It's too early to say exactly what detonated at the Cosmic Trigger play and festival in Liverpool this weekend, save to say that this particular firework was not a dud and much will be written about it.
At one point a man called Duncan Harvey handed me a memory stick containing a long lost photo shoot he did with Robert Anton Wilson at the Old Chelsea Town Hall, London, in 1986. I've placed my favourites throughout this post. Good, rights-clearable photos of Bob are in short supply, so if anyone has a use for these photos get in touch and I'll connect you with Duncan. This is my absolute favourite:
I was due to give a talk and host a panel with Robin Ince, Adam Gorightly, Robert Temple and Daisy Campbell. This didn't happen alas - whoever was in charge of the speaker's room lost interest in that role and wandered off and the resulting confusion and free-for-all (Hail Eris!) claimed the time alloted for my talk. So rather than see that talk go to waste I've transcribed here roughly what I would I would have said, bar the ums and errs and general blather.
Rather marvellously the panel talk was replaced by an impromptu wedding between Greg Donaldson and Daisy Eris Campbell. This was entirely fitting as we were going to be talking about connections, but the weekend was working on deeper levels than mere talk. It was a weekend of theatre and ritual, and a wedding expressed the concept of connection far better than words alone. Without giving away too much of the story of the play, a connection of love in the dark heart of Chapel Perilous, expressed in ritual theatre, is exactly what the weekend was about. Chapel Perilous, lest we forget, is still a chapel.
Here's what my talk would have been:
It is a year and a month to the day since I stood up, at
the Horse Hospital in London, and spoke about Robert Anton Wilson. I talked about how people
no longer reference Bob, and that I feared he was in danger of becoming
forgotten. So how stupid do I look now?
As it turned out, the deathly quiet that I had mistaken for
disinterest was a potent tingle of potential enthusiasm, waiting for an excuse
to manifest. This was the day when Daisy Campbell spoke in public for the first
time about her dream of putting on a Cosmic
Trigger play, and this was the excuse that was needed. You know how a
pearl forms seemingly out of nothing, provided it has a bit of grit to form
around? Well, Daisy was our bit of grit. Which admittedly doesn’t sound
like a great compliment but trust me, it is.
Watching this festival form over the past year has brought
to mind the Noah’s Ark story. Noah didn’t go out and collect up all the
animals. He busied himself building the ark. The animals just knew they were
supposed to be there, and they turned up at the right time, and they got on the ark,
and they didn’t eat each other.
It’s the same for everyone here – cast, audience,
performers, backstage, and production crew. You somehow knew you had to be here
and you turned up as and when needed. I’ve talked to a lot of you this last
year and your stories about what brought you here are all very different. You
are very different people, with different aims and motivations and baggage. Yet
you all turned up, and you didn’t eat each other.
This coming together has been extremely productive. It’s
been a virtuous circle of people being inspired by people being inspired. I’m
reminded of a quote from Ken Campbell I saw recently, in which he said that the
meaning of life can be peripherally glimpsed by being amazed and by amazing
others, but it can fully grasped by amazing yourself.
When you gather together new-age heads and materialist
rationalists, American libertarians and British socialists, the focused and the
vague, the serious and the silly, the human and whatever it was that accosted me earlier, it does not sound
like a recipe for getting things done. The only thing we all have in common is
that we have at some point read Robert Anton Wilson and recognised and valued
the impact that he has had on us.
So the fact this weekend actually happened is, I think, a great
credit to Bob’s philosophy. Discordians take it for read that other people have
different reality tunnels, and we don’t feel the need to force others into our
own. We know it is as important that we don’t fall for our own belief
system, our own BS, as it is that we don’t fall for other peoples'. Instead we value people like Robin Ince, a man who knows Alan Moore and Richard Dawkins, and
who can be friends with them both and converse with them both and understand
them both, without his head exploding.
I could tell countless stories about what brought people
here. Scott Mcpherson who did all the animations and projections is a good
example, as everyone has been raving about his projections today. When
Daisy was writing the script, she wondered if it was possible to do stuff with
projections, but neither of us knew anyone who did that sort of work or what it
cost. And at that point, this guy @amoebadesign tweets out of the blue, asking
if we need anyone to do projections. I’d seen him about on twitter talking about
my KLF book and clocked that he was a Wilson head, and I’d assumed he was based
in Glasgow. But no, he was in Brighton, where me and Daisy live. So we went to
meet him.
He started showing us examples of his work including footage
of a road in front of blue wooden garage door, with typography animated in the
scene as if the words were filmed in the real world. I asked him why he had filmed
those particular blue garage doors, and he explained that his then-office was right
there, in the window next to the blue doors. And I explained that I know that
road because I wrote the KLF book in the building opposite, sat at a window in an
office which looked down at those doors. What was on the screen was the exact
view I had as I wrote that book. Which was something of a coincidence, when you
think about the size of the world... So yeah, I knew then that he was our guy and
having seen what he did yesterday, I don’t think anyone will disagree. Although
I do sometimes ponder if such close proximity to Scott’s psychic pollution
during writing could have shaped that book in any way.
Another example of what brought people here is the band TC Lethbridge, who played their first gig last night, 23 years after they formed. Their story needs longer than I have here to do justice. In fact I’ve written a 28,000 word book about it, to mark their appearance at this festival. I doubt
there are any other bands who have had a full biography written about them
before they have even poked their noses out in public, and I wouldn’t have done
so if they and their story hadn’t been so extraordinary.
That edition of that book is just limited to 111 copies – it’s
not for sale bar for 5 copies which were placed, for obvious Discordian
reasons, on the bookstall this morning and which have since gone. One reason
why it’s not being made properly available is because I feel some unease about
how badly a particular individual comes out of that story. But after writing it I realised that the book
also works as a jigsaw piece. It connects to the story I told in my KLF book,
and it also connects to my Timothy Leary book. With that work connecting the other
two, the three books can be thought of as one larger story - if admittedly a lopsided
and strangely shaped larger story.
This pleased me greatly, for what was my KLF book but a
statement that five seemingly separate stories were, in a certain light, one bigger story?
It was my way of saying that the stories of Bill Drummond, Robert Anton Wilson,
Ken Campbell, Alan Moore and Doctor Who were parts of something larger, even if
none of the characters in that story were aware of it. And so by joining up
those three books, and squinting at them a bit, you get an even larger story
still.
This, it seems to me, is exactly where we are as a culture.
I’ve written a book about the 20th Century which will be out next
year and which I’ll bang on endlessly about soon. But one thing I realised
writing that book that the predominant story form of the 20th
Century, especially in cinema, is what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s
Journey. A young man (and it's almost always a man) of lowly means receives a
call to adventure, meets a patriarchal mentor, faces many challenges, defeats
the personification of evil and returns home with treasure. You’re probably
sick to death of that story, it’s been used in everything from Errol Flynn
movies to Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. It’s the story of a single reality
tunnel – it’s the tale of how the hero views the world.
But there’s been a huge shift in our culture. Look at the
big hits that we get now. You have TV series like Game of Thrones, where the complicated interplay between dozens of
competing reality tunnels proves to be a far more interesting, rewarding and
illuminating piece of television than the story of one single reality tunnel. You
get things like the Marvel cinematic universe, where all these separate individual
superhero films join up into something larger, because Marvel understands that
the sum is larger than the parts. In the Eighties the fact that Doctor Who had decades of backstory was
a reason not to watch it: now people love it when they pick up on a Jon Pertwee
reference from the 1970s. A simple children’s Hero Journey story such as The Hobbit becomes an epic 9-hour trilogy for today’s audience.
Alan Moore understood all this decades ago, when he first began
connecting up the entire world of fiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
And this is what this weekend is all about. All the stories,
all your individual stories about what brought you here to this building on
this day, they all connect up and form one larger story that is greater than
the sum of its parts. And none of us can see that story, but we can sense it. We
know deep down that this is exactly where we are meant to be, and that being
here is important and will resonate with us for perhaps the rest of our lives. This
weekend is about something other than one person’s reality tunnel. And yes, it
is frustrating that none of us can see this larger story, but you know it’s
there, just out of the corner of your eyes, because you keep getting flashes of
it. So perhaps now is the time where we should stop hearing what me and the
rest of the speakers think, and get as many different voices heard as possible.
We’ll bring a few people back for a panel, people who you might have questions for,
and people who might have insights into what you’re thinking, and we’ll see
what we can learn from each other.
I’m hoping your heads are buzzing and fizzing and full of
questions and connections, and that by catching glimpses of what you’re all
thinking we won’t gain any clarity or closure, but we'll go away with even more
buzzing and fizzing and questions and connections.
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