High Weirdness, take 1.5

Take 1.

When I was a teenager I had a recurring nightmare. I was in the parish hall of our episcopal church. We were all lined up around the wall, and at the far end of the church I could see these men all dressed in black. They were removing everyone’s right hand and putting on an electronic hand that would be everyone’s brain. I’d wake up from that dream petrified, in a cold sweat. I didn’t know what it was about, until a few years ago — I walked into a coffee shop and saw everybody staring into their hands. And I realised, oh, they didn’t have to cut off our hands, they just put it into our hands... 

T Bone Burnett, in conversation with Tom Power

Back in '97 I was a purchaser for a deceptively staid-looking independent bookstore (during that almost forgotten era when “independent bookstore” weren’t words that needed saying). I sat with publisher reps and went over their catalogues, tagging stuff I thought might be just off-beat enough to escape notice among the neighbourhood competition but still close enough to this side of the edge to catch the discerning eye of our regular customers. A super-fun gig, needless to say.

My favourite part was always the close, when the rep would say, “So was there anything you’d like a closer look at?”

One title that caught my eye had been in the seasonal catalogues for quite a while, its publication date perpetually TBA. “Any chance you could get me the pre-pub of this?”

The rep looked where I was pointing and raised an eyebrow. “Oh — you like the weird stuff.”

If you say so.

When Davis’ book finally arrived I tucked in. I thought he did a terrific job of deep-diving into some of the more disturbing possibilities Neal Stephenson had raised in Snow Crash. Techgnosis was, I thought, the most tuned-in guide to our immediate present and near future. Time has only reaffirmed this belief.

Last night I finished High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Erik Davis’ most recent book.

I was in an office waiting room. It was the end of the day. The building custodian came in, made the rounds and locked various cabinets and doors. Then he left and I was alone.

At the office’s sole window I stared into the night sky, then down at the city street below. I felt grateful — for the book, for Davis. In fact I was having some trouble keeping the tears at bay.

It seemed to me that at some point during the making of this book — essentially Davis’ doctoral dissertation given a haircut and a touch of lipstick — the realisation that he was performing an elegy must have sunk in and gutted him.

During the late 70s and early 80s the figureheads Davis explores — the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick — wrote the sort of stuff you had to send away for (money orders only!). The whole ritual of entrusting the postal service with your paper-route earnings added to the pulp exoticism on offer.

When Blade Runner came out in '82 it was evident Dick was in the ascendant, while the other two waited in the wings. In the 90s Terence McKenna surfed into GenX awareness via the rave scene. And although RAW died in relative obscurity, his fame/infamy is growing exponentially in the current memetic yeast infection we're enduring.

We are no longer talking about the fringes.

Wilson’s largely optimistic visions are still going concerns for transhumanists, as well as some of our Silicon Valley overlords. For most of us, however, such talk has become about as inspiring as a styrofoam cup of Soylent. These days it is Wilson’s earlier portraits of warring conspiracies, memetic mind control, and chaotic reality breakdown that are proving, if anything, more prophetic. The sort of hard pranking represented by Operation Mindfuck has now become an ordinary tool of politics, publicity, and self-promotion. With their deployment of Pepe the Frog in the run-up to the 2016 election, the alt.right promulgated “meme magick” with a familiar Discordian mix of tactical nonsense, anonymous authorship, politicized media, and arcane esotericism. 

Today, as memetic noise eats consensus reality, and conspiracy thinking is weaponized by parties across the political spectrum, a sort of existential vertigo has opened up beneath our feet. What once felt like “the world” has shattered into an incompatible chaos of contradictory, engineered, and disturbing reality tunnels. Ontological anarchism increasingly seems like a pragmatic response, weird realism that keeps you on your toes — Erik Davis

You wanna visit Chapel Perilous? Check your right hand — you're already soaking in it.