Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  Watch Sir John Peel, said Sir Talis coiling oily surly. Cuckoo.

  With his hounds and his haunts in the gloaming, said Canon Futter. Dorter of the Garter.

  Thee I invoke, Crowley chanted faster and faster. The hornless one thee that didst create the earth and heavens thee that didst create the night and day Thou art myself made perfect Thou art the truth in matter Thou art the truth in motion

  Fornication sodomy abomination, ranted Verey. Cuckolds, garterbaters.

  I never used my dirty penis Reverend, said Jack the Ripper. Only a nice clean knife. Linked by strange coincidence where the moon doesn’t shine.

  The rent bill is due again, said O’Shit. Landlords never die.

  If we lived in the middle of a fireworks exhibition, Einstein lectured, everybody would understand my theory of space-time immediately, directly, sensorially. But we do live in the middle of a fireworks display: the velocity is not observed because we are moving with it. Why then do I observe it now?

  My best friend in college was homosexual, Joyce told Babcock. I didn’t realize that until nearly ten years later. The arts of hypocrisy are even more highly developed in Ireland than in England. My God I will write this Hunter book and show humanity the real truth of its situation.

  I never knew just breathing could be so marvelous, Babcock answered.

  Now I’m a billionyearold fish and a man who will be born in 1984 and live a thousand years in a dozen galaxies, Joyce remarked happily. Man, what have you done to us?

  Opened the doors of perception, Crowley said.

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, Shakespeare asked lisping effeminately.

  Oh why not, said Mr. W. H. camping outrageously. It would be a marvelous ripping rag.

  Sodom and Gomorrah, Verey muttered. London and Paris. Illegal entry. It runs on ears of words.

  You be a photon I thought.

  Joyce knew suddenly that the four of them in Arab headgear had sat around this campfire for seventy thousand years.

  There is a cruel streak in you father, said Eduard Einstein. Hiroshima … Nagasaki … New York …

  Einstein looked at rising flames in horror.

  How long does this go on?

  You and your piggy books, Lucia Joyce said. And your garters and garters and garters.

  Concepts breaking down into atomic perceptions, Joyce muttered.

  It has to end sometime. Or are we in Eternity?

  Adam Weishaupt arose through the trapdoor wearing a Wizard’s Cap with the eye-in-triangle design. How the simple Mason plies, he chanted, Tool on Temple, see it rise! Princes of Jerusalem, How we mock and scoff at them!

  This is Hell.

  We’ll all be crushed.

  I remain an eternal mystery, said Mr. W. H. The supreme desire, unknown, refined out of existence. Only my initials remain. Mr. W. H. O?

  Philosophia meta pederastia, Plato intoned from Eternity. Eleutheria. Tapa kega day.

  Floating, Einstein said, zero gravity. The relativism of the instrument.

  It has to end soon. Doesn’t it?

  But Crowley Hierophant rapped eleven times on the floor with his Staff, reciting in plainchant:

  There is no Grace; There is no Guilt;

  This is the law: Do What Thou Wilt!

  Split the skull, Weishaupt howled in delirium. On guard the sword! Earth be null and heaven abhorred! All’s a lie, although Divine! Give annihilation’s sign!

  I’m dying. We’ll never escape.

  The aromas of rose and clover where the moon doesn’t shine.

  O’Neill saw Queen Molly’s pants, Joyce laughed.

  That wasn’t so bad after all. We’re floating in space and we’ve turned into genitals.

  Joyce condensed himself into a blue book, split into atoms, refined himself out of existence, reproduced, and became incarnate in a million libraries.

  Fee fie fo fum, said Sir Talis. I smell the blood of an Englishman.

  Babcock laughed. Is that what I was afraid of? An illustration from a children’s book?

  Go away, Joyce told Sir Talis calmly. You’re only a Freudian symbol. Eutaenia sirtalis, the common garter snake. Sir Talis, Garters—do you understand, Babcock? Also called the garden snake. Hence the Eden symbols in the dreams.

  Egad Joyce, said Einstein with Dr. Watson’s face. How do you do it?

  Elementary, my dear Einstein, replied Joyce with Sherlock Holmes’ face. Garters, garters everywhere.

  Dr. Carl Jung climbed through the window.

  That kind of Freudian analysis is true enough, he said, but it’s not the whole truth. The snake is the Gnostic symbol of immortality and rebirth. To the primitive racial unconscious, the snake is reborn every time it sheds its skin.

  Bosh, said the voice of Sigmund Freud.

  Egad, Joyce cried in ecstasy. I have it at last!

  What? Einstein asked absently.

  Joyce recited gravely awaiting their applause:

  From deep ’neath the crypt at St. Giles

  Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles

  The vicar said “Gracious—

  It’s Brother Ignatius!

  He’s forgotten the Bishop has piles!”

  Das Buch ist ein Schwein, Nora Barnacle said accusingly. Garters he writes about when we don’t have enough food in the house.

  Well, Joyce said uneasily, is not fetishism the first religion?

  Half the men in England have some such fetish, Crowley said. Usually it’s Miss Birch, mistress of discipline: the psychological correlative of imperialism.

  Yes … Joyce said earnestly. I have always wanted Nora to discipline me … to see her eyes flash with anger …

  Joyce is mocked, slandered, outcast, condemned, rejected, despised, starved. Rumors circulate like new cases of the clap around Paris London Dublin Zürich Pola Moscow Hong Kong Nagasaki Hiroshima Sydney Honolulu Mendocino Chicago Bad Ass Texas and back to Dublin. They say he has become a hopeless cocaine addict, his mind has been destroyed by paresis, he has died of drink in New York, he suffers from seven vile dieases and delirium tremens, he makes homosexual overtures to head-waiters, he writes anonymous obscene letters to the Queen of England and an assortment of nuns and teenage girls, he is a voyeur, he is an exhibitionist, he defecates in public parks awaiting applause with an idiot grin, he is going blind from morose delectation and excessive masturbation, he wets the bed and wiggles his toes in it, he haunts finishing schools to smell the seats of girl’s bicycles, he is secretly an English German or a German Agent or a brainwashed bezombified mindless tool of the Illuminati, he has been cuckolded by his brother, his best friend, seven priests, nine rabbis, the Elect of Fifteen, the House of Rothschild, and the band at the Waldorf Astoria. His books, together with those of Sade, Masoch and Wilde are to be buried in a secret vault in the Lost Pyramid in the Hidden City in the Lost Continent of Mu. He himself is stripped, lashed, tickled, tormented, hanged, drawn, quartered and crucified.

  Father forgive them, he said, for they know not what they do.

  He kicked the bucket. Sparks flew out, astral vibes shook the atmosphere, he gave up the ghost, ball lightning and unidentified flying objects dazzled all the spectators, earthquakes collapsed Dublin into the sea, the heavens shook, and he died like a dog.

  Why seek ye Jim here, asked the angel, rolling back the rock. And from Joyce’s grave came flowers and each flower had seven leaves and every leaf had seven secrets and every secret had seven titles and they could read among them such poesies as Poppy Oh Popey Do You Have Cartage on Your Rhine, The Tarot Towery Connection, Left-Handed Monkey Shines, It May Be Bolt Like A Sheephorse But Do You Call It Levin, The Campbells Are Camping with Musks of Goths, God Bless You Please Mr Robinson, They Needed A Songbird In Heaven So They Took Crusoe Away On A Friday, Tinned All Us Do Part, You Kenna Get My Chests With Your St. Tomach’s View, Sit On A Potato Pan Otis, The Oyster Rising and the Clam Dever, The Hannibal Cairo Express with Huck Chum and Effrontery, Nero My Dog Has Fleas, A Grand Canyon b
y the Committee of the Hole, The Old Seizers and the New Cut-Ups, A Fold-In Burrow for an Ova Eggspressed, and the especially treasured Ten Spices and Twenty-Two Raisins To Turn Your Brainpan To a Fruitcake. As each goes to seed up spring such unique products of the Groves of Academe as Motive and Method in Joyce’s Voices, Method and Motive in Joyce’s Verses, Myth and Metaphor in His Comic Epic, Metaphor and Myth in His Crucified Eroticism, Night and Day He’s Got Us Under Our Skin, A Skillfully Done Key to His Finicky Work, A Skinfull Down Teeth for a Talulapalooza, The Marx in His Gripes, The Freud in His Feuds, Our Purification and Petrification for Canonization of His Excrementations and Pornographations. Who’s Who and Who Cares When Nobody is Everybody, and the exhaustingly exhaustive Myth, Metaphor, Meaning, Symbolism, Morose Delectation and Sneaky Dirty Jones in A Sample Paragraph (3 vols.)

  The mummy Osiris rose from the grave.

  I am a watchmaker in Amsterdam, he said. The nitrogen cycle.

  Ulysses rose from the grave.

  I am an advertising canvasser in Dublin, he said.

  Stanislaus Joyce came out from under the carpet wearing the Mark of Cain.

  Am I my brother’s keeper, he asked. Besides, the woman did tempt me….

  Oh rocks said the voice of Nora Barnacle.

  But Joyce arose from the grave glorified infinitely subtle.

  Bad luck to your souls, he laughed, did you think me dead?

  Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake, sang the Master Masons.

  Merde, said General Canbronne. Age of Reason. Always wear brown trousers in battle.

  Dracula rose from the grave.

  Don’t forget to include me in the I.N.R.I, process, he said. Landlords never die. The other side of the Devil. I never drink wine.

  Eduard Einstein and Lucia Joyce were led in, wearing straitjackets, moving with the mindless jerkiness of chronic schizophrenia.

  You’ll desert my mother, Eduard said accusingly to Albert. You never loved me. All you love is your goddam equations. You are a monster. You live in your head and don’t love anyone. Oh I think I shall go mad.

  Oh, no, Einstein said sobbing suddenly.

  You see, Crowley said to Babcock. Now it’s his turn for the Nun stage of I.N.R.I. Death on a White Horse.

  Lucia Joyce lifted her skirt flirtatiously, showing a blue garter.

  Go, damn you, she shouted at James. Hide under the ground. I know you’re watching us. Watching, always watching. You know everything—men women boys girls—and you see through it all don’t you? You live in your head and don’t love anyone.

  Shite, Joyce said, sobbing in his wine.

  And there’s another candidate, Crowley said airily.

  You rotten bastard.

  It’s bloody beastly buggering bleeding hell to be the child of a genius, Eduard Einstein mourned.

  Don’t I know it, Lucia Joyce agreed.

  I am HE, Crowley chanted suddenly drawing their attention again. The Bornless Spirit having sight in the feet Strong and immortal fire Who hate that evil should be wrought in the world He that lightning and thundereth He whose mouth ever flameth He from whom is the shower of life on Earth

  A true initiation never ends.

  Dare to struggle, dare to win, shouted Lenin.

  Dare to guzzle Gordon’s gin, Joyce added.

  Je suis Bovary, Flaubert said looking embarrassed.

  Je suis Molly Bloom, Joyce said unembarrassed. The Master Masons chanted over the Neanderthal fire:

  For of the Father and the Son

  The Holy Spirit is the norm

  Male-female, quintessential, one

  Man-being veiled in womanform

  Glory and worship be to Thee

  Sap of the world-ash, wonder-tree!

  I think, Joyce said, that we have somehow been mutated from symbolic verbal consciousness to total body awareness. Is that it?

  That is certainly part of it, Einstein agreed thoughtfully. But there is an element also of direct brain consciousness, is there not? It seems to me that you should understand Relativity better now, because I certainly understand it better than I ever did.

  But the table, Joyce said. My God, the table.

  What about the table? Einstein asked.

  We’re inside it, Joyce said.

  Yes … Einstein said softly … that’s it. We’re inside It and It is inside us. There’s a bridge …

  My God, Joyce said. Yes.

  In the material universe, Einstein said happily, the smaller is always inside the larger. But in the mental universe … mein Gott … the larger can be inside the smaller. That’s what thought is…. We are as big as whatever we perceive and conceive…. It’s a mobius strip….

  Glory to thee from gilded tomb, resounded the voice of Tim Finnegan.

  Glory to thee from waiting womb, chanted Molly Bloom.

  Glory to thee from earth unploughed, cried Osiris.

  Glory to thee from virgin vowed, sang Isis.

  The cross becomes a phallus.

  The phallas becomes a cross.

  The cross becomes a whirling sun.

  Two owls and a hen, said King Lear, Three crows and a wren, have all built their nests in my beard.

  They were moving toward Zero.

  My God it’s the Black Hole, Schwartzchild cried.

  The entrance to Hell, Babcock said.

  The Cup of Our Lady, Crowley corrected them.

  It became an enormous pulsating doughnut. Joyce laughed.

  Nine months to get out, he said, and the rest of our fool lives trying to get back in again….

  The doughnut became the spinning galaxy.

  “Have we really been sitting here,” Joyce asked finally, “laughing like fools for three or four hours?”

  “Something like that,” Einstein said.

  “Is it over yet?” Babcock asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Joyce replied. “Do you see what I see?”

  The earth shook. Cthulhu rose from the Depths waving white-stained garters and stocks bonds currencies of all nations boards and corporations. Governments fell like bowling pins. The stock market crashed. Nameless anarchist hordes stormed the streets, shouting Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers as they executed bankers corporation presidents lawyers politicians landlords priests rabbis ministers lady-golfers and anyone with a clean white shirt. Orgies broke out in parliaments, congresses, antique shops, boutiques, business offices, butcher shops, monasteries, trolleycars, hospitals, carousels, universities, academies, laboratories, nunneries, bakeries, cathedrals, law offices, factories; huge brutal cocks were thrust into cunts, assholes, mouths of voluptuous actresses, doddering dowagers, distinguished philosophers, kings, bishops, boys, girls, soldiers, Mother Superiors, bankers, whimpering poets; cunts were fucked, sucked, chewed, licked, kissed; Queen Victoria was gangbanged by 358 Watusi warriors. Madmen defecated in wells, fountains, punchbowls, on streets and in doorways. Drooling farmboys waving signs that said Bestiality Liberation charged into pet shops to sodomize dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, tarantulas. Andre Breton walked about Paris shooting pedestrians at random. The last lawyer was strangled with the guts of the last politician. The Pope appeared in delirium on the balcony facing Saint Peter’s Square incoherently chanting Cthulhu fthagn while sodomizing himself with a twelve-inch dildo from the Yokohama Sex And Leather Corporation. Housewives murdered their husbands and rushed to the stockyards to fuck goats, howling Io Pan Io Pan Pan The Goat With a Thousand Young!’ Nihilists attacked insane asylums with automatic rifles, murdered the staffs and set the patients free to roam the streets and set fire to psychiatrists’ offices. Avant-garde poets seized the newspapers and published strange, unsettling headlines: Is It a New Electromagnetic Phenomenon or The Heart and Mind of Europe Dying?; Only the Madman Is Absolutely Free; The Star People Are Returning But I Have Lost My One True Love; Where Is God Now That We Need Him? The next day the women got organized and completed the butchery. And the sky turned into the body of Nuit, black, beautiful, the starmother: and all was ch
anged in a moment, in the flickering of an eye. It never happened. We were just four people sitting on the floor looking past time into eternity.

  CROWLEY

  [Solemnly]: In my mad and werewolf heart

  I have howled thirtynine years away

  In laughter and rage: the bread and wine

  Of Werewolf Mass

  [Mass dissolves; they float free.]

  JOYCE

  [Liturgically]: In my high and mountain heart

  I have laughed thirtytwo years away

  In folly and scorn: the flesh and blood

  Of werewolf Time

  [Time ends; they enter Eternity.]

  EINSTEIN

  [Precisely]: In my clear and limpid mind

  I have counted thirtyfive years away

  In measure and line: the skin and bones

  Of werewolf Space

  [Space implodes; they enter Infinity.]

  CROWLEY

  [Furiously]: And until defiance builds of its own ache

  A truth less tame than the truth of death

  My werewolf heart shall howl against

  Both werewolf God and werewolf Man

  JOYCE

  [Sadly]: Yes, until our heartache builds of its own flames

  A truth more wild than the truth of Life—

  [Isis appears. All see Her.]

  BABCOCK

  [Rapt]: My werewolf heart is pierced at last

  By the silver bullet of the Lady’s gaze

  CROWLEY

  [Erotomaniac]: My werewolf heart is pierced at last

  By the silver bullet of the Lady’s eyes

  I am the Beast the Lady rides

  I am the stars within her hair

  [Isis and Osiris merge into Apophis.]

  MESCALITO

  [Green, pointy eared, dancing]:

  Glory to Thee, thou sire and dam

  And Self of I am that I am!

  MASTER MASONS

  Glory to Thee, beyond all term,

  Thy spring of sperm, thy seed and germ!

  [Pyramidphallus rising again.]

  LOLA LEVINE

  Glory to Thee, eternal Sun,

  Thou One in Three, Thou Three in One!

  MASTER MASONS

  Glory and worship unto Thee,

  Sap of the world-ash, wonder-tree!