Remembering Robert Anton Wilson

"RAW" to his legion of readers and fans, and "Bob" to almost all who knew him (although Wilson said his friend Timothy Leary called him "Robert"), would've turned 80 this past January 18th. He died a week short of his 75th birthday, in 2007. Recently Boing Boing made the week of Jan. 11-18 "Robert Anton Wilson Week," which largely prompts this blogpost. I think RAW was a major ingredient in the spiked-with-something mind-manifesting cream of the relatively free-floating unattached generalist intellectuals in Unistat in the second half of the 20th century.

I was still living in San Pedro, on the Los Angeles harbor's edge, when I wrote RAW and asked, if I drove up (a good five hour's drive from LA to Capitola/Santa Cruz, where he lived), could I interview him? He'd read some of my stuff about his writing at alt.fan.rawilson, and the writer Eric Wagner told him I was cool, so RAW said yes. We made a date. I was nervous, and in the two weeks before driving towards the Bay Area, filled maybe eighteen pages of a spiral notebook with questions, being careful not to ask anything anyone had previously asked in the fifty or so interviews I'd read with him. I had  emailed him only some of the topics I wanted to discuss, and he wrote back, saying "I can't wait to talk about this stuff with you."

We - my wife and I - buzzed his number at the gate and he let us in, and one of the crew members of what would be the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, greeted us at the door and led us down a short hall (I remember seeing a room to my left completely filled from floor to ceiling with books, and regret I didn't get to peruse his collection) and there were cameras and microphones, and The Man himself, seated at his couch. I'm pretty sure at that moment I went into an altered state. I'm resolutely not a celebrity worshipper. There are only a few people in the world who, if I met them in public, I'd have to try and tell them how their work changed my life, and would you please sign this piece of paper? There are/were maybe five people for me like that, and he was one.

I was very nervous but he put me at ease quickly. I met the crew for the film: young very hip intellectual types who were interested in, besides RAW: jazz and progressive ideas. Because what I said was being recorded for possible use in the film, I signed a waiver. RAW was making the filmmakers laugh, and he turned to me and apologized that he'd fallen recently and had broken a tooth and was going to get it fixed, but he would sound sort of funny when he spoke. All around the living room, on every surface, were gifts that friends and fans had given him, mostly books.

                                    I don't know who took this photo, but this is pretty close to how 
                                                he looked when I interviewed him. He died at 4:50AM on January
                                                11th, 2007, in his home, among family and friends.

There was a brief lull, so I spoke up and asked him, "Are you ready?" He said let's go! I started my microcassette recorder, and here's the transcript from how the interview started, and as the goddess and the Green Horned Man are my witnesses, I'm typing it out exactly as he answered it:

Me: I gave you a list of some of the things I wanted to talk about, but didn't mention humor. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about humor first.

RAW: That's a great theme.

Me: It seems to me that humor, humorists, comedians, and satirists aren't given enough credit for their intelligence in our culture. It reminds me of the popular discourse about, say, Beethoven, Picasso, or Orson Welles: "Oh sure they're artistic, but I don't consider them intellectuals like Einstein or Chomsky." Do you see this too? And if so, why?

RAW: Well, that's an interesting question. The first thing I think of is the Academy Award has never been given to a comedy as far as I know. If they did it was only once. Comedies never even get nominated! The idea is that to be serious you've got to be grim. And I think some of the greatest writing in - I'm talking about my own field - some of the greatest writing in the world is comic writing: Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Rabelais, James Joyce, Ezra Pound...Ezra Pound is much funnier than he's given credit for...

I think the thing is that comedy arouses some of the same joyous feelings as orgone or pot. And these are the feelings our society most dreads. They're literally ashamed of them. A lot of comedians say when they're successful, "I killed them!" They mean they broke down our resistance to having a good time. There's a critical mass...I've known some professional comedians. The critical mass beyond which when the audience has reached that point of laughter, they'll laugh at almost anything. You can stop telling jokes and start reading the phone book and they'll laugh at that, too. It's a contagious thing, but that's because it's so repressed and you need a lot of pressure to unleash it. I think that's why people get drunk: it's to unleash their laughter. Unfortunately, it unleashes their violence, too. You get the laughing drunk followed by the fighting drunk. Followed by another homicide case. It's a Dionysian thing. And our society is very anti-Dionysian. What's the main association with Dionysus? Drugs and orgies. That's what our society is most terrified of. You can kill as many people as you want, but for god's sake don't look like you're having a good time! About anything.

That's why Hannibal Lecter is the greatest villain ever. It's like he has a magnetic field around him. Everyone either hates him or loves him. Most of them hate him. The ones that hate him the most - I think - are the ones that secretly love him the most. I once admitted I love him because he's so shameless. Without his bad habits, of course...That's the thing about Hannibal: he's fascinating because he's not only a villain but he's not a pathetic villain. The villains that people love all have a touch of pathos about them, like the Frankenstein monster, the Wolfman who doesn't want to turn into a werewolf but has to because he's under a curse. They've all got something sympathetic about them. Hannibal Lecter has nothing sympathetic about him whatsoever. There's no excuse for him. And he knows it and he doesn't give a damn. (Laughs) There's this polarity. He's incarnate evil. And enjoying himself thoroughly! He eats the best food, dines at the best restaurants, wears the best clothes, knows everything. He's a walking encyclopedia of music, art, science...How can you help hating him? I mean if you're a normal, well-adjusted citizen. And Anthony Hopkins plays him with so much charm that they can't help feeling, even while they're hating him they're strangely attracted, which scares the hell out of them.
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Yes, that's RAW: give him a question and he can really take off, almost like a Coltrane solo: take a theme and just riff madly off it, linking ideas, following harmonies and ideas suggested by previous ones, trying to stay interesting by making the improvisation informationally dense, and landing on your feet by the end of the solo. He did this with me for four hours, with many breaks to sit on his balcony and look at the wine-dark Pacific, smoke.

And he was stoned the whole time, because his post-polio syndrome had really began to take its toll by then: an awful proportion of the nerves in his legs had died, he'd feel 20 degrees colder than what the thermometer read, he felt pain constantly, and he mostly used a wheelchair to get around.

The movie crew left after I'd been there for a couple of hours. Gradually, the interview turned into a discussion, and we riffed back and forth with each other about the sociology of science, avant garde classical music, how delighted he was that Lily Tomlin and George Carlin had been subscribers to his futurist newsletter Trajectories, the influence of J. W. Dunne, pragmatism in using intellectual models, ethnomethodology, Vico, film and Jungian archetypes, James Joyce, Freud, reading tabloids like they're cultural anthropology, and Pound. Among other things. I think he appreciated that I'd actually read Pound and had prepared some good questions for him. By the third hour he made me feel like his equal, and seemed to genuinely like listening to me riff on ideas about authors he said he hadn't read.

The only unpleasant moment during my whole time with him was my question, "How well do you think you've been understood?" He seemed to darken, then stared at me for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only 20 seconds, and said, "Next question!" I almost panicked. Had I brought up the one sorest of sore spots? Had I ruined the entire afternoon? I had discussed aspects of this question with other Wilson scholars, and indeed, we wondered why this genius was not a bigger deal in the sociology of intellectuals.

I nervously laughed a bit, and asked my next prepared question, and he brightened immediately and it was as if I had never asked that Offending Question.

Since then, I have come to understand that the apparent lack of understanding of his work by the literati was indeed a very hurtful thing for him. I had asked the question in all innocence and earnestness, never intending to be snarky or provocative. I felt painfully naive later.

After four or so hours, I'd exhausted my questions and felt like I'd taken up too much of his time. It was agreed we'd go for two hours, and we'd been there at least four. But he still wanted to talk, so we chatted about stuff, my recorder off. I wish I had recorded everything, including the stuff he said on breaks on the balcony, because he was ALWAYS fascinating! He had an uncanny gift for combining elegant intellectual thought with human feelings, history and the hidden aspects of culture, all with a tinge of humor - from whacky to ironic - all at once.

Before we left, he asked us if we'd be so kind as to open a can of soup and heat it up for him, and my wife gladly did. As we were leaving I thanked him for making me feel so at ease in my nervousness, and he asked, plaintively, "What's there to be nervous about?"

He insisted on getting in his wheelchair and leading us to the door as we left, and he said something in what I took to be Hindi. I didn't understand any of it, and he explained it was a Buddhist saying about taking things as they come, as I recall. It all struck me as incredibly kind.

My wife and I went to a pub and discussed our day in the presence of the smartest, most interesting, and most alien-like sage we'd ever met or were likely to meet. I think I really had the orgone flowing at that point, and it lasted for hours.