CELINE’S LAWS

by Hagbard Celine (for Black Crayon)

As every thinking person has noticed, our national life has become increasingly weird and surrealistic. The waiting lines at banks and post offices are growing longer all the time, even though demographers tell us US population is no longer rising. The street signs more often than not say WALK on the red and DON’T WALK on the green. You can’t get a plumber on the weekends. Nobody has been able to explain the cattle mutilations yet. Every survey shows that the price of consumer goods, the number of violent crimes, and the eerie popularity of THE GONG SHOW are ominously accelerating.

I believe I have found the explanation these distressing trends. Needless to say, I cannot present, in a short article, all the evidence which I have accumulated in three decades of careful metasociological research; that will have to await the publication of my three-volume study, “Why Everybody Is Going Bonkers.” Here I can only mention the thousands of depth interviews, the innumerable flowcharts and helix-matrix equations, the vast files of computer readouts, the I CHING divinations, and other rigorous scientific techniques used in developing what I modestly call Celine’s Laws of Chaos, Discord and Confusion.

Celine’s First Law is that National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity!

That may sound like a paradox, but I will explain it at once.

Read more.

Dazed Digital Features: Robert Anton Wilson

Rod Stanley, contributed the following with an interactive bibliography in its original presentation, for Dazed Digital, September 22, 2006.

“Doubt. Doubt even that you have doubted enough. Doubt your doubts.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Polymath, agnostic and the author of 35 books and counting, Robert Anton Wilson is both lightning rod and Van der Graaf generator for radical ideas. For 40 years, his takes on conspiracy theories, quantum mechanics, sex magick, psychedelic drugs, alternate universes and the possibilities of the internet as a generator of feedback and disseminator of information, have been laid down for a rapt audience, all lovingly parcelled in a tricksterish sense of humour. At 73 years of age, Pope Bob is the last grand old man of American 60s counter-culture.

His most popular work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, coauthored with Robert Shea, remains the touchstone of his career. A wild romp through every far-out conspiracy theory around, along with tales of kinky sex, mind-enhancing drugs, absurdist jokes, numerology and experimental structures, it introduced the world to the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney and Hagbard Celine, and promulgated the significance of the number 23 and “Discordian” ideas such as the fnord.

Read more and see the interactive bibliography.