The man laughed. "A few words from the skeleton at the feast, eh?" This was the fifth and most formidable Illuminatus Primus, Brother Henry Hastur, the only one who would have the gall to name himself after a lloigor.
"It is written," he said, "that the universe is a practical joke by the general at the expense of the particular. Do not be too quick to laugh or weep, if you believe this saying. All I can say is, there is a serious threat in being to all your plans. I warn you. You have been warned. You may all die. Are you afraid of death? You need not answer- I see that you are. That in itself may be a mistake. I have tried to explain to you about not fearing death, but you will not listen. All your other problems follow from that."
The other four Illuminati Primi listened in cold, disdainful silence and did not reply.
"If all are One," the fifth Illuminatus added significantly, "all violence is masochism."
"If all are One," Brother Otto replied nastily,'"all sex-is masturbation. Let's have no more mehum metaphysics here."
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
"George!"
Then George was here, with Celine, in Ingolstadt. This was going to be tricky. George's head was bent over an earthenware stein, doubtless full of the local brew.
"George!" Joe called again. George looked up, and Joe was astonished. He had never seen George like this before. George shook his shoulder-length blond hair to clear it away from his face, and Joe looked deep into his eyes.
They were strange eyes, eves without fear or pity or guilt, eyes that acknowledged that the natural state of man was one of perpetual surprise, and therefore could not be greatly surprised by any one thing, even the unexpected appearance of Joe Malik. What has Celine done to him in the past seven days? Joe wondered. Has he destroyed his mind or has he-illuminated him?
Actually, it was George's tenth stein of beer that day, and he was very, very drunk.
HARRY ROBOT HARRY HARRY
(Civil liberties were suspended and a state of national emergency declared during a special presidential broadcast on all channels between noon and 12:30 on April 30. Fifteen minutes later the first rioting started in New York, at the Port Authority on Forty-first Street, where a mob attempted to overrun the police and steal buses in which to escape to Canada. It was 6:45 P.M. just then in Ingolstadt, and Count Dracula and His Brides were giving forth a raga-rock version of an old Walt Disney cartoon song… And in Los Angeles, where it was 9:45 A.M., a five-person Morituri group, hurriedly convened, decided to use up all its bombs against police stations immediately. "Cripple the motherfucker before it's heavy," said their leader, a sixteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth… Her idiom, in standard English, meant: "Paralyze the fascist state before it's entrenched"… and Saul, trusting the pole-vaulter in the unconscious, was leading Barney and Markoff Chaney into the mouth of Lehman Cavern… Carmel, nearly a kilometer south of them, and several hundred feet closer to the center of the earth, still clutched his briefcase and its five million green gods, but he did not move… Near him were the bones of a dozen bats he had eaten…)
TO BE A BAT'S A BUM THING
A SILLY AND A DUMB THING
BUT AT LEAST A BAT IS SOMETHING
AND YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL
Joe Malik, hit by the raga rock as if by an avalanche of separate notes which were each boulders, felt his body dissolve. Count Dracula wailed it again (YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL), and Joe felt mind crumble along with body and could find no center, no still point in the waves of sound and energy; the fucking acid was Hagbard's ally and had turned against him, he was dying; even the words "Hey that cat's on a bummer" came from far away, and his effort to determine if they really meant him collapsed into an effort to remember what the words were, which imploded into an uncertainty about what effort he was trying to make, mental or physical, and why. "Because," he cried out, "because, because-"… but "because" meant nothing.
YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING NOTHING BUT A NOTHING
"But I can't take acid now," George had protested. "I'm so damned drunk on this Bavarian beer, it's sure to be a down trip."
"Everybody takes acid," Hagbard said coldly. "Those are Miss Portinari's orders, and she's right. We can only face this thing if our minds are completely open to the Outside."
"Hey, dig," Clark Kent said. "That French cat eating the popsicle."
"Yeah?" said one of the Supermen.
"It's Jean-Paul Sartre. Who'd ever expect to see him here?" Kent shook his head. "Hope to hell he stays long enough to hear our gig. Sheee-it, the influence that man has had on me! He should hear it come back at him in music."
"That's your trip, baby," a second Superman said. "I don't give a fuck what any motherfuckin' honky thinks about our music."
YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING
"Mick Jagger hasn't even played 'Sympathy for the Devil' yet and already the trouble has started," an English voice drawled… Attila and His Huns were trying to do acute bodily damage to the Senate and the People of Rome… Both groups were speeding, and they had gotten into a very intellectual discussion of the meaning of one of Dylan's lyrics… A Hun bopped a Roman with a beer stein as another voice mumbled something about Tyl Eulenspiegel's merry pranks.
YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL
Joe had always had the policy at Confrontation that real screwballs should be sent to him for interviewing, but the little fat man who came in didn't seem particularly crazy. He just had the bland, regular, somewhat smallish features of a typical WASP.
"The name is James Cash Cartwright," the fat man said, holding out his hand, "and the subject is consciousness energy."
"The subject of what?"
"Oh- this here article I have written for you." Cartwright reached into his alligator briefcase and pulled out a thick sheaf of typewritten paper. It was an odd size, possibly eight by ten. He handed the manuscript to Joe. "What kind of paper is this?" said Joe. "It's the standard size in England," said Cartwright. "When I was over there in 1963 visiting the tombs of my ancestors, I bought ten reams of it. I took the plane from Dallas on November 22, the day Kennedy was shot. Synchronicity. Also, I sneezed the moment the gunman squeezed. More synchronicity. But about this paper, I've never used anything else for my writing since then. Kind of gives a man a nice feeling to know that all the trees that went into my paper were chopped down over ten years ago, and no trees have died since then to support the proliferation of Jim Cartwright's philosophical foliage."
"That certainly is a wonderful thing," said Joe, thinking how much he loathed ecological moralists. During the height of the ecology fad, back in 1970 and '71, several people actually had had the nerve to write Joe saying that ecologically responsible journals like Confrontation had a duty to cease publication in order to save trees. "Just what fruit have your philosophical researches borne, Mr. Cartwright?" he asked.
"Golden apples of the sun, silver apples of the moon," said Cartwright with a smile. Joe saw Lilith Velkor defying Gruad atop the Pyramid of the Eye.
"Well, sir," said Cartwright, "my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as light and gravity do. Therefore, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If four amino acids-adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine-suddenly become life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA-life. Okay so far? If awareness is life and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of the universe's sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You might think of it as a giant, self-contained eye."