February 05, 2004
Fnords
For some geek-humour reason, fnords came up on a mailing list I'm on and one thing led to another.
It's a fuck of a long time since I read Illuminatus! and Schrödinger's Cat, and a lot of intellectual water has flowed under the bridge since then, but I still have a bit of an adolescent soft spot for those paranoid, drug-addled, absurdist hippy fantasies. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson shamelessly appropriated whatever shambolic fragments of mysticism, science fiction, anarchy and random plagiarism came their way, and the lunatic tapestry they created remains a seminal document of the era -- and also a continuing apocryphal bible for that ever-popular internet religion Libertarianism.
There's a lot of crackpot twaddle in there, a lot of bad acid trips, and I'm sure much of it has dated horribly. But there's something touchingly romantic about the underlying humanism that still, more than two decades later, seems to me to be worth hanging onto.
Also, I clearly remember a gay sex scene in one of the Schrödinger's Cat books that, despite having all the rude words replaced with names like "Rehnquist" and "Falwell" (a gimmick stolen shamelessly from Gore Vidal), was one of the most incredibly erotic things I'd ever read at the age of 14 or so :)
So. Hail Eris! All hail Discordia! Why should we let the forces of darkness immanentize the fucking Eschaton?
