Haunting the Margins

The Dawdler's Philosophy launched a two hour podcast in November 2018, with Episode 1 on Robert Anton Wilson.

00:07:00 – Margin Haunting, Inc.

00:22:39 – RAW, the Man

00:30:00 – Margin Haunter Attributes/Margin Haunter Conditions

00:46:46 – The Incorrigible Optimist/Model Agnosticism

01:18:06 – Discordianism, Expanded/Correct Answer Machines

01:36:16 – Generalism/Drugs & Openness




They have also done a podcast on Korzybski.

GENERAL semANTICS

A general semanticist is someone who, upon encountering a person with a beard, would say it was probably a man, but would hold open the possibility that it might be a bearded lady.  - Richard P. Marsh

The subject of General Semantics (and Count Alfred Korzybski) came up quite often when studying with RAW, even if only indirectly (as in discussions of E-Prime, for instance, or Non-Aristotelean Logic).

GS aims to improve one's ability to evaluate the world and one's place in it.

The younger generation(s) appear to know little of GS, but it had a period of great influence on people like William Burroughs (born 1914) who actually went and studied with Korzybski in 1939. 
Details of that amazing sounding set of lectures, here.

I guess RAW learned about GS later, perhaps via Burroughs, and A.E.Van Vogt, etc - or through the founders of NLP - Bandler and Grinder (say). Or maybe Bucky Fuller, Alan Watts or Gregory Bateson.

Bob himself gave a lecture at the Institute of General Semantics - here in PDF format.

More recently, Graham Rae gave this interesting presentation:

GENERAL SEMANTICS MEETS EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE: THE LIFELONG EFFECT OF ALFRED KORZYBSKI ON WILLIAM S BURROUGHS

He posted the text of the talk on this forum at Reality Studio.


This OM post has appeared now in response to our hearing about  a huge biography of Korzybski written by Bruce Kodish which sounds fascinating (to me).

Kodish has a blog related to this material here.

And here, on the relationship to Burroughs.

For those who do not know anything about the subject, this brief summary by Piero Scaruffi might give you a glimpse, although whether such a brief description may confuse more than enlighten, who can say?

Synopsis:

• Animals: hunters and gatherers = bind to territory, i.e."space-binders"
• Humans: agriculture = bind to a memory of the past and prediction of the future, i.e. "time-binders"
• Time-binding is enabled by a nervous system that is capable of constructing and manipulating symbols
• Time-binding allows to transmit knowledge to succeeding generations
• The rate of growth of human knowledge is exponential  (aka the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon)
• Language allows time-binders to categorize/generalize experiences and communicate them to others
• General Semantics to remedy the limits of language:
• We have fewer words and concepts than experiences: we "confuse" similar situations
• We must evaluate a situation less by intension (its category) and more by extension (its unique features)
• We must avoid categorization/generalization and spot the unique characteristics of a situation

This link goes to the Institute of General Semantics, relating to the new biography.

New York Society of General Semantics - about Korzybski by Susan and Bruce Kodish

Random Research

fUSION aNOMALY on Korzysbski

fUSION aNOMALY on Burroughs

Steven Lewis - brief bio of Korzybski

Steven Lewis on General Semantics

Donald Fagen mentions GS, RAW, Van Vogt and Burroughs

Language, a virus?    By Florian Cramer

The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading    by Michael Stevens

Michael Stevens - The Road to Interzone Interview        by Paul Hawkins

"Tomorrow is our permanent address"

One of the things I most regretted about not having the complete Tale of The Tribe course with Bob - we never really got to discuss Marshall McLuhan.

He seems well out of fashion. For all his analysis of media, he probably appears difficult. Partly because of his teasing approach - trying to make you think!

Bobby has offered the complete version of McLuhan's Wake (with Laurie Anderson doing narrator). [but note Glandmaster's technical comment below, about the site].

I choose to watch/listen to it right now as I write. I'll probably go and buy it, so I can show it on friends' DVD players (you see! We do end up buying things, even when we can look at it online). Oh, yeah - you have to set 90 minutes aside, like a docu-movie.

In the 60s he amused me greatly. He seemed as good as Dylan at winding up journalists. He gave great soundbyte...he got slogans. He apparently gave Leary "Turn on, tune in, Drop out" (or the idea for it).

English teachers often seem to have done far more than teach one simple subject (mine did, for sure - he even understood why I had to drop out, and even wished me luck - unlike all the other teachers). I didn't know he came from a Roman Catholic position (I have my own prejudices - most of my heroes seem like lapsed Catholics - Leary, RAW, Lilly, Joyce, etc). I can't read Lord of the Rings for just that subtext from Tolkien. I didn't know it when I tried to first read it in 1972. I just felt mysteriously ill, and queasy, as I do with the Harry Potter books (which seem curiously old-fashioned with their boarding schools and 'magic powers' - but, as so often, I feel quite out-of-synch with many people. Apparently UK citizens have turned religious again, just to get their kids into the best schools. (sigh)

-There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan

“How can we make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Check out John Cage talking about both of them.

McLuhan seemed curiously old-fashioned and straight, and also 'hip' at the same time. A great teacher. Whether he really 'stole' a lot of it from Bucky and Korzybski still seems an open question - perhaps we might call him a populariser.

The Phantom Captain
(click to read whole article quoted below)

But there is some evidence that this idea of the extension of man, identified by many as the core concept of McLuhan's philosophical stance, may have come from the transcendentalist Bucky. From 1960 to 1970, Constantin Dioxides, an engineer, architect, and urban planner and the founder of the Athens Technological Institute in Greece, organized summer cruises complete with cutting edge guests such as Margaret Mead, and Jonas Salk.

Many, including McLuhan, were guests more than once, but only Fuller was invited on every single trip for twelve years in a row. In The Synergetics Dictionary, under McLuhan, notes such as these were made by Fuller: "Marshall McLuhan told me the first day he met me - on one of the early Dioxide cruises - 'I am your disciple.' He held up copies of No More Secondhand God and Nine Chains to the Moon and said to me 'I've joined your conspiracy!"'

In his notes, he writes: "McLuhan has never made any bones about his indebtedness to me as the original source of most of his ideas. The 'Global Village' was indeed my concept. I don't think he has an original idea. Not one McLuhan says so himself. He's really a great enthusiast, a marvelous populariser and teacher. He has an irrepressible sense of the histrionic, like no one I've known since Frank Lloyd Wright."

Indeed, in Nine Chains to the Moon, a passage reads: "Through the leverage gained by his inanimate instrument extensions of self, he has attained an extended mechanical ability far in excess of his own integral mechanical energy content ability." He goes on to claim that the idea of "man backing up into his future" appears in his books and that Fuller's concept of the "Mechanical Extensions of Man" is the basis for McLuhan's talk of the "Electrical Extensions" of man.

Open source - interesting and relevant post...

At that time, I was cavorting with known anarchists like the composers John Cage and Udo Kasemets. I had been a fan of Cage, Bucky Fuller, Marshal McLuhan and William S. Burroughs since my teens; in retrospect, I was probably a powderkeg in search of a terrorist. As an unabashed advocate of free and unfettered information sharing, free software appealed to my young mind, it held an almost Kabbalistic hope: "You may pay for knowledge, but you should never charge for it.". Community currencies would prevail over the economics of scarcity; I devoted myself to learning, promoting and participating in the Free Software Revolution.

Happy New Ears!

When RAW died at the age of 74, it seemed to me that I found myself next in line (at the age of 61). The Forum and the Academy seemed generally a space for younger folk. Not that I thought it made me any wiser (or put me at the front of the line for dying!) but it does (inevitably) make my frame of reference different, just because of having started earlier in the Twentieth Century.

Now that I (along with an unknown group of others)have begun working on the self-directed course of The Tale of The Tribe (which doesn't have a discussion zone) I seem to have leaked a lot of my 'thinking aloud' to this blog...and with Comments we can at least have brief exchanges, as we would in the forum.

The monologue aspect of a blog post suits me, too (no interruptions and sidetracks - heh heh).

One of the reasons I started talking about Duchamp and Cage, etc, arises from wanting to create a context. It seems so easy to think of creative people working in isolation.

Even now, I get a little shock when (say) Bob Dylan mentions Neil Young, in Highlands as though I somehow assumed he doesn't live in the same soundscape world as me...or might have read the same books, seen the same films, etc.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down

So, to put Joyce and Pound and Korzybski and Fuller in context (when what they worked on still really was 'modern' - as in contemporary) I have studied around them, I want to know if they knew (or knew of) each other...and find it amusing that Joseph Campbell ended up the way he was because of total poverty in The Thirties (and just giving up and retreating into books) - so I also find it intriguing that Cage (from sheer poverty) started playing Furniture Music (finding sounds in all the objects around him) - and then got into electronics and experimental music (early uptaker in The Forties) and began the 'Happenings' in The Fifties that mosbunall people associate with The Sixties (if they don't think of Cabaret Voltaire in The Twenties). And yes, I have deliberately used those decades (inaccurate though I find them) to show how we cut up a century. We even believe something 'new' happened in 2000, but many people in 1900 felt the same...they felt really trendy and new...

Anyway - I am working my way around John Cage again. I have access to a couple of his books through the library - Silence, and For The Birds ("I am for the birds, not the cages that people put them in"). The library also has various pieces of his 'music', but I feel more interested in his cross-over work. I really enjoyed Roaratorio (a soundscape - or Irish Circus -he made for Finnegans Wake) and just got a copy of his highly amusing 'radio play' Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet.

I already have, in my collection, the rather wonderful Indeterminacy, a series of 90 one minute stories he tells on one channel, while David Tudor adds random sounds on the other stereo channel.

Plenty of mushroom stories for our Phly. You can find the stories online here...and while reading them on screen just listen to the sounds of the environment you find yourself sitting in (it'll do just as well, and I feel sure he would approve).

I feel like I want to make a timeline, and put all these people onto it - maybe focused on 1932 (when Bob arrived on the planet, and Cage arrived back from a trip to Europe, aged 20, to study with Schoenberg), from William Burroughs (studying with Korzybski) to Joyce refusing psychoanalysis from Jung, from Joe Campbell in his cabin, to Crowley on his island...to Hitler and Korzybski and Wilhelm Reich, and on and on and so on.

Ahem. You can see what I mean about my tendency to monologue (or even, to get Shakespearean, soliloquy). Musing. Brooding. Thinking. Meditating.

Strictly speaking, I feel I should take all this over to my own blog, but so long as it seems fairly relevant I will stay and clutter up the blog. OMMMM. AUMMMM.

New Courses for the Fall

CROWLEY TAROT
Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot
Lon Milo DuQuette / August 13 - September 30 / $135
https://www.deepleafproductions.com/deepleafcart/home.php

THE GODDESS PATH
Myths, Invocations and Rituals
Patricia Monaghan / September 3 - October 28 / $125
http://www.maybelogic.org/courses.htm

THE CRAZY WISDOM OF PHILIP K. DICK
Erik Davis / September 17 - November 11 / $120
http://www.maybelogic.org/erikcrs.htm


Well, it may have gone a little quiet during the summer semester in the main forum (or maybe that’s just because I have STFU) but MLA has plenty of goodies for The Fall, including a new experiment, self-directed courses. These will run without a tutor/facilitator, and the syllabus will cover similar ground to previous courses, offering a chance for students to continue work on the material, on their own.

Now His Serene Absence has moved on to higher pursuits this seems like a great chance to help amplify and complete his work. The Tale of the Tribe course will include and expand upon work RAW originally offered in two of his courses: The Ideogrammic Method, and The Tale of the Tribe.

The first two S-D offerings are Robert Anton Wilson's Tale of the Tribe and Philip H. Farber's Meta-Magick.
https://www.deepleafproductions.com/deepleafcart/home.php?cat=2

MLA Self-Directed Course - Tale of the Tribe

An Interactive Exploration
with Robert Anton Wilson
10 week access to S-D Course Site
For more info, http://www.blogger.com/www.maybelogic.org $60

Derived from Robert Anton Wilson's landmark MLA courses 'The Ideogrammic Method' and 'Tale of the Tribe,' this self-directed course bridges the political, the social and the psychological in a mix only Wilson conjure. Starring Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce and Buckminster Fuller -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Follow RAW through the labyrinths of Joyce and Pound as we learn to perceive/conceive in non-Aristotelian categories and join the Global Village.

You may find out more about Ideograms, and the Tale of the Tribe by referring to the Index in the right hand column.

MLA Self-Directed Course - Meta-Magick

Where Magick Meets the Brain
with Philip H Farber
10 week access to S-D Course Site
For more info, http://www.blogger.com/www.maybelogic.org $55

NB: for students who already participated in these courses, I believe you may get a reduced price, email Admin for advice on this.

Bogus MLA Courses

Accept no cheap substitutes! Fakes and Simulations have flooded the market!
For three years now, the MLA has offered high-quality online courses to people from all around the world [but only in English, so far].

Robert Anton Wilson ran all the first few courses, but slowly the range of tutors has expanded, and also the subjects tackled. Current instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff and David Jay Brown.

Of course, not everyone has sufficient time to study, and those with time on their hands may not have the money…but you can always join the general forum, for the flavour of the place. If you understand the freelance life you may understand why tutors need paying (!) and the course fee also means you get a closed environment, with concentrated energy from other students, rather than the potentially dispersive/disruptive content of free-for-all forums, which you can find on the web on almost any subject, and which certainly have a value of their own.

As RAW graduated to His Serene Absence earlier this year, we can never complete some of the assignments he set us. The feedback he got from participants meant he continued to tune his teaching methods and subject matter from course to course. He would certainly have noted a certain disappointment in sombunall students that in one of his last (and very ambitious) 12-week courses [The Tale of The Tribe] we failed to cover all the ground that the Syllabus hinted at. As it happens, those of us who enjoyed the course did not mind that we focussed on just some of the material on offer (we still assumed we could do pick-ups later). You can only do so much in 3 months.

Anyway – for those who wanted less Joyce and Pound, and more on the communications/information people of the 20th Century, I have begun encouraging the creation of brief teasers/tasters or possible courses in the open forum. And yes, I did mean them as a joke, before you ask…MLA may eventually initiate self-directed courses on some of these, or seek out appropriate tutors, but meanwhile you can join in relaxed conversation about McLuhan, Gregory Bateson, Bucky Fuller, Shannon, Bandler, Korzybski, Nietzsche, etc.

[2014 update] Although that generation of the forum has gone into hiding, I did find a link to that thread on the Wayback Machine.  For what it's worth.   aka Bogus

The Tale of The Tribe

My apologies for over-writing in the previous post. For a moment I thought I had got onto another course! The ideogrammic aspect of Bob’s interests emerged in one course called The Ideogrammic Method, and then later when we discussed internet and McLoon on his course called

Tale of the Tribe

The first of Wilson's MLA courses bridging the political, the social and the psychological, Tale of the Tribe promises to be a landmark journey with our dear Dr. Bob. Starring Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friederich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon and Marshall McLuhan -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Join Wilson as he explores the themes, minds and ideas of his forthcoming book, The Tale of the Tribe.

We got a bit excited on that course, as we felt that our contributions directly affected RAW’s work-in-progress (you can still find it listed as unpublished on Amazon!)

It appears that our interest (both in the course that happened, and the book that didn’t) has encouraged Admin to attempt something new. A self-directed course based around the material. I can see encouraging signs in the Academy that such a course may begin fairly soon.

A Way With Words

If you wonder about our interest in ideograms, it arose from one of Bob’s courses “The Ideogrammic Method”. He made a connection between the vividness of Pound’s poetry, and the Imagist movement, and their interest in using concrete, non-abstract language. The Fenollosa text contributed to this.

Many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters as ideograms, but actually some represent sounds, and syllables, and not all ‘pictures’ actually represent the concrete object drawn.

We spent some time discussing the difference between pictograms, hieroglyphs, ideograms, etc


• A Pictogram – literally a sketch/thumbnail of an object – therefore hard to use to just illustrate an action (if I draw a running stickman, do I mean man, or running?) Notice that either/or, because we distinguish verb and noun.
• Phonograms are indicators of pronunciation – I think Chinese has a few of these, but the most developed form is the phonetic alphabet, which indicate sounds (although not always in a logical way – look at English!)

• Hieroglyphs: defined as 'figure of an object standing for a word, syllable or sound, as used in ancient Egyptian and other writing..." I guess, in those terms, hieroglyphics appear to be pictograms (have a look at stele 666 and pick out the birds, etc) but of course a picture of an owl could just be the bird, or could be an ideogram for “wisdom”
• Ideograms seem like symbols for an idea or concept. An everyday one we use is the set of numerals we got from the Arabic languages 1,2,3,4,5. [Note that we can all use these, and agree on them, but when spoken English speakers pronounce 1 as “one”, my French friend says “Un” and a German friend says “ein”.] I assume that icons like the sign for “Men” and “Women” also count.
• Graffiti and Calligraphy combine the phonetic alphabet with variations in ‘fonts’ to add layers of expressiveness. Street signs often only have an icon, but sometimes they are supplemented with words. It’s a design issue. Next time you go through an international airport, see how much you understand without using a dictionary or phrase book.

An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek iδέα idea "idea" + γράφω grapho "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea.

In relation to Pound, the Imagists included this in a manifesto:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact
word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

3. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we
believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in
vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this
reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor
indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very
essence of poetry.
RAW discussed some similarities between Pound's love of "precision, luminous detail, phalanx of particulars, image, vortex, and ideogram" and Korzybski’s extensional view of the world – where we deal with concrete particulars, not generalizations.

RAW: In extension we do not define humans as
mammals, mammals as vertebrates,
vertebrates as life forms etc
as caricatured by Fenollosa.

In extension we define humans as Odysseus,
Helen of Troy, El Cid, Lorenzo de Medici,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Tom Jefferson,
Cunizza daRomano, John Adams, Kungfutse,
Tai Tsong, Andy Jackson, Yong Ching,
JP Morgan, etc ...

Ideogrammic Method involves

montage
concrete particulars
perspectivism
observer - observed relationships
presenting various facets
condensare
luminous fragments

A typical topic for the week, from Bob: Pound & Fenollosa consider ideogram the heart of poetry. Korzybski thought extensionality the essence of science. Think about this and cuss and discuss in the forums.
On the course, we hammered out our own understandings about all this, through discussion.

Ezra Pound's book ABC of Reading also proved interesting:

...if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour'.
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort until... you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.
In the more traditional western view, red is a color is part of the spectrum of light is wavelengths is a form of energy, etc. The ideogram of red is rust, flamingo, cherry, rose.
Or, as Cosmic Ray put it...until I read Fenollosa's essay, I would have defined (categorized) rust, cherry, flamingo, and rose as "things that are red." I would never have thought to define red as "what rose, cherry, rust, and flamingo have in common." And there is how ideograms/extension seems quite opposite to the (or at least, my) traditional way of thinking: whether the term in question is defined by being placed in larger categories, or it is defined by what it categorizes. I would think that someone who once could see but is now blind, upon being told something is red, would remember things he once saw that were red, and apply that to the description of the object. He might even further define the redness of that object by asking "red like a cherry or red like a flamingo?"
The neuro-linguistic aspect of Bob's work has roots in this perception of Korzybski's:
All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals -- sound waves or light waves -- rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted "frames." physiological responses etc. as they impact upon the total synergetic organism.
You could sum the whole complex of ideas this way:
The Vico-Fenollosa-Pound-Korzybski-Whorf-Bandler Hypothesis holds that language influences thought-feeling-perception and the organism-as-a-whole
"A change in language can transform our apprehension of the cosmos." --Benjamin Lee Whorf
And, in our monoculture of English online (although MLA has several members with other first languages) I'll finish with this from Pound in The ABC of Reading:
"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension."
"Away with words!" language is a virus from outer space...

The passing of the torch

This is a repost of something I wrote in my own blog.


Robert Anton Wilson has left the building.

I add my voice to the chorus -- what now?

I find the timing a bit disturbing. Just the night before, I followed a compulsion to write some things down.

Forgive me, Papa Bob-
I went and turned you into an Idol (for a while, anyway)
In doing so, i swallowed whole a delightful menu...

Maybe I took "maybe" too far.

Ever go to that place that feels like the existence of,
say, a dog, is no more or less certain than the existence of
the IPU (invisible pink unicorn), or Eris,
or a 9/11 conspiracy, etc?

Oh, Bob, poor Bob, he warned against this-
Even going so far as to print a
CONTRACT
at the beginning of TSOG!

Let's take a looksie...

1. The author of this book hereby warrants and gives assurance that the readers have no obligation to believe everything-- or anything-- in it. Nor does he hope to reveal the absolute & final truth about any topic discussed.

2. Readers must warrant and give assurance that they will not believe or disbelieve any part or parts of this book until they have given some time to careful examination of such a part or parts; and that they will file everything herein under "maybe" until or unles slowly arriving at "true" or "false."

I looked up from reading that just now and saw Papa Bob, in my living room, pointing a frail arm in the sky and intoning
(in that delightful laughing voice of his)

"Think for yourself, schmuck!"

And Korzybski chimes in:
There are two ways to slide easily through life:
To believe everything or to doubt everything.
Both ways save us from thinking.

And there's the Buddha-
My teaching is a raft whereon men may reach the far shore
The sad fact is that so many mistake the raft for the shore

I read these things and I feel that I know them, deep within me.
So why do I continue to make the mistakes?

And I know all kinds of crazy shit, but what am I doing with it?
Am I living it?
Am I spreading it?
Am I setting an example with it?

Nevermind what everyone else does -
I can no longer justify my lack of action by rationalizing
that someone's out there doing what I'm too
bored and disinterested and lazy to do anything myself.

And if I can't find meaning for myself, then what will propell me to action?
If nothing else, I feel I owe it to Bob to do something other than go about the motions of a life.

Papa Bob, I'm sorry that my own weaknesses and "buttons" kept me from your company so much.
I'm sure that it didn't bother you much, as you were with so many who love you.
I guess I'm more sorry to myself than to you, actually.

I'm sorry that I take the easy way out, that I avoid confrontation, that I don't stand for anything.
I look back at 10 years of comfortable, monotonous, lazy life and say to myself -
"What now? Are you gonna let another decade go by before you decide to do something?"

Thus ends the piece I wrote just hours before he took off from this earth.

Neurologic

Update June 13th: this course got postponed, as Bob doesn't feel so good right now....

The Venerable Bob will teach another course for the summer season, and this looks like the accumulator we have all waited for - finally tackling Korzybski and Bandler's NLP - and throwing Leary and Ezra Pound into the mix.

Neurologic
follow link, or explore the Maybe Logic Academy home pages...link on the right...

Learn how to really "think outside the box" in an 8 week journey though Korzybski's non-aristotelian semantics, Bandler's neuro-linguistic programming and Pound's ideogramics all united with Leary's model of the 8 circuits of evolution. Summer fun for your brain.

All reading material online and included with course.

8 week course from
June 19 - August 13, 2006

NewRAW Tarot

Back in April 05 NonProphet suggested making a RAW Tarot along these lines:

A combination of ideograms / thinkers / art work from MLAers - based

Could be based around the eight circuit and Quantum Psychology

Orson, Joyce, Bucky, Leary, Pound, Reich, Buddha, Lao Tse, Emperor Norton, 23, 5, pyramids
Golden and noon blue apples, Sacred Chao, laws of cosmic schmukery, Hagbard... you get my drift

'IS' as the hanged man
Ol' Bob as the Fool
RAW as the Heirophant

Then Bob himself chipped in on 14th April 05

i wd like 93 cards [for thelema and agape]

5 suits [for law of fives]
wands
cups
swords
pentagons
apples

23 trumps
22 as before
+ Sacred chao

Much lively discussion has continued for the best part of a year, mostly suggesting types and characters for a Tarot, like RAW as the Hermit (say) or Emperor Norton as the Emperor – or themes and subjects we would like to see referred to, from Bucky to Korzybski.

Meanwhile Bobby has started releasing his creations. He offered an Ace of Apples in the forum, in response to Bob’s preference for that as the fifth suit.

Zach offered a Sacred Chao.




Since then, Bobby has released 4 cards through the OM blog: The Fool, A Magician, The High Priestess and An Empress(just today!)

Currently Antero Alli approaches the end of his first course here - planning to repeat it in the Autumn (Fall) and in Angel Tech you will find a specific section on Designing Your own Tarot. (check out this article on the NeuroTarot from his website).

He also offers Vertical Oracle, which you can preview here, for inspiration perhaps? He has encouraged us to make our own set of cards up for the 8 Circuits model. You can see my own work-in-progress here.



Throughout the year people contributed some interesting links, some for people who know little about the Tarot, and some for enthusiasts.






Zach recently offered a Moon card in the forum.

From NonProphet:

Conceptualist Tarot
Le Palais du Tarot
Tarot Reference
Mantegna's Prints in Tarot History
Housewife's Tarot (!)
Magical Omaha

The Collectors: The Love of Tarot
About Tarot

The sarcastic but useful JK site
21. Can I (and should I) design my own Tarot deck?

Can you? Sure. While you at it, go design (or doodle) a starship, or a nuclear reactor, or paint the 21st-century Mona Lisa, or write a great novel or just do something really useful with yourself and cure cancer. Because, if you're just starting out with Tarot, or if you've only been at it using the blind-alley affirmation method, you don't have a clue about what you're doing or what Tarot is about. Isn't that correct? So, why do you figure you'd be any good at designing an example of something you know little or nothing about? But, lots of people do figure just that, aiming to reach the heights by expressing the depths of arrogance and absurdity. And they inevitably end up with muck that only vaguely makes sense even to them. The greatest Tarot deck ever designed, the Thoth deck of Aleister Crowley, was the culmination of a long and interesting life spent absorbing and processing huge amounts of symbolic data. Now, that's what we all do of course, process symbolic data. It's just that some of us are artists at it, and those people not only can but SHOULD make Tarot decks (and that doesn't require a pack of cards), and some of us can't process our way out of a wet paper bag, and those people should spectate (not speculate).

This guy - Lee Heflin - rectified the colours for Crowley’s Thoth Deck, and also did some amazing fractal variations. [2009 update: sadly, the link we had here, to lots of the images, has broken. You can see fragments here. And, for contrast Atu XVII on Flickr

If anyone can find a better online set, then let us know.]

For an exoteric and detailed 'true' history of the Game of Tarot, check out "A Wicked Pack of Cards" and/or other books by Ronald Decker (what a great name for a playing card historian!).

Systemantics

last year, when we set this blog up, I also made a 'sandpit' blog in parallel, where we could try things out. In June 05 I posted the text below in that alternative universe, but didn't follow up on it. As I consider this blog intermediate between the permanent publication of Maybe Quarterly, and the semi-private interaction and discussions in the MLA forum, I thought I would repost the notes, to invite any feedback towards finalising a piece for the Spring MQ, and to share the links I have found.
Disclaimer: WORK-IN-PROGRESS (scroll on)

Analog and Digital Systems

Whole Systems - ecological systems

Open and Closed Systems

8 system (circuit) Model ETC.

Here you can find a list of some of the most influential people in the systems field - I have a particular soft spot for Bateson, von Bertalanffy, Watzlawick, Prigogene, Bucky Fuller and Shannon.

Oh, and Mr Korzybski's General Semantics:
"The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences. - Alfred Korzybski

Ludwig von Bertalanffy worked on General System Theory - International Society for the System Sciences

Watzlawick makes me laugh. Shannon made juggling machines, so I have to love his mind. Bateson, as a grand master, often displayed the difficulty of thinking about systems in the Aristotelean language of Either/Or, and would mumble self-referentially about preferring Both/And [I may have made that up, but Niels Bohr famously mumbled when asked to explain his model of the universe - I heard that on the radio, so it must have some truth (!)] Prigogene turned me onto chaosmics (Joycean word) or, how order can spontaneously (almost inevitably) arise out of disorder without some Great Architect in the Sky having anything to do with it.

I find 'general models' interest me most. A few Quotes to indicate what I mean.

A lot of work on 'whole systems' belong in the ecological realm

And, of course, as buzz words they may simply turn up in sales pitches in Google

This page seems like a good place to start, if you don't know much about the subject
And you can find a great book list here

Oh, yeah. Systemantics comes from John Gall, who wrote a rather witty book with that title - still available from Amazon, etc - I believe - or the General Systemantics Press.

One's Own View of Reality as the Only Reality is the Most Dangerous of All Delusions.
"As I have already said, the belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous or all delusions. It becomes still more dangerous if it is coupled with the missionary zeal to enlighten the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world wishes to be enlightened or not. To refuse to embrace wholeheartedly a particular definition of reality (e.g. an ideology), to dare to see the world differently can become a think crime' in a truly Orwellian sense as we get steadily closer to 1984." Watzlawick

Four Idols

We have had a discussion about Bacon/Shakespeare - arising from our reading Finnegans Wake. I want to post a few interesting bits from a discussion we had about Bacon last year, as they seem relevant to the Maybe Logic and General Semantics interest in the things that facilitate or inhibit clear thinking. 'Idols' is a term which Bacon used figuratively for fallacies which block or distort men's perception of reality and their pursuit of truth. They are psychological barriers - prepossessions, prejudices, and delusions, emotional and sentimental biases. In short, they include all the imaginings which prevent men from seeing the object 'as it really is'. Most of this summary got culled from this excellent site, which goes into the Idols in more detail, with examples - I have jotted notes of my own amongst them.

Novum Organum
Aphorisms concerning The Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man.
Aphorism XXXIX. There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, -- calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-place; the fourth, Idols of the Theatre.

Idols of the Tribe: (Human Chauvinism - sensory limits - bodymind?)

A person's education:
The books a person reads:
The people a person admires: (try not to end up with their bad habits, too)
A person's experiences:
Our need to seek more and more regularity in the world than there really is: (23s and The Law of Fives?)
Our tendency to seek out evidence of that which we already believe to be true: (self-fulfilling prophecy, The Prover proves what the Thinker thinks)
Our tendency to see personal truths as universal: (opinion disguised with isness)
Our belief in empirical data: (only part of the spectrum)
Our tendency to let emotions rule reason: (faith-based vs experiment-based)

Idols of the Cave: (Personal reality-tunnels)

People see things in light of their own special knowledge and opinions:
Some of us are governed by similarities, others by differences:
Those who love the past and those who love the possibilities of the future obscure the knowledge of the present:
Some of us see only the details and others see only the global:
Bacon advised students to hold in suspicion any idea which particularly appealed to them

Idols of the Marketplace: (General Semantics and NLP)
Words are misused or misunderstood:
Words have a true and a vulgar meaning: (slang and jargon)
Words cannot be defined because we need words to define them:
Names of things which do not exist confuse our understanding: (nominalizations)
'Idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all'
'It is not possible to divorce ourselves from these fallacies and false appearances, because they are so inseparable from our nature and condition of life'

Idols of the Theatre: (The State - true believers - ready-made fictions)
Dogma:
Religion:
Political systems (democracy, communism, etc.):
Education:
Political parties:

Systems of dogma or philosophy which have been invented with little or no regard to realities: they resemble the fictions of stage plays which distract audiences from 'what is' to illusory worlds. Such systems may be sophistical, extracting a great deal from a few facts, or empirical, extracting a little from many things, or superstitions, mixing philosophy with theology and tradition. All of these are errors because they do not see knowledge truly. The Sophists do not consult experience; the Empiricists are too easily satisfied; and the Superstitious contaminate knowledge and spread their fallacies widest of all. The Idols of the Theatre also influence the mind into excesses of dogmatism or denial.

In-crowd, in-jokes and gossip (a personal point-of-view)

Last week in the MLA forum: after the first flurry of fun in our newly made ‘Tavern’ or play area, we seem to have reverted to our normal semi-serious selves. The running magical battles in graphics amused me, but I imagined my cone of white light most of the time, and then just grovelled at the feet of Dal (hail Dal!) and pleaded for protection from the platypus. We already miss Dal (hail Dal!) – who has had to go off fighting crime, or something (defending criminals?) – Mindy and ZP seem in great, feisty mode however, and Hecate turns up pretty often to support them, so between them they manage to balance our sometimes rather nerdy male selves…


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The Reading Group plough on with the heavy-going, and sometimes depressing Reich reading - although it has led to some very interesting discussions on the nature of fascism, mob mentality, the current state of the USA, emotional armouring and the emotional plague, etc. All good stuff.



We plan to tackle Korzybski next. It may prove hard to get our hands on hardback copies of Science and Sanity, but we already found an online copy. So many of us refer to General Semantics, and to E-Prime, that I think this particular reading could lead to very stimulating discussions. I did read it more than a decade ago, but I remember feeling quite impressed (it made an impression on me, in me – it dented my reality). There may well exist popularisations of this material, but I always like going to the source.

The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences. - Alfred Korzybski

We still have a lot more members than active posters – but I never really know if people join who can afford to spend $60 just to look, and then wander off. Like people who think that ‘joining a gym’ shows they care about their health (but never actually go and do any classes). No doubt we have lurkers who don’t feel like joining in because we look like an in-crowd (and as a founder who posts several times a day I plead guilty to having a loud voice, or high-profile presence) but really we welcome new people in warmly, and encourage people to speak up, either with opinions, or links, or corrections. If we use argot or jargon - just ask!

A thread about The Church of Reality seems to have stirred up some serious discussion about religions, communities, useful beliefs, cults, etc. To me it looks like a joke (conceived when smoking a joint, it says in the history) - but that doesn't mean that it won't go the way of (say) scientology and turn into a cult. The 'guru' took a cult test by Secret Agent Orange, and reckons they pass the test as 'not a cult'. We could check this out for MLA, too, given that he offers this definition:

Examples of groups that have some cult properties include religions, nations, political parties, corporations, non profit organizations, sport team fans, neighborhood associations, bridge clubs, softball teams, online discussion boards, Macintosh users, bike clubs, and vegans. Not to say that you should quit all these groups but that all of them will be to some extent at least benignly cultish.

NB: This MLA does not represent the Modern Language Association (although I liked their map of where different languages get spoken in the USA – as we keep on teasing Americans for acting monolingual in English). Oh, and we have no affiliation with the Museums, Libraries and Archives council in the UK – although my own current job has to do with their project of rolling out “Internet access for all” through libraries. The Peoples Network.

Tale of the Tribe

I look forward to this course in the Fall, as Bob’s eclectic mind seems to range over material I have a lot of empathy for. As the course material will probably get published later, under the same title, this feels like an opportunity to contribute (however indirectly) to shaping Bob’s thoughts – to actually getting involved in reader feedback on draft material – a really interactive option.

Bumph: "The first of Wilson's MLA courses bridging the political, the social and the psychological, Tale of the Tribe promises to be a landmark journey with our dear Dr. Bob. Starring Giordano Bruno, Giambatista Vico, Friederich Nietzsche, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon and Marshall McLuhan -- the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Join Wilson as he explores the themes, minds and ideas of his forthcoming book, The Tale of the Tribe."

I would say that all the people Bob enjoys seem to have a ‘magical’ quality to them – and the theme of hidden streams of ancient knowledge, as well as the possibility of new models of the universe. Although Bob acknowledges an interest in Crowley, he doesn’t recommend setting out to become a magickal practitioner, as such. Uncle Al does seem to obsess people (the Cult of Personality worked for him) but Bob leans the other way, it seems to me, towards freeing oneself from obsessions and habits of thinking, and/or worship of any particular form or method or person. He also explains the magical side to the arts (thinking of Burroughs and Pound and Joyce and the Surrealists) as well as of the sciences (with particular reference to Quantum Physics and anthropology and futurist planning and design).

So don’t feel dismayed if you think any particular area of study doesn’t appeal. The sheer eclectic mix means some particular approach to the future, or to the mind, or to the future mind or to the future of mind…may intrigue you.

RAW’s whole approach can lead to misunderstandings. The infinitely satirical side of Illuminatus! often gets overlooked, and the implications of the story get taken seriously, which means he gets described as a conspiracy theorist.

This seems strange to me, as that book seems like an obvious send-up of the conspiracy scene. Well, OK, that represents one of the various possible readings. The two Bobs who wrote it treated all conspiracy beliefs the same, and said “what if they all had a part of the truth?” Somehow, treating them all as real blows it up into an outrageously improbable picture of the insanity we live by…