Gary Webb, Philip Marlowe, Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous

Investigative Journalists
I finally caught, on Netflix, Spotlight, this generation's All The President's Men. I had coincidentally been thinking a lot about investigative journalism and journalists and was moved by the story. And how could one not be?

The "Spotlight" group of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe were in the belly of the beast of Catholicism in Unistat. Their footwork, tenacity and courage has seemed to actuate some real change in what seems like an endless run of pedophile priests, with cover-ups going all the way to the Vatican.

The Film Noir Detective Hero
But they were a team, backed by a major metropolitan daily. Woodward and Bernstein: two guys backed by the Washington Post. Still: when I look at ballsy investigative reporting, I keep thinking of some of my favorite characters in my favorite film style: film noir, which flourished in Unistat from 1941-1959, but has never gone away. Some of those films feature the lone private detective who gets hired to do a seemingly simple seedy gig, like finding out if a spouse is cheating. But one thing leads to another, and the detective (Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the best example) finds himself up to his ears in a bigger mystery. Things are not what he thought they were, and he's in great danger.

He's not being paid to solve this big conspiracy - much less report on it for a major newspaper - but he can't help himself: he's the Lone Knight in search of the truth. He takes risks, travels in the labyrinth of The City from the poorest neighborhood to the wealthiest enclaves, trying to piece things together.  Everyone, it seems, is lying to him. But why? He needs to know. He will eventually get knocked out, shot at, drugged, and punched in the solar plexus by hulking meathead gangsters.

He will come out alive, but with the gnosis. The myth of the private detective in films noir: he's a free agent, not well-off, lives by his wits and instinct and street-smart intellect and knows how to talk his way out of a jam and into more knowledge of the situation.

The noir detective drinks, loves beautiful women, and is obviously flawed, and he's no hypocrite. He seems like a profane character, but he's a mostly a man of honor who hates bullshit, who cares about justice in a world that only pays lip service to the idea. In a hopelessly corrupt metropolis, he keeps his integrity. And observes.

It's been noted many times that the Marlowe-type detective harkens back to the Knights of the Grail legends. Which brings us to Chapel Perilous.

Chapel Perilous
I had come across this term when I first tried reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland in my early twenties. I didn't follow up on the footnote in the section "What the Thunder said," which tells us to consult "Miss Weston's book." I have since made a study of Jessie Weston's 1919 work of brilliant scholarship, From Ritual to Romance, which studies the Grail legends from primary sources. There are very many variations on Chapel Perilous, with interpolations by later writers. Weston's penultimate chapter covers a few of the versions that involve Chapel Perilous, with Sir Lancelot starring, or sometimes Sir Gawain, and even King Arthur appears.

A generic version of Chapel Perilous: the Knight is riding alone in the forest when a violent storm hits. He finds a chapel in a clearing, often near a cemetery. He'll take refuge from the storm there. He goes in and no one is there, except for a dead knight on the altar, with one long candle lit nearby. There is a window behind and above the altar. Suddenly a Black Hand extinguishes the candle and chapel-shakingly loud haunting voices are heard. The Black Hand looks evil and hideous. Maybe the Knight engages the Black Hand with his sword, and barely makes it out alive.

My favorite version in Weston: King Arthur has fallen off his game: he's a slob and is at risk of losing all fame and prestige he once had. His wife urges him to trek out to the Chapel of St. Austin, which is a very dangerous journey, but may be just the thing to restore Arthur's reputation. He will take with him a young squire, son of (get this) Yvain the Bastard. The squire's name is Chaus. Chaus is like myself: if I have a very exciting and unusual thing to do the next day, I sleep fitfully in anticipatory anxiety.

Chaus decides to sleep in his clothes in the hall, to be ready to roll at daybreak with Arthur. He doesn't want to screw this up. He falls asleep, and then it appears King Arthur has already wakened and left on the journey without him. He immediately jumps up and rushes to his horse, trying to follow the tracks of Arthur's horse. Chaus happens upon a chapel in a glade, near a churchyard. He enters the chapel, but there's no one there, only a dead knight on the altar. There are golden candlesticks burning at the dead knight's head and foot. He takes one of the candlesticks and jams it into one pant-leg, mounts his horse, and goes off searching for Arthur.

Chaus then meets on the road a dark, foul man with a double-edged knife. Chaus asks him, "Have you seen Arthur?" The man says no, but I've met you and you're a thief! You stole that golden candlestick! You're also a traitor. Give me the candlestick! Chaus refuses and the dark man stabs Chaus in the side. Chaus cries out...and then awakens: he'd been asleep in the hall the whole time, yet he has the candlestick and he's been stabbed! Chaus, bleeding out, tells his story, confesses, receives the last rites, and dies.

Weston, after relating many variations of this story, asks what could it all mean? And she's convinced that it is "The story of an initiation (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical." (italics in original, pp. 171-172 of the Dover ed.)

Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous
Robert Anton Wilson uses "Chapel Perilous" as an unforgettable metaphor in his autobiographical book, Cosmic Trigger vol 1 (1977). RAW told Sander Wolff in an interview in 1990 that the "whole book is an account of self-induced brain change." Self-experimentalists and Quantified Self-ies: are you aware that the heritage of your endeavor(s) is brimming with a history of daring, intrepid self-experimentalists like RAW? (I also find Scott Michaelson's take on RAW's self-experimentation compelling: that it was a synthesis of Aleister Crowley and modern neuroscience.) (See Portable Darkness, jacket sleeve, inside cover.)

As I write, there is a group reading of Cosmic Trigger vol 1 going on over at RAWIllumination.net, and if you're reading this at a later date, look for the archives of the reading and the scads of insightful comments and leave your own comments from your reading there, as I sense this is a case in which a "mere blog" will offer up many a nugget for future researchers...

Back to Wilson's take on Chapel Perilous as metaphor:

When researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. (p. 6, CT1) Wilson describes Chapel Perilous as a mind-state that, while undetectable by any instruments, certainly seems all-too real to the person who finds herself in it. Comparing Chapel Perilous to the human Ego, "once you're inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought." (p.6)

In reading of Wilson's determination to push his nervous system as far as it can go before it breaks (delving into ceremonial magick, psychedelic drugs, various forms of yoga, a deep research into conspiracy theories, even some investigative reporting on his own, etc, etc, etc...) he finds himself the psychologically functional equivalent of the Knight, alone in the isolated Chapel, with a dead knight before him on the altar, and then the otherworldly Black Hand appears...

What does he do? Read the book!

                                                Gary Webb, investigative reporter

Gary Webb
If you don't know who the reporters/investigators I'm talking about here, you really ought to look into their cases for yourself. (See Michael Hastings and Danny Casolaro too?) There are far too many (luminous) details and I suspect at least half of my readers are familiar with these figures anyway. So I'll try to make it brief: Gary Webb got a line on how the CIA was allowing crack cocaine to flood the streets of Los Angeles, in order to fund their covert war against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Few believed him, but he was smart, with boundless energy, and he produced a series of reports for the small San Jose Mercury-News that made national headlines. Then, the CIA, with a deplorable amount of help from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times - the reasons seem complicated: they resented being scooped by a relatively small-town paper and some liked the access the CIA allowed them? - Webb quickly went from award-winner to having his own editor and staff gutlessly retract most of Webb's work. There is much to be learned here, my friends, and it's not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps "mendacious" is too strong a word for these big-time journalists and editors, who, taking the CIA's idea an running with it, decided that Webb's work was shoddy and stoked the fears of an already "conspiracy-theory"- minded African American readership. Webb's own paper took him off the investigation beat and he eventually quit, pursued the story alone, but ended up dead in his hotel room eight years after his breakthrough reporting, with two bullet holes in his head from a .38

I read a lot of the full-frontal assault on Webb in the Big Newspapers. One thing that really troubles me (to this day) is that, apparently, we're not supposed to know that the CIA has been involved with gangsters and thugs and drug smuggling since...before they were even called the CIA! Don't reporters go to the library and read the astonishingly well-documented Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy? How did you miss not reading about the OSS/CIA and their deal with Lucky Luciano and the Mob, the democratic elections in Italy, and the French Connection that flooded the streets of major Unistat cities with heroin?

Another galling thing: many of the "reporters" on the big-city dailies who attacked Webb for stoking conspiracy theories in black communities? Many of them were black themselves. I tracked down a handful and emailed them, politely asking if they've changed their mind about Gary Webb (who turns out to have been right about almost everything, of course). Only one wrote back: Donna Britt, who wrote in the WA Post that the whole CIA/crack cocaine-contra connection "just may not have happened." But still, paranoid cases will go on thinking their conspiracy thoughts. "They know the truth, or one truth anyway: It doesn't matter whether [Webb's "Dark Alliance" series - OG] claims are 'proved' true. To some folks - graduates of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and FBI harassment of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr - they feel so true that even if they're refuted, they'll still be fact to them." (Donna Britt, Washington Post "Finding the Truest Truth," Oct 4, 1996)

Here's what she said in her email to me:

Thanks for your note. The fact is that I honestly don't recall what I wrote about him. That was a long time ago! Sorry to disappoint.....

The boundaries are imaginary. The rules are made up. The limits don't exist....

Apparently she's a book-author now. HERE is her website.

When I think of Gary Webb, I think of his own Chapel Perilous. But: was it brought into existence by thought alone? I think there was more to his. I think Webb's Chapel Perilous somehow has something to do with us.

Other Sources Consulted:
Kill The Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb, Nick Schou.

Kill The Messenger (2014 film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb: trailer)

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack-Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb

"Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb," by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept

Censored 2016: chapter 7, "Dark Alliance: The Controversy and the Legacy, Twenty Years On," by Brian Covert, pp.227-253

Murder, My Sweet (1944 Edward Dmytryk) with Dick Powell as Marlowe
The Big Sleep (1946 Howard Hawks) with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe
Lady in the Lake (1947 Robert Montgomery) with Montgomery as Marlowe
Long Goodbye (1973 Robert Altman) with Elliot Gould as Marlowe
Farewell, My Lovely (1975 Dick Richards) with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe
Chinatown (1974 Roman Polanski) with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes

                                           I personally posed for this photo. The book was
                                           artist Bob Campbell's idea. In reality, the number
                                           of arms is slightly exaggerated.

If You're Bored, Don't Read This

Or, on second thought, go ahead and read; I mean: why not? It's not like you have anything better to do, fer crissakes.

I can't find the source for a quote I'm about to fake, but I'm fairly sure it was either Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson who said that, if you're bored you're boring. Does that seem callous to you? It does to me, or did. Now I see it as a tremendous spur, because when I read the quote - wherever the damned thing is - I had been well on my way to a personal abolition of boredom. I testify here: I'm never bored. (I will admit that I simply may not perceive myself as being bored, even when some fMRI shows my state to be very much like another's who testified that they are bored, but this line of thought could easily veer into some arcane spiel, which I shall resist.)

"Someone please text me. I'm bored." - seen far too often in CraigsList personals.

                                         Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy

If we're all caught up in the Infinite Goof - and I think we are - boredom seems some sort of faulty mechanism which we needn't accede to. To those who are bored, easily bored, usually bored, find most people boring, or were not bored but are now that they've read this far: let us assign blame to the school system, which never taught us how to rewire our nervous systems to avoid boredom. Or blame Bad Economics, your parents, your diet and genome, and Other People. Once we've assigned blame, we feel cleansed, absolved of a bad habit (?) such as boredom, and decide to never be bored again. I assert it's a worthy goal. Why not give it a shot? I suspect exactly 13 of you are way ahead of me on this one.

Oh, but there "really are" so many dreadfully boredom-inducing things out there, you say. Bullshit. To steal gleefully from Billy the Shakes and warp him a tad: nothing is either boring or not but thinking makes it so.

Gawd, you might be thinking: this Overweening Generalist dude is a simpleton! Ha! Maybe, but the old game of equating sophistication with being bored with what the lower-minds find accessible and fun? I'm not buying. Your above-it-all Weltschmerz isn't working and I hate to say it, but you look like a damned fool to me, usually.

Back to the Infinite Goof: I don't see the world as an Epic, with all the breathtaking events swirling around me, and myself in the center of History. We do know some friends who seem sort of like this, no? Hey, if it works for them and their marvelously endowed egos: let them enjoy their narratives. How fantastic these lives are to those living in them! And we get to play some small part!

Neither do I see the world as a Tragedy or a Melodrama; those who do - they seem to never know this about themselves! - seem so boring that they're of a passing fascination to me. I listen, probe, try to get into the head space in which the keynotes of every day seem to point to boundless Tragedy or soapy Melodrama. (There are Good People and Bad People, dontcha know? And me and my friends are the Good People...

Uh-huh...What's the payoff?)

Yes, you're not hallucinating: by dint of my writing about boredom in this way, I seem to be arguing that boredom is interesting (or: not boring) to me.

In an Infinite Goof life is more like a Black Comedy. I cop to it: I live in a Black Comedy. Almost all of my favorite writers seem to live in one, too. We humans have made up almost everything we take very seriously...and forgotten we did this. We assert a Free Will, but that's quite debatable. Certainly the frontal cortex thinks it's running the entire show, but the lower half of our brains, and our amygdalas and oh hell: the limbic system in toto: they act and speak in ways quite contrary and perplexing to "us."

"What was I thinking when I did X (not the drug, but the variable that X stands for)?" Indeed.

Paraphrasing William James: Of course everything is determined and yet our wills are free. A sort of free-willed determinism must be the run of the game.

If that's not cosmically hilarious to you, you might not be paying attention.

"A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation," Nietzsche says. A funny line? You're with me if you said aye.

Now, accidents do happen and some of our fellow humans find themselves mired in sadnesses and depressions and crippling anxieties and fears and it's nothing to joke about. But it does seem to lend credence to the Black Comedy model: a war criminal like Dick Cheney not only got away with it, he's smiling and has many fans and yet another book out, huge advance, and gets to air his ghoulish opinions on dipshit TV "news" as if he's a wizened Elder Statesman. Meanwhile, you remember that happy-go-lucky guy from high school? The one who liked everyone and was fun to be around? Remember when he cut all his hair off in solidarity with that other student who got cancer? Some of us followed suit and sheared their locks too. Yea, him. His wife died in a car accident (drunk driver), then he lost his job and I saw him the other day, looking like crap, begging for change outside a Starbucks.

Justice? A noble social construct. The preceding paragraph illustrates why I don't see the world as a Farce. Too much suffering. Too little equity and justice, too much luck and chance.

Robert Anton Wilson turned me on to life as a Black Comedy, and that a major, always-ongoing activity in life must be to learn how to "use your brain for fun and profit." I'm working on it, always. I have my days.

The Black Comedy is life inside the Infinite Goof, and I rather like it here. In Laurence Sterne's eternally delightful novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Shandy's father, in conversation with Uncle Toby, asserts "Every thing in this world [...] is big with jest, - and has wit in it, and instruction too, - if we can but find it out." (Book V, chapter 32)

I've been reading more and more about pleasure and human evolution and confess I'm quite taken with ideas about us humans stumbling onto more and more ways to modulate our "selves" - our inner states -  in order to feel good. Or at least: better than that last brain-state, which could have been more pleasant than it turned out to be. You're thinking: drugs? I'm saying: yes. You're thinking: sex? I'm retorting: of course! What do you think I am, a damned eejit? Hell: masturbation, a perennial hot topic for me, even if it's clearly not for most others, judging by how quickly they withdraw themselves from the midst of me when I broach the subject.

And so I often find myself alone, abandoned at a gala. May as well rub one out...

Play. Humor. Invention. Tinkering. And oh my lawd: daydreaming, sooo underrated. Not underrated but seemingly essential play: music. Make it, listen to it. Really listen. Feel the music activate the bioelectric circuitry of your brain and bod, one brain module secreting dopamine and faxing it to another area of your brain, which in turn spray-bathes its own endogenous euphorics onto the finest neurons, temporarily coating your precious grey goo with glee...and this all due to a blistering guitar solo! Think of the effort that guitarist put forth, only to do that to my brain. Thanks, man. Maybe I should actually buy your CD, rather than downloading it gratis. (In truth, I've never downloaded any music from the Net, for free. Ever.)

And yes: engaging our sensoria with media such as this thing you're doing right now. Are you bored? If so, I blame you, mostly. I will accept part of the blame, if only to make you feel better.

The line from Shandy's pop reminded me of feelings I get when I read Buddhist or Taoist texts. And, on a level inchoate to me now: the impetus of comedy. The problem seems to me: if you don't get the joke...you don't get the joke. Which in turn feeds me more of the Black Comedy vibe.

Anyway, the topic I've been tap dancing around here seems timeless. David Foster Wallace, in his posthumous novel The Pale King, has a not-named character say:

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive...To be, in a word, unborable. (p.438)

What gets me there is 1.) "unborable" and 2.) "conditioned". Your mileage may vary.

Self-Experimentation: Notes and a Few Colorful Examples

A quasi-hallowed, if underestimated and mis-appreciated history attends those investigators who used themselves as subjects. Perhaps the most famous - or most-oft-cited - work on the subject focuses on intrepid medical self-experimenters: Lawrence K. Altman's gripping Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine. 

I've found my readings over the past 30 years marked by sudden tales of self-experimentation, and a 900 pager has yet to be done, or at least I've yet to see some compendium on the subject.

What strikes me is the underappreciated nature of the methodology, and I hope to tackle the obvious seeming "problem" of various "biases" usually called into account by those who assert that the double-blind, placebo (if the study can have one) controlled study is the only valid mode of investigation.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in self-experimentation at the level of Psychology, and there's no better spokesman than Seth Roberts, but I'll get to him later. First: a few of my favorite self-experimenters.

Sir Humphry Davy
Let's return to those profoundly painful years of surgery in the late 18th century, pre-anaesthesia. As the retired professor of Marine Biology Trevor Norton puts it, it went something like this:


1. Site the operating room out of earshot of other patients.
2. Be excessively solicitous over the distress caused to the poor surgeon.
3. Strap the patient down securely.
4. Have the patient bite down on the surgeon's walking stick.
5. Slice and saw at speed.
-p.24, Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation, by Norton.


Around the beginning of the 19th century, some medics volunteered to sniff or inhale one or another of the newly discovered gasses. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, and even carbon monoxide were thought to be therapeutic to inhale. Who knows? Maybe these new gasses are miracle cures?

                                      Sir Humphry Davy: fearless chemist, got his friends 
                                      high on laughing gas, sold science as a good idea


Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was brilliant, a good communicator, and a bit of a showman. He gave himself credit for "discovering" Michael Faraday. (Davy died of congenital heart disease at age 50, after writing very popular essays on possible alien life and science and philosophy.) And it seems, Davy was fearless to the point of daftness. (Because he knew heart disease stalked his family? "I'm gonna die early I might as well be a hero?") The guy would try anything on himself, into himself, noting the results, upping the dosage, almost dying, dialing it back a bit, taking notes. His colleagues were relieved to see him show up the next morning, one noting that Davy risked his life, "as if he had two or three others in reserve, on which he could fall back in case of necessity."


Quickly, around the age of 21, Davy began to assume the much-ballyhooed gas therapy was overhyped. He had tried them all himself, finding carbon monoxide particularly exhausting. It had him "sinking into annihilation, and had just enough power to drop the mouthpiece from my unclosed lips...There is every reason to believe, that if I had taken four or five inhalations instead of three, they would have destroyed life immediately." He quickly breathed in some oxygen, and went on, unafraid. A week later he inhaled some solvent that seared his epiglottis and had him choking, but he made sure he kept measuring his pulse all the while. All in the name of Science!


A colorful character who invented the miner's safety lamp, Davy became something of a celebrity-scientist in his time (if you can imagine such a thing when the only mass media were books and newspapers), and helped convince the Ruling Class that they ought to invest heavily in science, because it's the ultimate tool for the production of wealth.


In the weirdness of time, a new gas came along that was creating a bit of a stir. Davy was skeptical - he'd had some very close-calls with gasses - but had to give it a whirl. This stuff was called nitrous oxide. He tried it, and found that it was good. He upped the doses every day, trying this stuff four or five times per day for a week. The verdict from Davy on what we now commonly call "laughing gas": "highly pleasurable... thrilling...I lost all connection with external things: I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized, I imagined, I made discoveries." 


Early Victorian hippie!


Davy was so wildly enthusiastic he turned on his pals the poets Southey and Coleridge, and a guy who was into thesauruses named Roget. They loved it. Soon the cognoscenti and well-off made haste to the Pneumatic Institute at Bristol. (Where have we heard this story before?)


Here's a horrible irony before I move on to another self-experimenter: Davy soon after suffered from pain from his wisdom teeth. Naturally, he grabbed for the wonder-gas. It worked. He wrote that Nitrous "appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations." Oddly, no one urged this on, and surgeries were done without Nitrous for another 40 years! I can't tell you why this happened - I can't find a definitive answer - and this story of prolonged pain in surgery gets even worse.


Around the same time that Davy was experimenting in England, a Japanese surgeon named Seishu Hanaoka (1760-1835) was learning surgery from European books, but he'd turned to Chinese medicine in an attempt to find a solution to the Extreme Pain Problem. He experimented on animals for 20 years with plant extracts that might dull pain and he thought he'd finally hit on the right solution, so he gave it to his wife and she went blind. (Not self-experimentation, aye, but the history of this stuff is also rife with offspring, spouses, and other family members who "volunteered to go first.") Seishu was undeterred and finally hit on a potion of muscle relaxers, sedatives, and analgesics. In 1804 he removed a tumor from a woman relatively painlessly. He then went on to do another 150 operations with this potion, but Japan's insularity toward the rest of the world made Seishu's anaesthesia a secret to the West. The Internet makes this kind of story impossible for our times, doesn't it?
(These anecdotes and more: see Trevor Norton's book, ibid, pp.22-43, "Sniff It and See." Norton's a wonderful writer, and funny!)

                                 Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs lab. This is 
                                    apparently not as "shocking" as it looks!

Stubbins Ffirth
I know his name looks like something out of Dickens, but he was oh-so real, and was determined, in early 1800s Philadelphia, to prove that the periodic breakouts of the vicious yellow fever were not contagious. He went to garish lengths to show his hypothesis was sound, in an effort to get his MD. He submitted his copious data eventually and was awarded the degree. Here are some of the things he did to support his idea:


Because the disease was rampant in the summer months but died off in the cold winter, only to return when the warm weather returned, Ffirth reasoned that warm weather overly-excited people, and yellow fever was caused by the stimulation of heat, food and noise. People just needed to calm down! Meanwhile, everyone else believed yellow fever was contagious. To prove it wasn't, Ffirth watched a patient vomit hot black mucus-laden coffee-grind-looking bile, and he filled his cup with some and drank it down. He didn't get sick.


Then Ffirth kept a dog in a room and fed it bread soaked in a patient's yellow-fever vomit. The dog ate it and seemed to like it, never once getting ill. Ffirth - a thorough medical student, this one - made an incision in his forearm and poured more yellow-fever vomit into his wound. Nothing. Maybe some inflammation, which subsided. He made a deeper cut and poured some more in. Still in the pink. He poured fever-vomit into his eyes. (I'm not making this up: see Alex Boese's book Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, pp.195-198) Ffirth heated some vomit on a skillet and inhaled the fumes, to no ill effect. He then created a whole room of yellow-fever-vomit sauna-fumes, basked in the vapors, and felt a headache, "some nausea," and perspired a lot, but it didn't last, and he probably skipped home to a good night's sleep.


He put yellow-fever vomit into pills and took them. He drank glasses of the stuff mixed with water, saying "the taste was slightly acid." He realized he'd become used to the black vomit of deathly sick folk, and even kinda liked it! He even cooked up a recipe for a yellow-fever-vomit liqueur, which I will include here, because some of you (Hey, who KNOWS the type of people who read the OG?) will want to have it, just in case:


If black vomit be strained through a rag, and the fluid thus obtained be put into a bottle or vial, leaving about one-third part of it empty, this being corked and sealed, if set by for one or two years, will assume a pale red colour, and taste as though it contained a portion of alkohol.
(NB the aging process! Don't come to me and complain your vomit bile tastes "wrong" if you don't properly age it!- the OG)


I know what you're saying: this whack-job Ffirth didn't use other bodily fluids from sick patients, or surely he would've perished. Wrong: he made incisions in his arms and worked in the sweat, urine, blood and saliva of very sick yellow fever patients, with only minor inflammation. Ffirth could only assume he'd more than proved his point: yellow fever was not contagious. He was awarded the MD.


Okay: we now know that yellow fever is caused by mosquito bites carrying an RNA virus. The mosquitoes bite in the hot summer months. Ffirth could have gotten sick. Why didn't he? Boese cites an authority on infectious diseases, Christian Sandrock of UC Davis, who thinks Ffirth got lucky, because mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever or West Nile virus require direct transmission from mosquito to host. It turns out Ffirth got lucky. He was right: you can't get yellow fever from someone else, but he wrong as to why. It's tempting to say he drank all that vomit "for nothing," but science VALUES wrong ideas like this; we now know you can pour the vomit from a patient with yellow fever into your eye sockets and you'll be fine, come out "smelling like roses," so to speak...just don't get bit by a mosquito! Had he picked smallpox, he'd have died quickly.


Still: hat's off to the brave Stubbins Ffirth, and...bottom's up!


[The aforementioned Alex Boese's 10 Strangest Self-Experiments Ever. I like the guy who did his own surgery.]


The Great Generalist, Somewhat Overweening: Buckminster Fuller
Broke and feeling like a loser, in 1927 Bucky decided knowledge and assumptions about what he or others "knew" was probably based in language, and there might be a problem with language getting in the way of solving problems. So he went silent for two years.


"All this was pretty difficult for my wife, because we were in Chicago and didn't have any money. We had an apartment in the least expensive fireproof tenement I could find, because we did have our baby. I really did stop all sounds, and then gradually started wanting to use a particular sound. I was finally pretty sure I would know what the effects would be on my fellow man if I made a particular sound. I wanted to be sure that when I did communicate that, I really meant to communicate thusly, and that this was me communicating and not somebody else."


Words were tools that mankind developed, but like all tools, they could be used unwisely. By going silent he might learn to re-think how to use words to say what he had thought for himself, uncontaminated by received wisdom. And it seems to have worked. (< Have a gander at that site.)


And the way he used words! Anyone who has read any of his books will be struck by his unorthodox verb-ing use of verbs (because physics tells us that "nouns" are, at the pre-verbal level, dynamic, whirling masses of atoms, nothing is static) and the geometric aspect of his peculiar linguistic fluency.


Here he is, talking, 6 minutes:

Alexander "Sasha"Shulgin
Psychedelic drugs. There's LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and peyote, DMT, and probably a couple more you've heard about but have forgotten and that's it, right? No, there are over 300 other psychedelic drugs, most of them synthesized by a man, now 86, who has worked for the DEA and was Professor of Chemistry at Berkeley. He built a lab on his property not far from Berkeley, and with his lifelong knowledge of pharmacological chemistry, concocts analogs of known drugs, never quite knowing how they'll turn out. Add an extra carbon atom here, some nitrogen over there, and the neurological effects can turn out to be quite different from the original potion. How does he know what it's like? He tries them himself. Then he writes a report later, basing it on notes taken or what someone who was not on the drug observed. And memory of the "trip." The range of effects - extremely erotic for one drug, nightmarish for another, dreamy lassitude with enriched colors and sounds with another, uncontrolled vomiting, temporary paralysis, a feeling that his bones were melting, floating, long-lasting euphoria, etc. 


If something has a particularly interesting effect, his wife will try it too and report on the effects. They note the dosages, how long the trip lasts, how long after ingestion it takes to feel effects, what the "peak" of the experience is like. There is an underground of knowledgeable "psychonauts" who will gladly assist in probing a particular drug. Shulgin re-discovered methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, or "Ecstasy," and it then became a Big Deal.


Why does Shulgin try these things himself? 

"I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?"

He thinks we have the right to experiment with ourselves, and when Unistat tried to keep his knowledge from the public, he published it in books, and if you ever get a chance to sit for an hour or two and page through (the at-times admittedly dauntingly technical) PIHKAL or TIKHAL, it ought to be an eye-opener. Recently a documentary on Shulgin was released, but I have yet to see it, as I write this, although I just now noticed the full 90 minute doc in on You Tube, so I'll include it at the end of this blogspew. For those without the 90 mins to spare, here's a one-minute trailer:

Democratization of Self-Experimentation
This DIY idea has been quietly catching on, and I recently maxed out my library card and brought home titles such as Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools For Using Your Brain, Upgrade Your Life, and The Road To Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games by K. Anders Ericsson, who tested Joshua Foer's performance on cognitive abilities, including memory, which I mentioned HERE while discussing Foer's road to using a 2000 year old "memory palace" technique in order to win a "mental athlete" memory competition. 


The number of books that report on the author's experience in spending a year (or so) doing a particular outre thing has cascaded in the past ten years. I think of rock critic Neil Strauss falling in with a bunch of not-so-great looking guys who are intensely interested in techniques that work for picking up women (The Game), and Strauss's more recent true-tales of the extreme lengths he went to to become a survivalist because of what happened in Unistat after 9/11, Emergency!:This Book Will Save Your Life, or Beth Lisick's hilarious Helping Me Help Myself, in which she wakes up on New Year's Day with a killer hangover, disgusted with herself, then spends a year by reading and following a different self-help guru each month. There was some bright young guy who mined metal ores and eventually made his own toaster by hand, whose book I have not read. There are many more. 


Scientific Methodology and Problems With Bias
Seth Roberts, emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and some university in China, seems to have had quite a large influence on this...self-experimentational movement? 

                              Seth Roberts: found a way to manipulate 
                              his own weight via unorthodox methods


Roberts seems to have started off testing his dermatologist's recommendation that he use tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide for his acne. (He's 58 now, so this was a while back.) He took more of the antibiotic than recommended, then counted his pimples. He took less and counted. He was told by "experts" that diet has nothing to do with acne. He assumed the over-the-counter benzoyl peroxide was a sham, but when he finds out what works for him, after looking at his data: tetracycline doesn't work (and he'd assumed it would), and the OTC cream did work. So: he found out what he didn't expect, and this gets at what his critics charge: self-confirmatory bias makes self-experimentation worthless. You must have well-controlled double-blind placebo studies. Seth says: maybe. 


An interesting self-experimenter who's been influenced by Seth is Timothy Ferriss. Here's a link to Ferriss's blog, but note that Seth Roberts argues for the self-experimental method very well in the text below the two videos, said text appearing in Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Body. (Note his points on Mendel and Darwin.) Roberts also defends the "unreasonable effectiveness" of his methodology HERE. Seth's blog is HERE. Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen has been on board with Roberts since 2007.


What do you think? Is it all part of Operation Mindfuck?


This blogspew is dedicated to the first person to eat an artichoke; Kevin Warwick, who wants to be the first cyborg (see HERE and HERE); Morgan Spurlock, who ate supersized McDonald's food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 30 and made McDonald's re-think some of their menu; and some never-to-be identified primitive homo sapiens who, while standing with a friend, poked him in the ribs and said, "You see that white thing coming out of that chicken's ass? Call me crazy, but I'm eating it!"


Here's the Shulgin doc, Dirty Pictures (2011 Etienne Sauret):

Your Favorite Number, Coupled With Wilson's Conjecture

In my friend Eric Wagner's book An Insider's Guide To Robert Anton Wilson he uses the term "number poetry" in at least one place, and this has stuck with me: A moment's thought will probably reveal that you have a number or two that you, for some reasons all your own, particularly "like." Or you've long noted and memorized certain "deeper" meanings" regarding certain numbers, such as seven is "lucky" or thirteen is damned near evil, or that sixty-nine has something to do with naked yoga. Or for some reason (?) this number has meant something to you, or it's been involved in some synchronicities in your life. Perhaps you've simply always felt drawn to this number, for some - and I hesitate again to use this term because there's probably a more apt one - "reason."


We probably have a-rational "reasons" for our peculiar relationship to certain numbers. And many of us have wondered if Nature or (our?) Universe has Its own favorite numbers. And then we wonder if, with our limited knowledge, we've only created or discovered what we assume must be - as the brilliant and entertaining mathematical writer Ian Stewart called one of his books - Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics.


A recent article on our odd affinity for certain numbers showed up here, and linked to a mathematician's site where he asks us to tell him what our favorite number is, and why.

Because I was born on my father's 23rd birthday, and then I had three girlfriends who were born on the 23rd - three girlfriends in a row in my early twenties, two of them born on the 23rd of September - I had begun to notice how seemingly mysterious my relationship with that number was. I say "seemingly mysterious," because I had enough mathematics and statistics and reading in the psychology of perception to realize that, if I fixated on 23, that number would more likely be noted and that there's a subroutine of circuitry in the brain - probably developed through evolution, as we are a species very adept at pattern-recognition - that would "see" 23s everywhere.

Then I stumbled upon the writer Robert Anton Wilson in my late 20s. Have you ever so quickly fallen in love with a new writer that you could hardly believe your luck? It's happened to me a few times. But I had never heard of him before! Certainly not in college.

I had been promiscuously browsing in a bookstore in Torrance, California and picked up a book called Right Where You Are Sitting Now. It was a certain species of "experimental writing" mixed with journalistic pieces, pop quizzes, zen-like humor, and addressed what many academics would call "fringe" knowledge, but Wilson wrote about Odd Things in a very intellectual way. And I noticed he was using William S. Burroughs' "cut-up method," that Burroughs largely got from Brion Gysin, and which seems antedated by the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. 


Burroughs also had a story and/or "routine" in which he talked about his own very eerie relationship with persons named "Captain Clark" and ships that crashed that carried the number 23. 

                                           Robert Anton Wilson, 1977
                                                                 
The Wilson book was filled with 23s. That a-rational part of my brain sent my rational part a message: Is this some sort of sign? And even more non-rational: If so, from where or what? What is the connection to...if anything? Is chance weirder than I thought? Is there some kind of quantum effect on the macro-level that has my nervous system attracting or "causing" this number to keep showing up? 


(There may be a genetic predisposition towards thinking along these lines, too. The lines between very creative people and manic-depressives and schizophrenics are blurrier lines the more you look at it. See Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire for startling data on poetic genius and manic-depression; note the continuum between Joyce, Einstein, and Bertrand Russell, for example, and their schizophrenic offspring. My favorite theory about schizophrenia from the last 15 years is that it is a manifestation of a "cliff effect": in neurobiology and human physiology, too much a good thing. I have emotional reasons for why I "like" that idea...Anyway, most of us in families with manic-depressive genes or schizophrenia will not develop the full-blown versions of those two quite dire illnesses; we will just be "weirder" than most other people. But we can get along in life.)


Since the first volume of Wilson's tripartite autobiography was released in 1977, 23 has become a sort of cultural meme. (There was even a Joel Schumacher film starring Jim Carrey that seems to have mined a few things from Wilson, although not credited.) You may have noticed 23 pops up in too many odd ways; maybe it seems to appear in an "unreasonable" frequency? Or are you the one who notices it? Is it some sort of conspiracy? You mention it to a friend and they say, no. They notice 42 far more often than seems "natural."(42 people and me tend to get along really well.)


Notice how I used the term "odd" in the above paragraph (and others): I was not cognizant of my word-choice when I wrote; "odd" is synonymous with "something strange" in many Western cultures, if not all of them...why is this? "Odd" is clearly a metaphor from mathematics, but how easy it seems to not notice this! The even numbers seem stable; the odd ones maybe not so? Some part of us considers them a tad queer or "off," for some...reason. Prime numbers? Don't even get me started! (But note: 23 is prime. And we have 23 chromosomes...)


This goes back at least to the Pythagoreans, who saw qualities in individual numbers, perhaps even something like what we would call personalities. What "is" it about us? One part of us knows that numbers serve a basic utility, starting with counting on our fingers. And some compelling neuroscience suggests that the mathematical faculty seems to have piggy-backed on the evolution of the linguistic faculty, but I leave that for better minds than mine, for now.

Is there "really" something odd about our favorite numbers? Why do they keep intruding in our lives in ways that seem "above chance," or in just plain spooky ways? Wilson himself - being a skeptic, despite what his detractors said of him - thought this was probably a trick of perception, and was revelatory of the human mind and its ability to see patterns, or impose patterns on dense clusters of information, which seems related to selective perception, a basic bias most of us are prone to, even the highly educated ones. And then we forget our own minds made these connections, and look for the causes "out there."  (Nature seems, to quote William James, a "blooming, buzzing confusion," and what we want is a narrative. Much editing needs to be done, literally every second, if only to cop a story that seems pleasing or plausible, or provides some sort of harmony with our current working models of "reality.")

But Wilson also wondered at times if there might be something Unknown, eldritch and exceedingly weird that might be going on...I call this Wilson's Conjecture Regarding Recurring Numbers: That we ought to appreciate the creativity, even of the unconscious mind!, to see the "uncanny" aspect of recurring numbers, even while knowing that our minds tend to impose patterns based on our prior conditionings. Basically stated: recurring numbers tend to happen when you pay attention. Wilson's Conjecture Regarding Recurring Numbers: don't look for it in the math books, folks: I just made it up, on the 23rd of July!

(Most educated people tend to be flattered by how much we know; it seems equally likely that we know closer to 1% of what there is to be known, rather than the idea that we know about 99% of the Possible Knowable. This too is conjecture...For a book of dialogues with great scientific minds on this topic, see John Horgan's The End of Science.)

In a book that appeared earlier than Wilson's Right Where You Are Sitting Now, a "wild" and mind-blowing autobiographical/magickal book titled Cosmic Trigger Volume 1, Wilson related his own experiments over a roughly 14 year period in which he sought to find out how far a human nervous system can be pushed, and what could be found "there." And ethically, the only person he could experiment on was himself. In this he's in a long line of scientific self-experimenters. 


In Cosmic Trigger vol. 1 he relates the "23 Enigma" in a lucid way, but he also describes his exceedingly odd experience, that he asserted started on July 23rd, 1973, in which, after years of pushing his consciousness and/or nervous system (use of psychedelics, intense study of kabbalah, yoga, exploring different "reality tunnels," and diligently studying and practicing magickal techniques of Aleister Crowley, intense readings of Joyce and Pound and quantum mechanics, among other Things) to extremes and noting, scientifically, what might be "going on," he woke up on July 23rd, 1973 and, as he writes, "the Shaman [this is one aspect of "self" or a "mask" for Wilson - OG] awoke with an urgent message from Dreamland and scribbled quickly in his magickal diary, 'Sirius is very important.'" 


Sirius the "Dog Star." If his life hadn't been weird enough, it gets very weird from thereon, but I will let the Reader decide what was "really" happening to Wilson.


Anyway, through the years, RAW and his fans gradually began to call July 23rd "Maybe Day," in honor of Wilson's love of what became "maybe logic." This is a logic in which there are at least three values: True, False, and Maybe. Wilson went to great lengths to show how anyone can adopt this logic for their everyday lives, and he thought it would add more sanity to the world and possibly lead to more human happiness. With hardcore ideologues who seem sure of Everything making the rest of our lives miserable, this seems like maybe a good idea. One story has it that a quantum physicist Wilson knew, named David Finkelstein, said, "In addition to a yes and a no, the universe seems to contain a maybe." (John von Neumann [say "fun NOY-mahnn"], one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, proposed a three-valued quantum logic that seems pretty much the same thing here.)


Our nervous systems and cultural conditionings urge us to want to know what the truth "really is," but all of our epistemologies suggest our knowledge seems always contingent and subject to more information and investigation. Our points of view about politics, diet, musical preferences, what ideas in culture are "really" based on truth and what ones are hokum....all manner of our taken-for-granted worlds, should be subject to maybe logic: My entire blog has some sort of attitude, but verily, I tell you, I do not "know." What I write here is what I think, as of that day. I always want a new angle; I am always searching for some new way to think about something I find I thought I had a handle on. I find this mode of embracing uncertainty in knowledge both more honest according to the epistemologies of the 20th century and early 21st, AND it opens the mind to constant wonder and creativity. It turns out, for Wilson and for me at least, that most "things" seem to reside in the "maybe" state. 


So: as an experiment, try thinking and verbalizing much more using "maybe" over the next week or so, maybe until August 1st, and see if you learn anything interesting from this exercize. Anyone can do it, too! You can do it, right where you are sitting now.


A final observation: in my years of reading about this topic - seemingly recurring numbers and people's reaction to this phenomenon - there seems a certain psychological disposition among some to get disproportionately snarky, even angry that a person should bring up the topic at all. It's out of bounds, and like talking about one's own masturbatory habits, or alien abductions or the JFK assassination. "Ut-oh! Mister Woo-Woo is gonna tell us about his latest New Age spirulina nonsense!" I've never been able to clearly tell if these people are pretentious, overly rational, deadened to that human faculty of "play" or that they think someone is trying to do some dangerous ju-ju out in the open, trying to get away with some subtle wizardry, trying to pull a fast one. I used to think, "Probably a little of all the above." Now I've pretty much given up trying to understand this intellectual position, or psychological disposition...There seem far too many other interesting things to think about.


I write this on 23 July, 2011: Happy Maybe Day!