KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  Sciambra's claim that Thornley was "a victim of the most fantastic chain of coincidences ever" raises some interesting questions. To choose just one example, what are the odds that Garrison's photocopier would have been previously used to copy the writing of one of his key suspects? At first glance, this seems extremely unlikely. There were 195 million people in America at the time, so the likeliness of two coming together in such a way must be extremely small.

  To a mathematician, however, the issue is not so strange. They would point out that the photocopier link is arbitrary. We artificially assume a greater level of importance to the photocopier link because we know of a connection there, when in fact there are countless other possible connections between any two people. Had it been, for example, that Garrison had once bought a car from Thornley, or perhaps that Thornley had once dated Garrison's niece, then we would have ignored the photocopier and invested these links with the same level of relevance. The true issue is not the photocopier, but whether there is any connection between the two men at all, and the odds of this are considerably smaller than the odds of a specific connection. When you factor in that the two men were both based in New Orleans, and that Garrison's job made him very active in the community, then the odds fall even more. They are still high, of course, but not so high that mathematicians would find them unusual.

  There were many more strange coincidences at play than this, however, and these were what Sciambra was alluding to. These include Oswald moving to New Orleans when Thornley was writing a book about him there, or people that knew them both mistakenly identifying Thornley with Oswald, or the pair never meeting despite frequenting the same places, or Thornley's friendship with people who had discussed the idea of assassinating the president. The odds against all these are individually very high, and when all such coincidences are considered together, they multiply. A mathematician, however, would see such high odds are interesting, but not inexplicable. The amount of different connections between all the different elements of our world are so huge, and so many different things happen at any one time, that finding a set of events that have such unimaginable odds is not strange. In fact, when the full enormity of actual events in this world is considered, such unlikely strings of events are guaranteed to happen. Mathematicians such as Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller call this the law of truly large numbers.

  Those who find themselves at the centre of such a storm of coincidence, however, rarely find this simple numerical analysis satisfying. They would argue that it does not differentiate between irrelevant coincidence and strange events that seem to possess their own innate meaning. More specifically, there can often appear to be a distinct sense of humour at work, behind the onslaught of coincidence, that mathematics isn't a suitable tool to appreciate.

  Thornley would have dismissed the mathematician's claims of coincidence, and instead viewed these events as what Carl Jung called 'synchronicity.' Jung defined synchronicity as a "meaningful coincidence" or an "acausal connecting principle", where "acausal" means a string of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect. Or, to put it another way, if something is behind these events, then we don't know what. Jung has come to be regarded as one of the giants of modern psychology, comparable to his colleague and rival Freud, but there are many who dismiss his ideas about synchronicity as little more than 'magical thinking'. For Thornley and many other Discordians who found their lives spiralling out in strange and impossibly unlikely ways, however, Jung's ideas seemed an accurate description of the world around them. They were being buffeted by events beyond their control, and they thought that something was behind it.

  For the early Discordians it was tempting to believe that when Greg Hill used D.A. Garrison's photocopier to produce the first edition of Principia Discordia, something, some spirit of Discord and Chaos, somehow emerged, or returned, or arrived in the world we know. Of course, Greg Hill was an atheist. He intended Discordianism to be a satire of religion, and did not take the idea of goddesses or spirits seriously. By the late 70s, however, he was convinced that his Discordian adventures had stirred up something that he was unable to explain. As he told his friend Margot Adler, "If you do this type of thing well enough, it starts to work. I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By the end I had learnt that it is up to you to decide whether gods exist, and if you take the goddess of confusion seriously enough, it will send you through as profound and valid a metaphysical trip as taking a god like Yahweh [The Jewish/Christian/Muslim God] seriously." The effects of invoking a made-up god, in other words, were no different to sincerely invoking a 'proper' one. This was going to be an eventful realisation for those that invoke Eris. As Thornley once remarked to Hill, "You know, if I had realised that all of this was going to come true, I'd have chosen Venus."

  In the Summer of 1983, Bill Drummond walked to Matthew Street and, at the exact time that the Bunnymen went on stage in Reykjavik, he stood on the manhole cover.

  Drummond's personal mythology had grown considerably since he saw Echo in the record sleeve. He had come to view the different personalities of his two bands as alchemical opposites. The Bunnymen were cold, aloof and impenetrable, whereas the Teardrops were dangerous, wild and burning. He had come to associate both bands with places that had a hold on his imagination as a child. The Bunnymen evoked similar feelings to his memory of Iceland, which he had visited as a boy. He had stood on the edge of an immense glacier, and been overawed by the scale and cold grandeur of the place. The thought of the Teardrops, in contrast, conjured up images of Papua New Guinea. He had never been to Papua New Guinea, but he had heard the story of how a great-great uncle of his had once gone there as a missionary, and been eaten by natives. His childhood mind imagined it as a wild, uncontrollable place, burning hot and dangerous, with thick forests bristling with dreadful things without name. Not too dissimilar, in other words, to how he had come to view Julian Cope.

  In Drummond's mind Iceland, Papua New Guinea and Liverpool were linked in a manner that made sense emotionally, if not rationally. He could imagine a great flow of some form of energy flowing through space and powering into the Earth. It poured into Iceland, flowed just under Matthew Street, and emerged back out into space again at Papua New Guinea. This was an idea that he entertained, rather than believed. It was a mental folly, in other words, constructed for amusement rather than practical use. But something about it appealed in a way he couldn't dismiss outright, and a plan bubbled up from his subconscious.

  His idea was to arrange for the Bunnymen to play a gig in Iceland at exactly the same time as the Teardrops played in Papua New Guinea. He would remain in Liverpool and, at the correct time, he would go and stand on the manhole cover. Quite why he would do this, though, was another matter. He had a vague feeling that something would happen, but exactly what was hard to define. Perhaps he would somehow absorb the energy of the two bands? Perhaps he would gain some form of enlightenment? It was completely mad, of course, he knew that. But that wasn't a good reason to not do it.

  There was a big problem, though. His relationship with Julian Cope had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer influence him. Cope's ego had broken loose following a little fame and a lot of LSD. As Drummond later wrote, "Cope was careering from being pop pin-up to great acid casualty pop eccentric, somewhere between Sky Saxon and Syd Barrett but with an ego telling him he was Lord Byron, Jim Morrison and the son of a very unchristian god all at once. Great stuff and I loved it, but how was I to persuade him he should do a concert in the highland jungles of Papua New Guinea when I couldn't even tell him to have a bath?"

  The Bunnymen were not as difficult. He had previously arranged a Bunnymen tour which went up and down the country in a seemingly random way, playing unlikely and bizarre venues. What the band hadn't realised was this was all part of Drummond's attempt to evoke Echo, who had been conspicuous in his absence from later Bunnymen record sleeves. If you drew a line between the gigs on a map, they formed a pair of
rabbit ears. Arranging a gig in Reykjavik was fairly normal in comparison.

  So as the band took to the stage Drummond duly went down to Matthew Street. It was not the same as if the Teardrops were involved, but it was the best he could do. He stood on the manhole cover.

  A short while later, after he had satisfied himself that absolutely nothing was happening, he wandered off and got the bus home.

  It was time to move on, both from his bands and from Liverpool. He had put a lot into Zoo records. He'd re-mortgaged his house on two occasions to pay for tours and studio time. The end result, however, had not lived up to his aspirations. He was not proud of the records he made, and he found himself having to make decisions that caused bad feelings among his friends and colleagues. More importantly, it was not fair of him to indulge his inner fantasies at the expense of the careers of these bands. They were just not driven by the same forces that he was, and it was not fair to play with their careers for his own internal amusement.

  Before long the Teardrops collapsed, the Bunnymen found more professional management, and Drummond was offered a job working for a major label. He moved to London and became an A&R man at WEA.

  His inner life, though, still churned.

  On July 23rd 1973 Robert Anton Wilson began hearing voices in his head. They appeared to him to be communication from an alien life form somewhere in the vicinity of Sirius.

  This was not that unusual for heavy drug users in California during the early 1970s. Philip K. Dick, for example, began receiving similar communication from the alien entity that he christened VALIS in February 1975, and Timothy Leary was also channelling aliens at around the same time, to help pass the time while incarcerated in Folsom Prison. What was significant about Wilson's experience, however, was how he came to interpret it.

  Wilson was sane enough to know that just because it appeared as if aliens from Sirius were talking to him, it did not follow that this was what was actually happening. He turned to the medical literature and searched for an explanation. Perhaps there was a known process where a chemical imbalance causes randomly firing neurons to connect in an unusual way, for example, which would explain what he was experiencing? The trouble was, he couldn't find anything. The schizophrenic family of illnesses were very poorly understood back in the 1970s, as indeed they still are now. They may have been named and described, but a name was not an explanation, nor did it tell him what was going on. Neuroscience has made some remarkable discoveries about the brain, but when it comes down to explaining issues of awareness and the actuality of experience it is still struggling in the dark. Science could slap a label on what was happening to him, Wilson discovered, but it could not explain it.

  This being California in the 1970s, Wilson decided to tell a psychic about what was happening to him. She told him that he had it all wrong. He was not hearing voices from aliens from Sirius at all. What was really happening, she explained, was that he was in communication with the spirit of an ancient Chinese philosopher.

  Wilson thought about this. It seemed to him to be just as plausible as the Sirius explanation. Either explanation fitted the data just as well as the other. But which explanation should he favour? How could he find out whether he was receiving information from aliens from the star Sirius or an ancient Chinese philosopher? He decided to get another opinion. He asked another psychic. This psychic was adamant that both the Sirius and the Chinese philosopher explanations were nonsense. In actual fact, Wilson was told, he was in touch with the spirit of a medieval Irish bard.

  This was getting confusing, and lesser men would have given up and gone quite mad at this point. Wilson, however, made one the most important philosophical leaps of the twentieth century, although, admittedly, it is not yet generally recognised as such.

  As well as undergoing drug-induced schizophrenia, Wilson had been raised as a Catholic and had also been a communist in his earlier years. He had fully accepted these two powerful belief systems, before rejecting them both. Thanks to this background, he was able to recognise what he would later call a self-referential reality tunnel. This was a philosophy, religion or ideology that was complete and satisfying and which fully explained all the details of the world, assuming that you did not question its central tenet. This central tenet was an idea, and often an appealing idea, for which there was no evidence at all, such as the idea that there was a judgemental patriarchal creator God or that a propertyless communal utopia would be the final stage of society. The rest of the ideology boiled down to an elaborate commentary which supported and protected the central concept. All the theory and education that is needed to fully understand an '-ism' or religion functioned like a sophisticated defence mechanism which protected this central tenet from crashing and burning on the rocks of reality. The reason these ideological defences were so painstakingly built up over time was because, once inside a self-referential reality tunnel, you had a model that made sense of the rest of the world. This could be an extremely appealing situation, and one that you could happily stay in for the rest of your life.

  The idea that a hyper-evolved intelligence from the stars had selected Wilson to receive great founts of admittedly confusing cosmic wisdom, and hence help mankind evolve into a higher state of being, did seem an appealing notion and one that would explain a great deal. But Wilson could see that it was just another self-referential reality tunnel, like Catholicism or Marxism, and that it was vitally important that he did not come to believe the bugger.

  It was around this time that Wilson watched the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey. In the film, Stewart plays an amiable small-town drunk called Elwood P. Dowd, who stumbles out of a bar and meets an invisible 6' 3½" rabbit named Harvey. "How are you this evening, Mr. Dowd?" asked Harvey. Dowd was not too surprised by this. "It's a small town, everyone knows my name," he reasons, and strikes up a friendship with the rabbit. The other characters in the film, however, are more concerned about Dowd's relationship with the giant invisible rabbit, and do not accept Dowd's explanation that Harvey is actually a Pooka, an ancient rabbit spirit from County Derry.

  A psychiatrist called Marvin Wilson attempts to treat Dowd, but in doing so cracks up himself. The turning point is a scene where he looks up Dowd's word 'Pooka' in a dictionary. He reads aloud: "Pooka, noun. A Celtic elf or vegetation spirit, wise but mischievous, fond of rum plots, crack pots, and how are you today Mr. Wilson?"

  "Oh that's all I need," thought Robert Anton Wilson. "Now the television is talking to me."

  Still, the idea that an ancient rabbit spirit from Western Europe was communicating with him had a certain appeal, and now Wilson thought about it, it seemed just as plausible as the other explanations he had. Indeed, it offered something that the aliens and bards and philosophers lacked. There was absolutely no danger that he might take the idea literally.

  As Wilson saw it, we all need models in order to deal with the world around us. We need models that fit the existing facts and which have some ability to predict what will happen next. This is what all the best ideologies, religions and philosophies offer us. What we shouldn't do is confuse these models with the real world, for the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal. Once this is understood, the need to fight to protect the 'truth' of the model falls away and we are free to use different and contradictory models as circumstances change. So it was that as Robert Anton Wilson's consciousness kept producing strange and dazzling feats of awareness, Wilson comforted himself with the idea that a giant invisible European rabbit spirit was currently intent on trying to tell him something, and by and large he felt much better about the whole thing.

  This is, as no doubt you have noticed, the second time in our story that a giant invisible rabbit spirit has appeared. This is of course a coincidence.

  It also has all the hall marks of what Jung would call synchronicity. Giant invisible rabbit spirits are extremely rare, so when two come along at once it is hard not to sit up and take notice. Indeed, it is hard to think of other occasions where giant
invisible rabbit spirits might appear. Cryptozoologists and Forteans do possess accounts of sightings of giant rabbit creatures, but not in any great number. Apart from the film Harvey, they make very few appearances in our culture. The only example that springs readily to mind is Donnie Darko, a movie made in 2001 by Richard Kelly. What then – if anything – should we make of the fact that the film opens to a montage set to The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen?

  The Killing Moon is a song that was written after singer Ian McCulloch woke from a dream with the lyric 'Fate, up against your will' in his head. It was never supposed to appear at the beginning of the film. The director wanted to use Never Tear Us Apart by INXS, but financial and licensing issues got in the way and the Echo & the Bunnymen song somehow barged its way to the front. (The director was later given the chance to make a Director's Cut of the movie, where he was able to shove the song back to a later, Halloween party scene and start with the INXS song as he originally intended.)

  What should we make of this? We shouldn't make anything of it. We should forget it and move on. If it makes it any easier, this author can assure you that there will be no other appearances in this story by giant invisible rabbit spirits. As our story takes us deeper into the music industry, the rabbit spirit either flees or evolves into something else. Just for now, picture this spirit in your head – tall, powerful, with long ears upright on the top of his head. How does he strike you? Mischievous and lusty? Or something more sinister?