his own nervous system; he makes things exceedingly difficult for himself in that he can't make any omniscient-sounding claims to Ultimate Truth or True Being or I Have THE Main Line On My Subject. Rather, E-Prime imposes a constraint on claims made in sentences that might violate what we learned in the 20th century about the nature of "reality." That is, E-Prime seems more in keeping with most of the interpretations of the Schrodinger's Wave Equation (i.e., the quantum theory), with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in math, with Gestalt Psychology and later models of perception and the human nervous system, with the relativity of cultural values found in Anthropology, the relativity of neuroscience (everyone resides in their own "reality tunnel"), and the philosophy of Phenomenology, to name but a few of the epistemic gems in our cultural inheritance from the explosion of knowledge in the 20th century. E-Prime makes the foisting of a Belief System (BS)almost impossible for a writer.
Somehow Wagner pulled it off. Damn if he didn't write the whole thing in E-Prime! (If you don't think that's difficult, try writing a letter to a friend telling them why some political position seems more desirable than another.)

If you've never heard of some of these highfalutin' epistemologies, no matter: reading the book and paying attention to the effects of the POV and lingering necessary uncertainty behind the prose might yield some interesting effects. Frankly, it blew my mind!

Wagner clearly has great admiration for his subject, and he thinks a book of literary criticism ought to seem able to come right out and make that clear, without the olde pretense of scholarly "objectivity." In this the book seems avant also. But he hasn't written a "fanboy" book, either.
In addition to two interviews with Wilson, a Preface/Introduction/Overture by RAW himself, and lots of ludic Joycean and "insider" jokes, I loved two extremely insightful pieces of Wilson scholarship, "Appendix Samekh:Illuminatus!", which told me many things about the structure of one of the greatest conspiracy theory novels ever written, and one I've quite frankly probably read too many times, even though it's 805 pages. And here Wagner sheds light on a deep structure in the dreaded "Illuminatus! Trilogy" , a structure I'd never guessed was so intricate; the other section of the book that I found particularly stimulating - and one in which many Joyceans would no doubt enjoy also - was Wagner's elucidation of "Joyce's Influence on (Wilson's) "Masks of the Illuminati", a delightful and learned essay that demonstrates Wilson as a writer heavily influenced by the labyrinthine, multi-vocal cubist prose of the greatest Modernist (and Postmodernist!) writer of the 20th century.

The casual reader will learn a great deal about the dizzying scope of Wilson's influences, the use of occult knowledge, and the cosmic hilarity and optimism that resides at the heart of Robert Anton Wilson's life and work.
Wagner has written, as far as I know, the first critical about RAW, and we hope many others will follow with their own views on this almost absurdly mutifaceted writer.