The Illuminatus! Trilogy

(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, "Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler's system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche…" Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself didn't really' see either. The child, Drake had decided-it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology -was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role… In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake's psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goats-head mask, and repeated, "I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts…")

You look like a robot, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco. I mean, you move and walk like a robot.

Hold onto that, Mr. Wabbit, says a bearded young man with a saturnine smile. Some trippers see themselves as robots. Others see the guide as a robot. Hold that perspective. Is it a hallucination, or is a recognition of something we usually black out?

Wait, Joe says. Part of you is like a robot. But part of you is alive, like a growing thing, a tree or a plant……

The young man continues to smile, his face drifting above his body toward the mandala painted on the ceiling. Well? he asks. Do you think that might be a good poetic shorthand: that part of me is mechanical, like a robot, and part of me is organic, like a rosebush? And what's the difference between the mechanical and the organic? Isn't a rosebush a kind of machine used by the DNA code to produce more rosebushes?

No, Joe says.

Everything is mechanical, but people are different. A cat has a grace that we've lost, or partly lost.

How do you think we've lost it?

And Joe sees the face of Father Volpe and hears the voice screaming about submission…

The SAC bases await the presidential order to take off for Fernando Poo, Atlanta Hope addresses a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting the gutless appeasement of the comsymp administration in not threatening to bomb Moscow and Peking the same time as Santa Isobel, the Premier of Russia rereads his speech nervously as the TV cameras are set up in his office ("and, in socialist solidarity with the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo"), the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party, having found the thought of Chairman Mao of little avail, throws the I

Ching sticks and looks dismally at Hexagram 23, and 99 percent of the peoples of the world wait for their leaders to tell them what to do; but in Santa Isobel itself, three locked doors across the suite from the now-sleeping Concepcion, Fission Chips says angrily into his shortwave,

"Repeat none. Not one Russian or Chinese anywhere on the bloody island. I don't care what Washington says. I'm telling you what I have seen. Now, about the BUGGER heroin ring here-"

"Sign off," the submarine tells him. "HQ is not interested in BUGGER or heroin right now."

"Damn and blast!" Chips stares at the shortwave set. That bloody well tore it. He would just have to proceed on his own, and show those armchair agents back in London, especially that smug W., how little they actually knew about the real problem in Fernando Poo and the world.