SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

by Robert Anton Wilson

  Cagliostro was always carrying around a book called Homo Ludens in those days.

  "Is that about faggots?" Sandoz asked him once.

  Cagliostro laughed. "No," he said. "It's Latin. It means… uh, you know it's hard to translate… Man the Game Player, I suppose."

  Sandoz grinned. "You can learn all about that just by watching the marks," he said. "I been a carny damn near twenty years now and I swear from the things I seen, you could sit down with a blackjack table and a sign saying THIS GAME IS CROOKED,' and half the marks would still sit down opposite you and try to beat you. A mark wants to lose," he concluded profoundly, almost with anger.

  "No," Cagliostro said. "The mark wants to be hypnotized. He wants to enter the world of magic, with mirrors and blue smoke and shifting shapes, and he's willing to be swindled, just to have a glimpse of that world."

  "Is that what that book says?" Sandoz asked.

  "More or less," Cagliostro said. "In sociological jargon."

  JUMPED BY JESUS

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  Mary Margaret Wildeblood still couldn't get to sleep, and The Search for the Historical Vlad was pishposh. She got out of bed and padded over to the desk to glance at the latest volumes that had arrived for review.

  FROM CALIGARI TO VLAD

  Another pretentious volume of neo-Freudian film criticism by George Dorn, obviously cashing in on the current fad. Rot.

  THE RADICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

  OF SMOKEY STOVER

  Hmm? Marshall McLuhan again. Try a page:

  and the Notary Sojac sign, communicating much by its very inscrutability, is not alphabetical but ideogram-mic, bringing tribal mystery to the electronic continuum, just as Chief Cash U. Nutt, true shaman that he is

  Fiddlefaddle. What else have we got?

  IN THE CASTLE OF VLAD

  Somebody else ripping off Marvin Gardens.

  CONTEMPORARIES OF VLAD

  I smell a fad in the making.

  PATTERNS OF FASCIST ART

  Who's being dissected? Wagner, Pound, Celine, Riefen-stahl, Vonnegut… Vonnegut? Oh: It's by Kate Millett.

  JACKIE DID IT!

  The latest Kennedy assassination expose. Bosh.

  I AWAIT HIS RETURN

  By who? Rebecca Goodman. Didn't she write that anthropology book a few years back, Golden Apples of something? What this time? Hm. Had her husband cryonically frozen at death. Hm.

  Well, let's see. Millett, I guess.

  Beneath the veneer of chic liberalism, Vonnegut's sexist prejudice reveals hm skip a bit refusal to recognize dialectic of capitalist blah blah blah a really sinister note enters with the chauvinist caricature of Montana Wildstack blah blah beneath the sentimentality a ruthless determination to subjugate and humiliate women

  Mary Margaret realized that she was getting horny again; any reference to subjugation and humiliation was likely to trigger that response in her. She stealthily removed the vibrator from the bureau drawer again, climbed back into bed with Patterns of Fascist Art, and then remembered a little bit of hashish left in the living room.

  "Perhaps a diagram would help," Blake Williams said, getting a sketchpad and drawing rapidly:

  "This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it," he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. "A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood's party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrodinger's Cat at D. Got it?"

  "Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it…"

  "Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell's Theorem. It looks more like this." And Williams sketches rapidly:

  "A 'causes' B, C, D, and E, but B also 'causes' A, C, D, and E, and C 'causes' A, B, D, and E… and so on. Got it…? All before the appearance of the space-time manifold."

  "You mean it works everywhichway in time…"

  "No, it happens before time itself appears along with space as a by-product of the quantum mesh…"

  Brrrzzzzzzmmmmbrz the vibrator purrs along as Mary Margaret surrenders again to Him (to Him!) starting to compose a poem almost "Crush me in your Dionysian biceps, Jesus Lord" but that was perhaps a bit too Hopkins and the reality of it was beyond poetry (heresy: she could never admit that in literary circles) but the thrust and the purr and the agony and the ecstasy of it Lord Lord lord

  because she was remembering an old Sufi proverb about the three stages of the Path which were "Lord, use me" and then "Lord, use me but don't break me" and then "Lord, I don't care if you break me"

  and He was breaking her smashing her annihilating her the Great Magician of the Tarot naked on the bed as SHe rammed hir cock up his ass

  I AM CONFUSED

  To be is to be related.

  –cassius keyser, Thinking About Thinking

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  "So that the brick never moves, logically," Williams says.

  "Yeah I had that in a class at the New School, 'Paradox and Personality,' it's based on you know Relativistic Ego Therapy, we're all Empedoclean concepts in social topology. " Natalie actually had received an A for the course.

  "In territorial topology my dear I um invented Relativistic Ego Therapy," Williams says, meaning: I created the course.

  "You're that Professor Williams my God you're famous at the new School." Natalie was impressed.

  "And at Esalen um yes my dear but to the world at large-" Williams demurs.

  "Thank God I'm an atheist," Joe Malik said fervently. "If I considered for even a moment for even a microsecond that the pretense of a demon might be functionally equivalent to the presence of a demon… Just change the t to an s…"

  But Marvin abandons the Britannica (never find what you really want in there) and undressing for bed fumbles at the radio for something bearable, only to hear

  I'm in love with Vlad the Impaler

  With Hitler and Nixon and Ahab the Whaler

  He quickly turns the dial (after a moment of pride at new-won fame and wincing at the cacophony of The Civic Monster), finding a classical station the end of the Ninth all those heavenly choirs singringinging at the Omega Point over a century before science discovered it (always read Nietzsche and listen to Ludwig, was one of his adages, for the long-range evolutionary perspective), pops a downer to take the edge off the coke jitters before they come, and slips under the covers remembering Linda's mouth two inches four inches six inches nine goddamned inches gorgeous splat splat splat always splitting but always one, is it really? as Ludwig answers yes I will yes

  I never died said he

  "But the crowning insult to our simple-minded realism comes, of course, from our friends the physicists," Williams explains. "If Krazy is Schrodinger's Cat in the famous demonstration then my dear then we are really up the ontological creek without a paddle because when the brick is hurled she may be in any of several etgenstates, several mathematical probability matrices, in some of which the brick will certainly hit her and in some of which it will not."

  "Oh, wow."

  "Wow, indeed. To paraphrase Descartes: T think; therefore, I am confused.' "

  ESCAPISM

  The first fame of Cagliostro began while he was touring with the U.S.O. during the war. He had entirely abandoned mentalism by then and his act depended entirely on escaping from everything the M.P.'s could devise to restrain him.

  Variety called him "the new Houdini" in 1945, just a few months before Hiroshima.

  His first arrest occurred in the fall of that year, possession of marijuana, the charges dismissed without a trial. (His agent's connections, the Crane family lawyer, the fact that the Crane fortune had not been wiped out entirely when ORGASMOR dropped to the bottom of the Big Board, and judicious oiling of what Show Biz and underworld people call "tin mittens"-officials on the take- contributed to this happy consummation.) He was one of the first guests on The Ed Sullivan Show, but was never asked to r
eturn due to a 1948 "morals" arrest: the girl was quite young and an "act against nature" was alleged. Once again, money changed hands and there was no trial.

  His career was mostly "in the clubs" after that; Hollywood and TV were both in one of their chronic contractions of cowardice at the end of the decade.

  A second morals arrest, followed rapidly by a second pot bust, made him a little too hot for most club owners. Still-the crowds turned out wherever he appeared. The mob decided to set immediate money against caution, and he was allowed to go on working. Until his disastrous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950.

  "You're not a Communist, you hardly know any Communists, you could have sung like a bird without hurting yourself," his agent said afterward. "Why did you have to do it, baby?"

  "Listen," Crane said angrily. "Do you think I can get out of a rucking set of Junior G-Man handcuffs if I let one single jot of fear get into my head? You don't understand. I can't let anything scare me-especially not shit-heads like them."

  "It's your own funeral," the agent replied glumly. "I'll tell you the plain and varnished facts. You're gonna end up like Chaplin. Two sex scandals, two drug scandals, and now this. You're gonna end up worse than Chaplin. You're box-office poison, baby. From this day forward."

  THE HEAD REVOLUTION

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  Although the HEAD Revolution transformed the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance, nobody knows when it actually began. Some trace it to certain Alchemical cults of the early Dark Ages; some say it did not properly start as an organized movement until neuro-pharmacology began to replace old-fashioned "psychology" in the late Dark Ages (i.e., just before the time of this epic novel); some try to find its origins in primitive shamanism and yoga.

  What is clear is that some primates on Terra began to transcend genetic four-circuit limitations many centuries, or even millennia, before true neuroscience appeared among them. Whether this was due to mutation, empirical hit-or-miss experimentation with alkaloid herbs, or other factors is unknown. In Egypt and China and other places, a few primates reported fifth-circuit raptures-the dawning of neurosomatic consciousness-two thousand or even three thousand years before the Space Age began.

  The picture is the same on all planets. A few biots suddenly rise above the eat-it-or-flee-it imprints of the amphibian biosurvival circuit, above the dominate-or-submit imprints of the mammalian territorial-emotional circuit, above the either/or logic of the hominid semantic circuit, above the "good" and "bad" values of the tribal sociosexual circuit. They have transcended infantile feeding programs, childish emotional programs, adolescent philosophizing, and adult "responsibility" (pack role) all at once.

  What has happened, of course, is that these biots have formed a fifth circuit in their brains. This is called the neurosomatic circuit because it allows conscious feedback between the nervous system ("mind," in prescientific primate language) and the soma ("body"). In the larval stages of this Hedonic Revolution, every planet exhibits the same monotonous pattern:

  Mysticism and monomania appear. Many of the mutated biots become convinced that they control everything (the "I-am-God" syndrome), not realizing that they merely control their own perceptual field.

  "Miracle healings" are reported. The neurosomatic ("mind body") feedback loop allows the mutant biots to become healthier, younger-looking, and sleeker ("handsomer") than average. They soon believe, and are encouraged by their admirers to never doubt, that they can "cure" anything.

  Neurosomatic intolerance appears. The mutated biots grow annoyed, and become extremely critical about, the robot mechanisms of first-circuit approach-avoidance, second-circuit domination-submission, third-circuit either or-logic, and static fourth-circuit sex roles. They call on everybody to float free like themselves, or like the wind.

  The other biots usually declare these five-circuit mutants to be divine, or else they kill them. Sometimes they do both.

  The condition was just becoming understood on Terra at the time of this Quantum Comedy, as neuropharmacol-ogists slowly traced the links between neurochemistry and the creation of perceived reality-tunnels.

  GRAPEFRUIT THROUGH THE NIGHT

  Anyone with I's in their hood could see it was a tight cityation there on bonger howl, one nation under guard, as Case tosses in the midst of the nightmare, all of them whooping it oop with their tommyhawk fans and their moody decks and their scolded litters, one nation in a dirigible.

  Forty of them with town feathers, raising coin as much as they were able, insidious rapacious seditious, with their stars bangled bangers and the ramrods we welshed, through the nox with the lox from a bulb, till the girl with colitis goes by, and Case really saddling hard into it and glowing coolish along with it and hooverin deeper and dotter into doubt about it, pushing a head with their desotos and pontiacs there. "Buy all Chimatong highdeals," they sang.

  It was the Guylum Bardot or the Bardot Theodial or if not it was the vector moaning there, all singing O atum bomb O adum bum vee green send unum blather. The very muddle of a model motel tea party: Immolaton, Resurrection, Sewandsow.

  And Justin Case awoke.

  Just a nightmare, just a nightmare… Indians auditing his income tax and all that, fading now, only a trauma house, or a drama, yes, fadern.

  Justin sat up and turned on the light.

  His first thought was that he was only dreaming that he had awakened.

  For, at the foot of his bed, there stood a little green man in a miniature NASA spacesuit.

  "I am Apollon of Mars," he said. "Come with me at once."

  THERE IS NO GOVERNOR ANYWHERE

  Hugh Crane served his contempt-of-Congress sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, the "gentleman's club" as the Maf calls it, where the government incarcerates those ritzy felons who are not likely to shiv a guard or climb a wall.

  He worked in the library with Alger Hiss. They both watched the famous "Checkers" speech on the TV in the rec room. This was a masterpiece of primate oratory in which a vice presidential candidate named Richard Nixon argued that huge sums of money given to him by various businessmen were not intended as bribes and were not expected to result in reciprocal favors on his part.

  "As an old carny man," Mr. Hiss asked Mr. Crane, "what do you think of that performance?"

  "The dog shtik was very good," Crane said professionally. "But he left out Mother."

  Another distinguished guest at Lewisburg that year was the aging Idaho poet and folk singer Ezra Pound, who was also in for Un-American Activities. He and Crane never got along well, because Pound, who had seldom been outside Idaho, distrusted all easterners.

  Crane performed yoga exercises every day in his cell. The Illuminati, of course, subsequently scanned the notes he kept on these neurophysiological experiments. The most interesting items were the following:

  April 23, 1952-It helps if you identify each letter of AUM with one of the three gods of the Hindu trinity. A is Brahm, the Creator: let it explode upward from the diaphragm, like the big bang of creation itself. U is Vishnu, the Preserver: hold it so long that it vibrates, like the rhythm of life, the Big Beat of Beethoven's Seventh. M is Shiva, the Destroyer: close the lips in a decisive bite of "This is the way the world ends" as you enter the silence.

  May 1, 1952-Today, unexpectedly, pure dhyana. It was so much simpler than I ever guessed, and it is obviously a matter of practice. No wonder the yogis say that it's dangerous to do this without a guru: I am no better or worse, morally, and no wiser or more "spiritual." Repetition is the whole key. Force the nerves and muscles and glands, force them day after day, and it happens. The chief function of the guru is to ensure that you don't take advantage of the new freedom too quickly and get yourself in trouble with the authorities. The guru doesn't help it happen at all (as the honest ones admit); you do all the work yourself. The guru just makes sure that the rapture flows into "safe" (domesticated?) channels. Without such a moral watchdog, I am free to do as I bl
oody please.

  I just realized why all the real occult schools are so damned secretive, why the ordinary seeker is given a lot of double-talk and ejected out the same door wherein he came. If everybody could do this, the whole world would be in continuous revolution.*

  May 27, 1952-Another successful dhyana. There's nothing to it, really. The brain obviously operates on the same principle as those fellows in The Hunting of the Snark: "What I tell you three times is true." (Three million times is more accurate.) It was marvelous-better than the first time-and I'll never identify with "Cagliostro the Great" or "Hugh Crane" or even "me" or the perpendicular pronoun, ever again.

  I can see more and more clearly why all this is "sealed with seven seals" and hidden behind all kinds of mystification. Society as we know it is based on torture and death, or the threat of torture and death. I am in here to be tortured, although the authorities will never admit that. (What they do with heretics in other countries is torture; what we do here is penology.) The cage experience is profoundly punishing to the average human, as to any primate; it is the form of torture our society countenances. It is no torture to me only because I have learned certain neurological arts every stage magician learns.