A friend of mine had the following quote up as her away message tonight:

Smash, smash the old laws' habitual beauty becomes narcotic eventually; it can be rediscovered, but only dialectically, by contrast, by the creation of new, brutally shocking beauty, beauty that seems barbarism at first. And the creation of such new beauty is the first step for anyone who would a god, and not a slave of dead gods. It is in the war between great seeking and great boredom that new beauty is born.

It's a sharp little aphorism by the inestimable Robert Anton Wilson. What made my friend's use of the quote even more interesting is that she used it without realizing that RAW had just died a few days prior, expiring of natural causes in his Santa Cruz County home.

Wilson was one of those unique cultural personalities who found a perfect niche under the mainstream radar. He was witty, confident, and authentic enough that people took notice, but he was strange and incomprehensible enough that he never caught the attention of people who were too lazy to think through his ideas. His epic conspiracy bible, The Illuminatus Trilogy, is an experience to read, a non-linear head-trip through an expansive historical and mythological landscape.

Wilson was a strange cross between a paranoid hyper-rationalist and a fringe mystic, and in this sense, he might have had the kind of mind you really need to get any perspective on this world. He was equal parts Machiavelli and Camus, with a little Rousseauian libertarian idealist thrown in there… Between the world as a cold machine of motive and fate, and the world as a random and indeterminate mess of strange circumstances, Wilson found a place where he could embrace the connections and the contradictions, and where he could weave a web of sense out of the tangled threads of absurdity and circumstance that we have to wrestle with every day.