The Illuminatus! Trilogy

In a speech that Joe followed only with difficulty, Simon declared that "cultural revolution" was more important than political revolution; that Bugs Bunny should be adopted as the symbol of anarchists everywhere; that Hoffman's discovery of LSD in 1943 was a manifestation of direct intervention by God in human affairs; that the nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most "transcendentally lucid" political act of the twentieth century; and that "mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking, on every street-corner" was the most practical next step in liberating the world from tyranny. He also urged deep study of the tarot, "to fight the real enemy with their own weapons," whatever that meant. He was launching into a peroration about the mystic significance of the number 23- pointing out that 2 plus 3 equals 5, the pentad within which the Devil can be invoked "as for example in a pentacle or at the Pentagon building in Washington," while 2 divided by 3 equals 0.666, "the Number of The Beast, according to that freaked-out Revelation of Saint John the Mushroom-head," that 23 itself was present esoterically "because of its conspicuous exoteric absence" in the number series represented by the Wobbly Hall address, which was 2422 North Halsted- and that the dates of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22 and 24, also had a conspicuous 23 absent in between them- when he finally was shouted down, the conversation returned to a more mundane level.

Half in whimsy and half in despair, Joe decided to perform one of his chronic acts of faith and convince himself, at least for a while, that there was some kind of meaning in Simon's ramblings. His equally chronic skepticism, he knew, would soon enough reassert itself.

"What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises," Simon had said, "and insanity is the only viable alternative." That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.

"About that 23," Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.

"It's everywhere," was the instant reply. "I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists died on the 23rd day of some month or other-Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23-and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot on 23rd Street-and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did, in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days, you'll find he couldn't get away from the 23 Principle, because 23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. 'Nova heat moving in,' dig? And the world began on October 23, in 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and-"

There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter W-23rd in the alphabet- and its presence in the words "woman" and "womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.

"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax- original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction myths- all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course- nobody is nutty enough to deny that-but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the foundations. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."

"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true…"