The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  “I suppose so. The book’s a real stinker, eh?”

  “Heavens, I wouldn’t know for sure. I told you yesterday, it’s absurdly long. Three volumes, in fact. Boring as hell. I only had time to skim it. But listen to this, dear boy: ‘If The Lord of the Rings is a fairy tale for adults, sophisticated readers will quickly recognize this monumental miscarriage as a fairy tale for paranoids.’ That refers to the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the plot, if there is one, seems to revolve around. Nicely worded, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Peter said, crossing off book review on his pad. “Send it over. I’ll pay the messenger.”

  Epicene Wildeblood, hanging up, crossed off Confrontation on his own pad, found Time next on the list, and picked up another book to be immortalized by his devastating witticisms. He was feeling more than usually misanthropic, having had a disastrous evening the night before. Somebody had answered his personal ad about his “interest in Greek Culture” and he had thrilled at the thought of a new asshole to conquer; the asshole, unfortunately, had turned out to be the Vice President of the United States, who was interested only in declaiming about the glorious achievements of the military junta that had ruled in Athens, When Eppy, despairing of sex, had tried to steer the conversation to Plato at least, the VP asked, “Are you sure he was a Greek? That sounds like a wop name to me.”

  (Tobias Knight and two other FBI agents elbow past the Midget searching for whores who might have been with Dr. Mocenigo the night before, while outside the VSR’s first contingent, the Hugh M. Hefner Brigade, led by Dr. Horace Naismith himself, marches by singing: “We’re Vet’rans of the Sexule Revolution/ Our rifles were issued, we had our own guns/ One was for fighting, the other for fun/ We rose up in arms and none failed to come,/ We’re Vets of the Sex Revoloooooooooootion!”)

  You see, darling, it all revolves around sex, but not in the sense that Freud thought. Freud never understood sex. Hardly anybody understands sex, in fact, except a few poets here and there. Any scientist who starts to get an inkling keeps his mouth shut because he knows he’d be drammed out of the profession if he said what he knew. Here, I’ll help you unhook that. What we’re feeling now is supposed to be tension, and what we’ll feel after orgasm is supposed to be relaxation. Oh, they’re so pretty. Yes, I know I always say that. But they are pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty. Mmmm. Mmmm. Oh, yes, yes. Just hold it like that a moment. Yes. Tension? Lord, yes that’s what I mean. How can this be tension? What’s it got in common with worry or anxiety or anything else that we call tension? It’s a strain, but not a tension. It’s a drive to break out, and a tension is a drive to hold in. Those are the two polarities. Oh, stop for a minute. Let me do this. You like that? Oh, darling, yes, darling, I like it, too. It makes me happy to make you happy. You see, we’re trying to break through our skins into each other. We’re trying to break the walls, walls, walls. Yes, Yes. Break the walls. Tension is trying to hold up the walls, to keep the outside from getting in. It’s the opposite. Oh, Rebecca. Let me kiss them again. They’re so pretty. Pretty pretty titties. Mmm. Mmm. Pretty. And so big and round. Oh, you’ve got two hard-ons and I’ve only got one. And this, this, ah, you like it, don’t you, that’s three hard-ons. You want me to take my finger away and kiss it? Oh, darling, pretty belly, pretty. Mmm. Mmm. Darling, Mmm. MMMMM. Mmm. Lord, Lord. You never came so fast before, oh, I love you. Are you happy? I’m so happy. That’s right, just for a minute. Oh, God, I love watching you do that. I love to see it go into your mouth. Lord, God, Rebecca, I love it. Yes, now I’ll put him in. Little Saul, there, coming up inside you, there. Does little Rebecca like him? I know, I know. They love each other, don’t they? The way we love each other. She’s so warm, she welcomes him so nicely. You’re inside me, too. That’s what I’m trying to say. My field. You’re inside my field, just like I’m inside yours. It’s the fields, not the physical act. That’s what people are afraid of. That’s why they’re tense during sex. They’re afraid of letting the fields merge. It’s a unifying of the forces. God, I can’t keep talking. Well, if we slow way down, yes, this is nicer, isn’t it? That’s why it’s so fast for most people. They rush, complete the physical act, before the fields are charged. They never experience the fields. They think it’s poetry, fiction, when somebody who’s had it describes it. One scientist knew. He died in prison. I’ll tell you about him later. It’s the big taboo, the one all the others grow out of. It isn’t sex itself they’re trying to stop. That’s too strong, they can’t stop it. It’s this. Darling, yes. This. The unifying. It happens at death, but they try to steal it even then. They’ve taken it out of sex. That’s why the fantasies. And the promiscuity. The search. Blacks, homosexuality, our parents, people we know we hate, Saint Bernards. Everything. It’s not neuroses or perversion. It’s a search. A desperate search. Everybody wants sex with an enemy. Hate mobilizes the field, too, you see. And hate. Is safer. Safer than love. Love too dangerous. Lord, Lord, I love you. I love you. Let me more. Get the weight on my elbows, hold your ass with my hands. Yes. Poetry isn’t poetry. I mean it doesn’t lie. It’s true when I say I worship you. Can’t say it outside bed. Can only say love then, usually. Worship too scary. Some people can’t even say love in bed. Searching, partner to partner. Never able to say love. Never able to feel it. Under control. They can’t let us learn, or the game is up. Their name? They got a million names. Monopolize it. Keep it to themselves. They had to stamp it out in the rest of us, to control. To control us. Drove it underground, into background noise. Mustn’t break through. That’s how. How it happened. Darling. First they repressed telepathy, then sex. That’s why schizos. Darling. Why schizos break into crazy sex things first. Why homosexuals dig the occult. Break one taboo, come close to the next. Finally break the wall entirely. Get through. Like we get through, together. They can’t have that. Got to keep us apart. Schisms. Always splitting and schisms. White against black, men against women, all the way down the line. Keep us apart. Don’t let us merge. Make sex a dirty joke. A few more minutes. A few more. My tongue in your ear. Oh, God. Soon. So fast. A miracle. Whole society set up to prevent this. To destroy love. Oh, I do love you. Worship you. Adore you. Rebecca. Beautiful, beautiful. Rebecca. They don’t want us to. Unify. The. Forces. Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca.

  THE SEVENTH TRIP, OR NETZACH

  (THE SNAFU PRINCIPLE)

  The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

  —Never Whistle While You’re Pissing,

  by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.

  The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema’s two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge.

  It was in college (Antioch, Yellow Springs, 1962) that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden joke in his name, and the circumstances were—considering that he was to become the worst headache the Illuminati ever encountered—appropriately sy
nchronistic. It was in a math class, and, since this was Antioch, the two students directly behind the Midget were ignoring the professor and discussing their own intellectual interests; since this was Antioch, they were a good six years ahead of intellectual fads elsewhere. They were discussing ethology.

  “So we keep the same instincts as our primate ancestors,” one student (he was from Chicago, his name was Moon, and he was crazy even for Antioch) was saying. “But we superimpose culture and law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say,” Moon’s voice betrayed pride in the aphorism he was about to unleash, “mankind is a statutory ape.”

  “ … and,” the professor, old Fred “Fidgets” Digits, said at just that moment, “when such a related series appears in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney won’t be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the term, even if the related series of his appearances in class do seem part of a notably random process.” The class roared; another ton of bile was entered in the Midget’s shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.

  In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room, Playboy gatefold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women built like Playmates. Today, however, Playboy would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, Physical Anthropology (always good for a few humiliating moments), he hurried across David Street, passing Atlanta Hope without noticing her, and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him.

  Damn old Fidgets Digits, and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits.

  He took out the pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let’s have a Markoff Chain masturbation to start with, he thought with an evil grin.

  And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or even the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the Illuminati, not even knowing that they existed.

  His first overt act—his Fort Sumter, as it were—began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton’s Emporium, a glorified 5 & 100 store, when he saw the sign:

  NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR. THE MGT.

  What!, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can’t find a superior? Years of school came back to him (“Please, may I leave the room, sir?”) and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. Mathematics, of course. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah! not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor “Sheets” Kelly’s intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton’s and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:

  NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR OR GO TO THE DOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR. HE MGT.

  He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process; Marx had been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx was like the engineers of his time, who thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in terms of information transmitted. Nothing signed “the mgt.” would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management.

  At the same time, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and became grouchier themselves; sales, he guessed correctly; were falling off. Poetry was the answer: poetry in reverse. His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion. Let the market researchers and statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages.

  His father had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., generally regarded as the worst turkey on the Big Board (it produced devices to be used in making landings on low-gravity planets); profits had soared when John Fitzgerald Kennedy had announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before 1970; the Midget now had a guaranteed annuity amounting to thirty-six hundred dollars per year, three hundred dollars per month. It was enough for his purposes. Revenge, in good measure, he would have. He would have revenge.

  Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine, traveling always by Greyhound bus, the Midget criss-crossed the country constantly, placing his improved surrealist signs whenever the opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix on him: he had little ego to discover, burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter—but, unlike a dictator or a great painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric ELF. Watts went up, and Detroit; Birmingham, Buffalo, Newark, a flaming picnic blanket spread across urban America as the Midget’s signs burned in the stores that had flaunted them; one hundred thousand marched to the Pentagon and some of them tried to expel the Demon (the Illuminati foiled that at the last minute, forbidding them to form a circle); a Democratic convention was held behind barbed wire; in 1970 a Senate committee announced that there had been three thousand bombings in the year, or an average of ten per day; by 1973 Morituri groups were forming in every college, every suburb; the SLA came and came back again; Atlanta Hope was soon unable to control God’s Lightning, which was going in for its own variety of terrorism years before Illuminati planning had intended.

  “There’s a random factor somewhere,” technicians said at Illuminati International; “There’s a random factor somewhere,” Hagbard Celine said, reading the data that came out of fuckup; “There’s a random factor somewhere,” the Dealy Lama, leader of ELF, said dreamily in his underground hideout beneath Dealy Plaza.

  Drivers on treacherous mountain roads swore in confusion at signs that said:

  SLIPPERY WHEN WET MAINTAIN 50 M.P.H. FALLING ROCK ZONE DO NOT LITTER

  Men paid high initiation fees to revel in the elegance of all-WASP clubs whose waiters were carefully trained to be almost as snobbish as the members, then felt vaguely let down by signs warning them:

  WATCH YOUR HAT AND COAT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST PROPERTY. THE MGT.

  The Midget became an electronic wizard in his spare time. All over the country, pedestrians stood undecided on curbs as electric signs said walk while the light was red and then switched to don’t walk when the light Went green. He branched out and expanded his activities; office workers received memos early in the morning (after he had spent a night with a Xerox machine) and puzzled over:

  1. All vacation requests must be submitted in triplicate to the Personnel Department at least three weeks before the planned vacation dates.

  2. All employees who change their vacation plans must notify Personnel Department by completing Form 1472, Vacation Plan Change, and submitting it three weeks before the change in plans.

  3. All vacation plans must be approved by the Department Supervisor and may be changed if they conflict with the vacation plans of employees of higher rank and/or longer tenure.

  4. Department Supervisor
s may announce such cancellations at any time, provided the employee is given 48 hours notice, or two working days, whichever is longer, as the case may be. (Employees crossing the International Date Line, see Form 2317.)

  5. Employees may not discuss vacation plans with other employees or trade preferred dates.

  6. These few simple rules should prevent a great deal of needless friction and frustration if all employees cooperate, and we will all have a happy summer.

  THE MGT.

  On April 26 of the year when the Illuminati tried to immanentize the Eschaton, the Midget experienced aches, pains, nausea, spots before his eyes, numbness in his legs and dizziness. He went to the hotel doctor, and a short while after describing his symptoms he was rushed in a closed car to a building that had a Hopi Indian Kachina Doll Shop in front and the Las Vegas CIA office in the back. He was fairly delirious by then, but he heard somebody say, “Ha, we’re ahead of the FBI and the Cesspool Cleaners on this one.” Then he got an injection and began to feel better, until a friendly silver-haired man sat down by his cot and asked who “the girl” was.

  “What girl?” the Midget asked irritably.

  “Look, son, we know you’ve been with a girl. She gave you this.”

  “Was it the clap?” the Midget asked, dumbfounded. Except for his pornographic Tarot cards, he was still a virgin (the giant women were all so damned patronizing, but his own female equivalents bored him; the giantesses were the Holy Grail to him, but he had never had the courage to approach one). “I never knew the clap could be this bad,” he added, blushing. His greatest fear was that somebody would discover his virginity.