Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

– Dylan Thomas

Kerry Thornley

Lee Harvey Oswald

Thornley was one of America’s most fascinating unknowns. It is fitting, given the underground nature of his claims to fame, that his first biography, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by Adam Gorightly, is published in the quasi-clandestine form of a print-on-demand book from Paraview Press.

Thornley helped his high school buddy Greg Hill invent the comedic religion of Discordianism in dull suburban Southern California in the late 1950s. It was dedicated to the worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. Its flavor can be gleaned from this bit of powerful magick, the Turkey Curse, from its holy book, the Principia Discordia: “Face…towards the direction of the negative aneristic vibration that you wish to neutralize. Begin waving your arms in any elaborate manner and make motions with your hands as though you were Mandrake feeling up a sexy giantess. Chant, loudly and clearly: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE! The results will be instantly apparent.”

Thornley joined the Marines in 1959, where one of his buddies at the El Toro Marine Base was Lee Harvey Oswald, an openly communist “outfit eight ball” known to his fellow grunts as “Oswaldskovitch.”

Thornley began writing a novel based on his disillusioning experience in the Marines. After hearing that ol’ Oswaldskovitch really meant it with that commie stuff when he defected to the Soviet Union, Thornley transformed the book, called The Idle Warriors, into a roman à clef about Oswald — making Thornley the only person to write a book about Lee Oswald before that fall day in Dallas.

Thornley was living in New Orleans when John F. Kennedy was killed, hanging out, according to his own recollections (which some friends suspect Thornley invented) with a curious cast of characters. Among them were some unfortunates caught in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s feckless investigation into the JFK assassination.

What is definitely not Thornley’s imagination, though, is that he was dragged into the “Who Killed Kennedy?” melodrama, testifying before the Warren Commission and targeted by Garrison, who thought Thornley might have been part of the conspiracy as a “second Oswald.” The two men allegedly looked quite similar, and there was a weird series of coincidences linking them.

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Essay from Robert Anton Wilson’s “Email to the Universe”:

If you stroll through a large art museum, you will notice that Van Gogh does not paint the same world as Rembrandt, Picasso does not see things the way Goya did, Georgia O’Keefe doesn’t much resemble Rivera, Salvador Dali looks like nobody but himself, and, in general, no world-class artist became a classic by doing what somebody else had already done or even what everybody else in his/her own era did.

And in science, the names of Einstein, Dirac, the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, John Bell, etc. live on because none of them took Newton as Holy Gospel: they all made unique and unpredictable innovations in basic theory.

And, in case you think this applies only to “arts and sciences,” consider the most successful people in industry. Henry Ford did not get rich copying Fulton’s steamboat; he made a car so cheap that anybody could afford one. Howard Hughes produced movies that nobody else would have dared to attempt, and then went on to revolutionize the airline industry. Buckminster Fuller did not copy the cubical form of previous architects, but invented the geodesic dome; at last count, over 300,000 of his buildings existed, making him the the most visibly successful architect in history. Steve Wozniak did not copy the computers of his day, but instead invented one that even a “bloody eejit” (like me) could use (and even enjoy!) Bill Gates created new kinds of software. Etc.

We all need constant reiteration of these truisms because we live in a world where a multitude of very powerful forces have worked upon us, from birth through school to jobs, attempting to suppress our individuality, our creativity, and, above all, our curiousity — in short, to destroy everything that encourages us to think for ourselves.

Our parents wanted us to act like the other darling children in our neighborhood; they emphatically did not want a boy or girl who seemed “weird” or “different” or (Heaven forfend) “too damned clever by far.”

Then we enter grade school, a fate worse than Death and Hell combined. Whether we land in a public school or a private religious school, we learn two basic lessons: [1] There exists one correct answer for every question; and [2] education consists of memorizing the one correct answer and regurgitating it on an “examination.”

The same tactics continue through high school and, except in a few sciences, even to the university.

All throught his “education” we find ourselves bombarded by organized religion. Most religions in this part of the world also teach us “one correct answer,” which we should accept with blind faith; worse, they attempt to terrorize us with threats of post-mortem roasting, toasting, boiling, broiling, charbroiling and freedomfrying if we ever dare to think about it, at all.

After 18 to 30+ years of all this, we enter the job market, and learn to become, or try to become, almost deaf, dumb and blind. We must always tell our “superiors” what they want to hear, what suits their prejudices and/or their wishful fantasies. If we notice something they don’t want to know about, we learn to keep our mouths shut. If we don’t —

“One more word, Bumstead, and I’ll fire you!”

As my mahatmaguru J.R. “Bob” Dobbs says, “You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.”

“Bob” may have the average confused with the median, but otherwise he hit a bull’s eye. Half of the people you meet do indeed seem dumber than a box of turds; but they did not start out that way. Parents, peers, schools, churches, advertisers and jobs made them that way. Every baby at birth has a relentlessly curious and experimental temperament. It takes the first third of our lives to destroy that curiosity and experimentalism; but in most cases, we become placid parts of a docile herd.

The human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem that lost freedom, if they work at it hard enough.

I’ve worked at it for 50+ years now, and still find parts of me acting like a robot or a zombie on occasion. Learning “how to become what you are” (in Nietzche’s phrase) takes a lifetime, but it still seems like the best game in town.

I’ve recently finished reading Monsters and Magical Sticks by Steven Heller, which has some intriguing ideas in it about psychology, hypnotism, and the way that our brains work. (The editing is a little patchy, like some other New Falcon titles that I’ve read in the past, e.g. Christopher Hyatt books, so there are some really annoying punctuation and grammar goofs…although some of those are I’m sure intentional, as Heller warns at the beginning that he’s going to screw with your head.) A couple of interesting thoughts:

a) The subtitle is “There is no such thing as hypnosis”, which is a phrase that Heller repeats throughout the book. I wasn’t sure what he meant by this until I hit this passage:

“It is my belief that all presenting problems and symptoms are really metaphors that contain a story about what the problem really is. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the therapist to create metaphors that contain a story that contains the (possible) solutions. The metaphor is the message…Hypnosis is, in and of itself, a metaphor inside a metaphor…”

This hit home while watching Maybe Logic, the RAW documentary, in which Wilson hammered on the Reality Tunnel concept for a while, which is really just a specific repackaging of Korzybski’s phrase “the map is not the territory” — we perceive what is real, but between the moment of raw perception to the time that the signals reach our conscious brain (if they do), there are layers and layers of unconscious systems wrapping and simplifying the “inputs” to meet our preconceived frameworks of how the world should work; in other words, when the perception finally registers in consciousness, it is packaged as a metaphor. Hypnosis therefore is a way of bypassing consciousness, and using metaphor to explore and rearrange those subsystems, but it is in itself a metaphor, since it’s just another belief system (albeit one that seems fairly consistent).

Two other quotes related to this:

The first is Wilson, from an essay in Email to the Universe:

“All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals — sound waves or light waves — rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted “frames”, physiological responses, etc. as they impact upon the total synergetic organism.”

The second from the wikipedia article on Erickson:

“Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance at the unconscious level. The patient can be aware of this, or she can be completely oblivious that something is happening.”

b) Another set of ideas worth mentioning are from his presentation of systems. Essentially at any given moment, we have a primary input system, and a primary output system.

The “input” system is active at the interface between the unconscious and conscious (which, to be clear, are not directly equivalent to Freud/Jung’s concepts), and is primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic. If it’s visual, you are thinking in (creating, or retrieving) pictures; when you imagine something or attempt to retrieve a memory, your eyes will tend to look upwards (to the left for retrieval, or to the right for imagination). If it’s auditory, you are thinking in words and sounds - an inner voice may be active, you may be hearing conversation as it happened, or as you imagine it to happen, you may be hearing music, etc etc; typically when retrieving memories in this system, you look down and to the left. If it’s kinesthetic, you are thinking in feelings; perhaps you are deeply feeling physical sensations, perhaps you are feeling emotion, perhaps you are remembering feeling one of the above. Retrieving memories kinesthetically, you typically look down and to the right, and often memories or thoughts in this system will cause sympathetic physical feedback, e.g. in the posture, facial expression, etc.

The “output” system is about how your conscious thoughts are expressed to the outside world. This can be relatively literal: e.g. if you’re drawing, typically you’re in your visual output system; if you’re singing or making music, your output system is auditory; dancing or gesturing, you’re utilizing your kinesthetic output system. But less obviously it expresses itself in how you verbalize your thoughts. If your primary conscious system currently is visual, you’ll describe how things look (”the beach was beautiful, the golden sand against the deep blue of the ocean”,) and use language like “I see” and “look”. If it’s kinesthetic, you will describe how things feel (”the beach was beautiful, the clear air and the warmth of the sun on my skin”,) talk about sensations, and use language like “I feel”, “get a grip”, etc. Finally, if it’s auditory, you will be talking about how things sound (”the beach was beautiful, the crash of the waves was so relaxing”,) be very wordy in your descriptions, and use language like “that sounds like”, “I hear you”, etc.

Typically (Heller says) a well adjusted person will be using all of the systems every day, as the situation demands, but not unoften people will encounter a problem in one of the systems and either avoid using it, or get stuck in it. These are pretty fundamental to Heller’s methods, his primary applications being gaining rapport with his clients (he’s a working hypnotherapist), and deciding how to present the metaphors needed to explore the unconscious processes.

Cerulo, a professor at Rutgers University, wrote a book last year called Never Saw It Coming. In it, she argues that we are individually, institutionally, and societally hellbent on wishful thinking. The Secret tells us to visualize best-case scenarios and banish negative ones from our minds. Never Saw It Coming says that’s what we’ve been doing all along—and we get blindsided by even the most foreseeable disasters because of it.

In her research, Cerulo found that when most of us look out at the world and plan for our future, we fuzz out our vision of any failure, fluke, disease, or disaster on the horizon. Instead, we focus on an ideal future, we burnish our best memories, and, well, we watch a lot of your show. Meanwhile, we’re inarticulate about worst-case scenarios. Just thinking about them makes us nervous and uncomfortable.

A glance at a few statistics shows that most of us see just what we want. In a national survey of parents by the Public Agenda organization, a hefty majority said their child never stays out too late, never uses bad language, never wears sloppy or revealing clothes, and never does poorly in school. Only a third of American sunbathers use sunscreen, and Californians are almost twice as likely to play the lottery as they are to buy earthquake insurance. When the American Association of Retired Persons asked a sample of adults what they expected from old age, most said they figured they would always have enough money and good health to do what they wanted. And only 30 percent of Americans have written their wills.

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