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I originally published this as "Mr
Wilson and me" in the Singularity blog on the front page, June 23rd 2003, the Monday after the Summer
Solstice. It has been more than ten years since I first picked up a book with the name Robert Anton Wilson on the front cover. I was 18, in my first year of university, beyond-borderline psychotic, and in the middle of a lot of weird stuff that even now, 12 years later, seems quite extreme. Having devoured a pile of science-fiction and fantasy, and complaining bitterly about how they were all so obvious and boring and predictable, a friend of mine called Andy Miller handed me the first book in the Illuminatus! trilogy and said "That should keep you quiet". By page 5 I already knew that George Dorn and the dolphin were one and the same, sort of, which freaked Andy a little, and it was the start of a long and beautiful friendship between me and the Discordian mind-fucking of the Leary-Wilson fraternity. It was that effort to shut me up that led me to the gates of Hyperdiscordia and Loompanics Press. The Principia Discordia was only my second ever imported book (the first being an obscure fluid dynamics coffee table effort about Reynold's Numbers and the like called An Album of Fluid Motion). Well, I've just finished reading yet another RA Wilson book, this time Quantum Psychology. Strangely enough, after 12 years of putting myself through the warped headspace that Wilson both creates and inhabits (he has at least two heads, just like me), most of it seemed old hat. It was, on the other hand, a beautifully succinct collection of (sombun)all the disparate threads and meme sets that have contributed to the paradoxically joyous, amazed and cynical Sam's eye view of the world that I currently possess. Agnostic modellist - yep, that sounds just about right. Synchronously, I've been having a lot of discussions in various places recently, in which I have come to understand that, no matter how much I argue (and correctly too, nyer nyer) that "pagan" is a catch-all term for much more than "Goddess worshipping tree-huggers who think that environmental activism means taking the bottles for recycling when they go to the supermarket", in modern parlance pagan means just that. It's easy to see this by looking at the Pagan Federation website, where the second principle is straight Wicca rehashed for the Buffy generation; or the new Hitchiker's Guide, where I got into an argument about this article that eventually caused me to seriously rethink whether or not to remain as a researcher. It would appear that the adjective "pagan" and its derived noun are no longer terms that describe that which one is not, but have come to have a specific definition (see above reference about tree huggers). I don't really feel comfortable operating under the label of a set whose members mostly cannot comprehend my stubborn insistence that belief is not only irrelevant, it's distracting (and definitely fail to comprehend the irony of the stubborness). I certainly don't feel comfortable buying into this exclusionary definition where it means what they want it to mean, and yet they cannot see the hypocrisy in accusing others of not being "proper pagans". To this end, I think I shall give up calling myself pagan. Zetetic Realist is probably more accurate. Possibly Pyrrhonic Methodist. Or simply Agnostic Modellist, as RAW himself put it. I still consider my philosophy to be pagan, in the sense the word had before it grew a capital letter. It consists of shouting to the universe "I don't know! I don't know if I ever will know! I don't know if it's possible to know! And isn't it great?! I'm going to have such fun trying to find out!" I think I'd probably fit in with the Discordians. He's a grand chap, is Robert Anton Wilson. Mr Wilson, I owe you a great deal, you and Kim Stanley Robinson. You enabled me to watch the Tom Hanks film Castaway in a whole new light; you introduced me to the old lady/new lady optical illusion, which I saw as a caterpillar eating someone's head or a cave; and, probably most importantly, you made me feel as though the workings of my brain might actually hold something useful other than simple insanity and helped me to get hold of a whole pile of shit that otherwise could quite easily have swamped me. So here's to you, Mr Wilson. Here's to you and your explanation of Karma, which I didn't grok for almost 5 years even though it was working to shape my attitude to vehicular cycling behind the scenes. Here's to you and your "exercizes", to E-Prime, to the Copenhagen Interpretation and Wigner's Friend. Here's to George Dorn and Simon Moon, and Hagbard Celine, whom I met in a dream once and found quite attractive, in an authoritarian father-figure kind of way. Here's to you, Mr Wilson. Have a drink and a toke on me in thanks and appreciation for giving me the tools to start uncovering my own prejudices and preconceptions, and the necessary attitude to state them clearly for the record. |
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As an addendum to this, I ended up posting the following to a mailing list in explanation of my decision not to refer to myself as 'pagan' any more, as my decision seemed to be mostly misunderstood. If I need to discuss the shape of my headspace with someone, and I say "Hi! I'm Sam. I'm pagan! " then the someone (let's call him Bob) will experience a cascade of associations that he will use to build a model of me. That initial model is a very powerful one, because the mind tends to make corrections to an initial existing model rather than revising the model entirely in the light of new information. As I explain, Bob will then try to modify his first impressions of me, rather than realising that his preconceptions have led him to an erroneous conclusion, and so it becomes harder for me to communicate with him because he is interpreting everything I say in terms of this model. Having watched the changing 'pagan culture' for some years now, I have come to the conclusion that the associations with the word "pagan" will produce a model that is entirely incorrect, and this results in hours of explanations as to why it is incorrect, finally ending up in a somewhat disappointed (in most cases) "Oh. " The last time this happened was just before I made this decision. The final comment was "But I thought that you would be more like Willow. " Ahem. Yes dear (of course, it could simply be that I had crushed a sapphic fantasy). People don't like finding out they are so wrong they need to rebuild their internal model, even if they don't know that's what's going on. The road I walk just seems to be so different from the major pagan religions and philosophies that I don't think that the term is one that can be applied by me, to me, appropriately. Accuracy in communication is important to me. I consider myself to be 'objectively amoral' in many senses - not without ethics, but certainly not party to any paradigm of objective morality and that in itself is enough to rule me out of most ideas of what "pagan" means. I am the avatar, in some ways, of a Trickster spirit. That's not quite pagan, that's downright weird, and as pagan paths gain popularity this is not a concept that many pagans will have come across because it's not one that many people have come across. I don't want to say to Bob in potentia "I'm pagan, but I don't mean the Willow variety, or the ones with the dresses (or lack thereof), or the ones that .... look. 'Pagan', if you look it up in a dictionary, actually means this, ok, and it doesn't really tell you anything about me at all. No, it doesn't. Well, other than I don't follow one of the three monotheistic religions. Hutton argues that it dervies from pagani, which means.....Hutton. Ron Hutton? Wears sandals and white socks. Lovely chap. " I've done that. I've done it for 10 years or so. I still consider myself pagan, because I still have a dictionary and I can still read. But it's not a label I'm going to use of myself because I can no longer assume that other people who use the term have ever looked it up in the dictionary and found out that it isn't nearly as specific as people seem to think. This is a personal decision. It applies to what I say and do regarding myself, and isn't any statement or judgement about what other people say and do. The reactions I've been getting from various people (anger, sadness, disbelief, denial, sympathetic understanding) have been varied and very interesting. The reaction that has surprised me the most has been the one that infers I expect everyone else to do the same. If I say "I'm a Zetetic Animist" to most people, they'll go "Wuh? WTF? " and there will be a nice, blank headspace for me to fill with as much or as little information as I think fit. If I say that to someone who understands the broad definition of "pagan" they may know enough to guess in the right ball park, and then initial model probably won't be too far off. Of course, they can still call me pagan if they wish. |