[Music] well just one I won't speak much I'll just let you solve but if

you just want to talk about how you first heard of Anton Wilson I came to life
when I was probably let me say in my early mid-20s and I had been aware for a
number of years just through knowing Steve Moore and being connected at
secondhand to 14 times I've been aware of a lot of the the vectors of the 11
artists trilogy and of course Robert Wilson he was connected to the 14 times he
did a brilliant article upon the number 23 as I remember Ken Campbell had been
connected with the volume Tom's if only by his the great caper which was based
upon 14 times associate am will so all of these little connections they basically
came to a head when I think Steve Moore was up and visiting and gave me a copy of
the illuminatus trilogy and up until that point I suppose that although I'd
been interested in occult ISM as a source of ideas that I could make use of in
fantasy stories I hadn't really been interested in it as a phenomenon in
itself because an awful lot of the people connected with aquata zhim from a kind
of an ordinary perspective they did seem to be perhaps emotionally lacking in
some way that they had got some kind do emotional hole that they were trying to
fill with ideas of a secret power a secret knowledge something that made them
special it didn't seem a very very pleasant environment or a very
illuminating environment to me until I read the aluminum astrology and I saw how
all of this could be made into a fantastic enlightening joke an enlightening game
that what was previously paranoia or illness could suddenly be transformed into a
really instructive way of looking at the world it was a rational y approach in
awkward ism which appealed to me immensely and is probably a cornerstone my
lighter involvement with vehicle yeah oh I've checked out a lot of the bits
with Robert Anton Wilson oh well I checked out stuff about the actual illuminatus
I found a great thing in the local reference library talking to about some
ancient volume and it was talking about an alleged meeting of Freemasons and
members of the Illuminati including Adam voice helped that was sometime shortly
prior to the French Revolution and the best bit in it was this alleged quote of
belief from Voice help saying that the future of the Illuminati would be heavily
connected to female emancipation that the future was in the emancipation of women
the burgeoning were rights movements around the world and that the Illuminati
should very definitely embrace suffragettes and feminism in order to in some ways
to contain it to infiltrate it and I thought if Robert Anton Wilson had heard of
this he surely wouldn't have passed this a the suggestion that feminism is an
Illuminati plot as well as everything else I mean that's just too good to miss
but yeah I mean boy I think that the people who actually tend to think in terms
of a global conspiracy I think that in many ways that is because that is
reassuring when I was working upon the project brought to light which was a
history of the CIA since the end of the Second World War when they were the OSS
up to I believe the iran-contra affair and you find out that yeah there are
complex conspiracies that are running all over the world but most of the people
running them are completely inept are unbelievably stupid the the plans that they
come up with they're pretty much like those say are I plans for killing
Castro which included exploding cigars chemicals to make his beard fall out and
thus take away his masculinity in the eyes of the Cuban people and even a
brilliant plan to restage the second coming of Jesus Christ in the Bay of Pigs by
using amplified amplification technology and fireworks which the primitive
superstitious Cuban people would clearly never have heard of in order to make
them think that Jesus Christ had come back and was really really pissed off at
the doubt Castro hoping that they would defect that never got off the ground or
whether these are the kind of conspiracies so yes there are things that are being
run by shadowy powers from behind the scenes but there are so many of those
shadowy powers and they are so divided against each other they are all on Des
Moines in each other nobody knows who they work for anymore even people in the
intelligence services they are not sure whether they're working for the
country that they're supposed to be working for or could they perhaps be an
unwitting double agent for another country or is it a triple agent once
disinformation entered the picture then it really did become a complete world of
shadows where nobody knows what they're doing the simple truth of the world
is that it is far too complex to be contained by any conceivable conspiracy I
think that the frightening truth of the world is that there is no human hand upon
the rudder that the forces that are working their way out through human history
are largely it may be supposed blind mathematical forces that these are all just
contingencies and permutations of existence itself but but that they do have very
very interesting and often meaningful patterns in amongst all of those perhaps
chance events and occurrences that was the what was the large the major benefit
perhaps Wilson's books that he introduced me to that way of looking at the
world do you have any particular favorite so any to give him some books that are
important to you for reasons well yeah the Illuminatus trilogy will always have a
huge place in my affection because that was the first one that I read but a lot
of his later books I remember the was it Isis unveiled with was originally the
flyboard book of breasts obviously Wilson had written this when he was at flyboy
and then when he'd come to revise it heard because he'd never he never
written the book that playboy probably wanted him to write he'd written
something about the the symbolism of the the breast and he talked about in Anna
and Ishtar the goddess religions it was a brilliant book in that it was
surprisingly for something that had been a flyboy title it was almost a feminist
tract in many ways which yeah but that was kind of that was Carl or Robert
Hanssen wilson sense of humor he really did like to mess with sort of structures
and people's minds and categories a big favorite of mine is his book
coincidence where he's mainly talking about James Joyce but where he is
talking about Joyce's use of coincidence because I believe it was George who
actually covered coined the term coincidence to talk about the kind of dance of
meaning that can occur and there's one particularly good bit in currency
dance what he's talking about Wilson is talking about a section from
Finnegan's white where Joyce is talking or alluding to nuclear energy and what
was understood in the 1920s which was beginning to be quite a lot about the
possibilities of atomic power on a timely fashion and in the middle of this drift
of puns and the usual sort of joseon effects there's a sentence which is
something like which is called Nagasaki in the lip honey's linguish which is
very much like Nagasaki in the Nipponese language if that is difficult to say
what else it could possibly mean or be alluding to and this is in the middle of I
section upon nuclear fission that was written in the 1920s now that seems to
suggest or what perhaps it could just be an example of the dance of coincidence
that's possible but it's very evocative it's very suggestive it kind
of suggests to me something which I thought about the writings of William
Burroughs it sound to me that in cutting up words in cutting up meaning that
sometimes that perhaps allowed the future to leak through I'm not entirely
certain what I mean by that except that perhaps our construction of the present
is largely linguistic and in the way that we think in the way that we put our
present moment together that is probably largely a linguistic construction and
the conceivably boy messing around with the Brian's language centers or
presenting it with a piece of text that is Qatar for May is malformed or
creatively mutated in some way that conceivably perhaps blue pieces of the future
might randomly link through in some way if this is a block universe if this is a
space-time continuum where it has more than four dimensions or at least four
dimensions then it would suggest that space-time is a solid and the in some ways
all moments coexist within this giant hyper mode of eternity which is very close
to the suggestion by Robert Anton Wilson in the Illuminatus trilogy of the Gaston
Morgan's lighter that they probably got that completely wrong but I believe
it's a translation of the yesterday today tomorrow world it's a
continuous solid sense of time in which people can be communicating in strange
ways despite the fact that they may have centuries between them don't know
whether I'll go that far but the basic idea seems to me to be a sound and
perhaps a profound one yeah except I don't know if you want to talk about
yours and Steve sort of white room vision but wasn't that text well in
nineteen at the end of 1993 when I turned 40 and decided at one birthday party
after I'd had a few drinks they're always going to become a magician for
the reminder of my life and I actually announced that I said it out loud other
people could hear it too thus the next morning yeah I was caught on over and you
think I'll cross what did I say now I'm going to have to do that or
I'm going to look stupid
so I had to find out what do I even mean by magician how do you do this who do I
get in touch with and I naturally go in touch with Steve Moore who'd been
involved with that kind of thing for a few years and we might ought theoretically
about the kind of magic that we might want to do this was all theory this was at
the end of 1993 the beginning the very beginning of 1994 and we were relaxing
using some psilocybin mushrooms which were just tightened for entertainment
purposes and we were discussing what we might want to do with magic it was
entirely theoretical I think Steve was suggesting that we could use a cut-up
technique because we wanted to try and come up with some new way of approaching
magic and we thought that a literary approach or using modern literary techniques
such as Burroughs comes up to me that might be an interesting way and Steve was
suggesting that we could perhaps take a piece of purposive magic a piece of text
saying what we wanted and that we could take another piece of text representing
the body of the God and that by cutting these up and inter splicing them we
could perhaps in some way conceptually unite what we wanted with the idea of the
God see what results that might have now because I was starting to come up on the
psilocybin mushrooms always completely incapable of understanding this so but I
thought I had understood it I thought that Steve was suggesting we should take
the oeid which would take a piece of text representing a God and a piece of text
representing a goddess and that we should inter cut those and splice them
together and so I excitedly said yeah that's a great idea so what we should
do is and I'll run through more theory and Steve said yeah that's great
that's not what I was saying he ran through his again I completely
misunderstood again went through my pitch about fusing the God and the goddess
this happened three times before Steve said and we've been through this three
times already at which point there was a sudden realization I think that I said I
don't think this is the drugs and at that point probably one of the most
extraordinary experiences of my lord at least to that point commenced which was a
magical experience already don't know any other way to describe it luckily
both of us were there so it was at least a shared delusion we had of the
reference points we had the reference point of another person to evaluate the
experience which is more than most people get during this very very strange and
multi-leveled experience which went on for a number of hours there was one point
where we suddenly perceived that we had blundered into a blinding white space a
room of complete dazzling white in which were presences of great magicians
William Blake was there Aleister Crowley was there John Dee I forgot Liang Austen
spare Ed Wood Kelly there was an impression of figures at the back with animal
heads not sure what they were Egyptian gods something like that don't know
but amongst this crowd of dead my god it was also rather an Tom Wilson who at
that point was alive although I believe that it was only a couple of months
thereafter where he would be reported dead and would have to go to great pains to
explain the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated don't know
whether that's connected but at the time I remember after the experience had
concluded where basically I think we both became a bit embarrassed to be in the
company of such transcendent beings when we were giggling and perhaps not
conducting ourselves in the most sort of mangas like mana you know but afterwards
I remember thinking that was the Illuminati that was the real Illuminati which in
the Western magical tradition there is alleged to be a group of addicts who are
outside time who are nevertheless benign in their failings towards the those
magicians working upon a terrestrial level and who will intervene and offer help
to aspiring magicians this is part of the the kind of the folklore of magic
appeal or in the Sufi tradition in the Western tradition that group of sort of
trans material addicts are known as the Illuminati in the Sufi tradition I
believe they're known as the powerhouse on the Kabbalistic glyph trove life
or believe they are associated with the females fear boner which is the third
sphere of the Kabbalah it's kind of the female head of God and that is where
they are supposed to be situated I've got no idea whether any of this relates
to the vision that Steven I had but we did think that Wilson's inclusion
amongst the dead my guy that kind of makes sense in a internalist view of Turin
where in a sense we're all already dead and we're looking back upon this
but all this is another replay of something that has already happened many times
before that would explain how yeah we're always with the Illuminati whether
we're alive or dead that the future the past that really doesn't matter
the this is at least conceptually a kind of a cream of human intellect and
spirituality outside torn that can sometimes be called upon and resorted to
initiation never ends never met Bob did you or never never met him never met him
at all I mean boy the O'Neill looks great I'd love you just to talk a bit
about about the awesome magic being the same body company maybe in terms of the
performances that you did the slide specifically because that's all fixing
with what the cosmic string this true assorted and would you would you like me to
read the rubber anti-muslim peace okay so I'll talk a bit about art and magic
and then we can talk a bit about art magic yeah okay I'll just say magic as I
became more involved with what men Steve at least called magic it started to
unpack itself for us we started to realize that there was an effect very little
difference between magic and art that indeed the the name for magic had
originally been for the arts and we thought would it hurt to take that literally
how will do the two things map onto each other how do they compare and actually
if you look at the language either of them it's very much the same language
terms of literary things to cast a spell is a list according to Aleister Crowley
simply to spell to be able to use language a grimoire a black book of operat ISM
and magic that is simply a French Way of sign grammar pallets or artists will
talk about evocation so magicians they'll talk about invocation and some more
magicians the the arts and magic they do share a language and also they're
both concerned about something from nothing whether that is a rabbit pulled from
an empty hat whether it is the emergence of the entire universe from a quantum
vacuum or whether it is the emergence of a piece of art an idea from an empty
mind it kind of all comes back to one of the reasons why I myself became involved
in magic one of the probably many reasons but that was the fact that if you are a
writer and if you appear in public you will inevitably run out of things to say
and take the coward's way out and throw out to a questions and answer session
and yes I have done that and inevitably somebody will ask you with an earnest
look upon their faces where you get your ideas from and all artists all writers
hate that question we do ride it we talk about it as if it was the most stupid
question that anybody could possibly ask us that's because we don't know
we don't know the answer the thing that all of our livelihoods depends upon
is a complete mystery to us we never bothered to think where do we get our ideas
from this was a key thing in my initial understanding of magic but answering that
question on the annoy suggested midstate both suggested that there may be a kind
of medium a conceptual medium which we referred to as idea space in which all the
events of consciousness occur which would include all of the events of magic
which we see as being very much an extension of consciousness in fact I think
that our basic picture of the way things happened is that all of these things
work out a - magic probably the first act of representation so which is the first
act of art and also the first act of language that was a magical act it whoever
performed it would have been by virtue of that act a shaman he would have had he
or she would have had a power which other people could not have had any hope of
understanding and which would only become more and more complex and more and more
powerful as time went on some language as we are told precedes consciousness you
have to have language for a thing before you are conscious of it this was it was
it the Aztecs who one of the the South American tribes they would be going down
to the beach and they will be saying the city looks funny today this there's
something a bit funny about the sea we don't know quite what it is but
there's something something a bit odd about the sea is is everybody else
saying that or is it just me there's something a bit weird about the sick
because they have not got a concept of huge Spanish galleons of full of
conquested oars so it was something funny about the sea we have to have a concept
we have to have language before we are conscious of a thing so this tends to
suggest that art magic language and consciousness all emerge from the same point
they are all essentially the same thing they are all responses to consciousness
they are all ways of engaging with consciousness and pretty much all we have is
consciousness I was talking with some neuroscientists recently and yeah they
didn't have any problem with the idea
that I think was on the Infinite Monkey cage and so we've got we've got
Brian Cox who bronze materials he believes that the way to understand the
universe is to understand all of the particles that make it up from a quantum
level up to a cosmological level you know and that's valid but as I mentioned
on the show that from another point of view the entire of our reality is mere
article it is purely the reality that is being composed by our consciousness
somewhere in our mind made up of photons bouncing off of our Horace's the
vibrations in our tympanum and somehow moment by moment we we we've all this
into something that we call reality so if there is no more effectively to us
there is no more to reality than our consciousness of reality this explains how
by manipulating language by manipulating symbols or art you can manipulate
consciousness and in this way you can affect on a neurological level you can
alter reality that seems to me to be the only rational way in which magic can
work but luckily it does work quite well on that level so yes I would say that
it's almost you could almost the words are almost interchangeable magic and
art that we have the concept of high magic which is Magic where you don't
know what you're doing essentially you're just doing whatever comes into
your mind on the assumption that this is an instruction from the forces of the
universe it's completely spontaneous it's it's not got any of the
censorship of the rational conscious mind involved in it at all the sign could be
said great works of art that you don't know why you're doing them
you're not sure how you're doing them or what purpose there is it's
just something where you feel a compulsion that is bigger than you that is bigger
than yourself so yes outside that if you want to understand magic try thinking
about heart if you want to understand are try thinking about magic in fact I
believe the both fools would be immensely enriched if they were only to take on
the values of the other camp that we would have magic that if it was all same as
being a former part where it might actually produce wonderful works of art it
might actually produce works Lord those of Austin's bet or any of the other
great Rosslyn norm people great artists who've been connected with the arc or
over the years that would give a purpose that modern magic is almost completely
lacking the same time if contemporary artists were to be drawing upon the ideas
that are in magic then we wouldn't be getting all of this empty vacuous
conceptual [ __ ] that art seems to be frozen in at the moment where yes
conceptual art but it's not they're not even real concepts they're
concepts in the advertising sense or blind Charles Saatchi for a lot of this but
if you were to have that exchange of blood between art and magic I think that
both art and magic would be enriched immeasurably they would both have a human
purpose and would relate to the world in which we are actually all existing now
I've never had as I said any direct connection with Robert Anton Wilson the
closest Oh God who was when they did the Robert Anton Wilson commemorative
performance on March the 18th 2007 I was told that Ken Campbell was gonna be
there and since I haven't actually met Ken that was the main reason why I
went when I like to found out the bill Drummond was gonna be there as well that
was even better I remember turning up was it the Queen Elizabeth Hall or someone
like that and there were also a lot of brilliant musicians who were also involved
and I'd written a small piece about Robert Wilson that it was an attempt to
call him to compress his unusual biography into about 15 minutes 10 minutes 15
minutes of poetry now how successful or was you could probably you'd be best
to judge for yourself but the police already it's not in magic to naija to
let anybody go something to do with time not being what it seems something about
the Gaston high term Morgan's felt things happening all at once the way they
do in dreams and somewhere it's still 1932 it's Brooklyn sepia dust
depression streets neutrons discovered Lovecraft still alive fat Irish cops
abandoning their beats and breaking into a spontaneous ballet with nightsticks
twirling dancing on the Stoops as though through Joyce's Dublin on one
timeless day they gather around the New York naval crib of mrs. Wilson's
pride and joy to stand with news boys gangsters dig each other in the ribs of
tearful and red-faced Saint Danny Boy the nuns of Flatbush glaring and unkissed
lined up to smack their rulers on his wrists promoting sister Kenny's polio
cure and all of this could be in the imagined of a squirrel furiously circling
the tree all of these people moments and events could be no more than thoughts
suspended simultaneously within the smug low consciousness of Luna Wilson
dreaming in the ice to question everything that's still your only man the
best advice and some where Orson Welles his voice is leaking from old radios the
shadow knows if Arwen royally scripted those specific shows but suddenly it's
1958 they've set the matrimonial date in a lysergic spindrift spray that
grades from pink to tangerine the chemist Albert Hoffman rolls up on the day
asteroid his jelly bike while Leary rides down from an altered state the decades
beatnik h-bomb clock ticks over to the sixties as they kiss and grin and
celebrate until the lovely trouble starts but crassness realist then the rabbit
launch of happiness Paul side swoon wearing their hearts upon their Paisley
sleeves and psychedelic badges on their hearts soon he's reporting on the
tension swirling around the Democratic armies of the night convention in Chicago
1968 teargas grenades fired by police describe a fuming parabolic arc as William
Burroughs and Jean Jean I take each other by the arm and with great dignity with
years of riot experience between them with soaked handkerchiefs worn like our
hoot bandanas quit the park up with Bob Shaye playboy after dark and chuckling
over creepy letters from John Burgess detailing conspiracy's compiled from
Nesta Webster's library shelves our men read all the best bits out aloud and
then decided to cook one of themselves whilst elsewhere in the yesterday today
tomorrow world it's the mid-seventies their unified field theorem of American
anxiety become a textbook guide to her hilarious aah called anarchy a trilogy the
pulled it all together and changed paranoia from an illness into an illuminating
game before Dan Brown and David Icke hit town to change it back again a rattling
zenkei the movie full of sex drugs yellow submarine's Bavarians snored
Marilyn Monroe and dazzling dime-store profundity tell us John Dillinger how did
you manage to escape from that law itself same way that you break out of any
prison hell I just walked through the wall into the fire 71 it's written
published four years later and just one year after that served up entire on stage
can't Campbell science fiction theater of Liverpool bill Drummond working in
the wings who feeling justified an ancient and inspired moves on to other things
and during all this there's been doc faced messages from serious coincidence
is piped in by the crew that never rests new ways of seeing and when Bob and
Ireland's fifteen-year-old daughter Luna he's shot dead during a stick-up
job he points out that her killer was a young Native American compelled to rock
Bob brutal and oppressive history opposes the death penalty and stands as an
extraordinary and exemplary human being in another district of the guests earn
points at Morgan's felt meanwhile it's Sunday March 18th 2007 and well
here we are the one last 23 skidoo clearing the war with an important signal
coming through from the agnostic wing of heaven Robert Anton Wilson lived out
through the wall into the fire into the simultaneous part of eternity into the
splendid timeless funfair of a life that he has somehow managed to survive with
thirty-five books weaving his ideas in their spectacular diversity weaving his
luminescent consciousness into the intellectual DNA of our painfully slow
developing society and dancing where with his wife but when he could still dance
and she was still alive researching pocus watching Harvey in the cathode light
another Wilson on screen finds them in a dictionary described as rabbit
Spirit's working mischief with reality and mr. Wilson how are you tonight I
saw him in a soccer television once with other my guy in a room of showing what a
real Illuminati outside torn a crew that never rests but works without respite to
include everyone every last one of us within their light and mr. Wilson
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