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.
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.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
Jesse- Nice tribute to the Big Kahuna. Good work.
2 - Jesse Miksic
Thanks, Al. I read yours shortly after I posted mine, and appreciated hearing from someone who was so familiar with the work and so close to the source.
3 - Al Barger
You're welcome, Jesse. I wouldn't presume to claim to be very "close to the source" though. It was a big deal to ME to visit with him for a little while, but I don't know that he'd have remembered me at all.
I particularly remember a bit in his speech there at the Harvard Club in which he was quoting Charles Manson saying something like "Back in MY day, being crazy meant something."
4 - SHARK
Nice tribute to one of the great minds of the late 20th century.
Most of America (including the media) has no idea what a wonderful treasure has been lost.
I first read RAW some 30 years ago -- and he's always been one of the most powerful [literary] influences on my life. I probably go back and reread RAW once every few months, sometimes weeks; there's always an epiphany hidden somewhere in there that I had forgotten.
What a rare mind he had.
No wife, no horse, no mustache,
Shark