"Strange," Joe said. "Dr. Iggy, in the San Francisco JAM cabal, explained it to me differently."
"What would you expect?" Hagbard replied. "No two who know, know the same in their knowing. By the way, why haven't you told me that you're sure those gorillas back there were just men I dressed up in gorilla suits?"
"I'm becoming more gullible," Joe said.
"Too bad," Hagbard told him sadly. "They really were men in gorilla suits. I was testing how easily you could be bamboozled, and you flunked."
"Now, wait a minute. They smelled like gorillas. That was no fake. You're putting me on now."
"That's right," Hagbard agreed. "I wanted to see if you'd trust your own senses or the word of a Natural-Born Leader and Guru like me. You trusted your own senses, and you pass. My put-ons are not just jokes, friend. The hardest thing for a man with dominance genes and piratical heredity like me is to avoid becoming a goddam authority figure. I need all the feedback and information I can get- from men, women, children, gorillas, dolphins, computers, any conscious entity- but nobody contradicts an Authority, you know. Communication is possible only between equals: that's the first theorem of social cybernetics- and the whole basis of anarchism- and I have to keep knocking down people's dependence on me or I'll become a fucking Big Daddy and won't get accurate communication anymore. If the pig-headed Illuminati and their Aneristic imitators in all the governments, corporations, universities and armies of the world understood that simple principle, they'd occasionally find out what's actually going on and stop screwing up every project they start. I am Freeman Hagbard Celine and I am not anybody's bloody leader. As soon as you fully understand that I'm your equal, and that my shit stinks just like yours, and that I need a lay every few.days or I get grouchy and make dumb decisions, and that there is One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages but you have to find him for yourself, then you'll begin to understand what the Legion of Dynamic Discord is all about."
"One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages…?" Joe repeated, finding himself most confused when he had been closest to total comprehension a second earlier.
"To receive light you must be receptive," Hagbard said curtly. "Work that one out for yourself. Meanwhile, take this back to New York and chew on it a bit." And he presented Joe with a book entitled Never Whistle While You're Pissing: A Guide to Self-Liberation, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.
Joe read the book carefully in the following weeks- while Pat Walsh, in Confrontation's research department, checked out every assertion about the Illuminati that Joe had picked up from Hagbard, Simon, Dillinger and Dr. Ignotius-but, although some of the book was brilliant, much was obscure, and he found no clue to the One more trustworthy than all Buddhas. Then, one night high on Alamout Black hashish, he started working on it with expanded and intensified consciousness. Malaclypse the Elder? No, he was wise, and somewhat benevolent in a fey sort of style, but certainly not trustworthy. Simon? For all his youth and nuttiness, he had moments of incredible perception, but he was almost certainly less enlightened than Hagbard. Dillinger? Dr. Ignotius? The mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, who had disappeared, leaving behind only the inscrutable Principia Discordia?
Christ, Joe thought, what a male chauvinist I am! Why didn't I think of Stella? The old joke came back to him… "Did you see God?" "Yes, and she's black." Of course. Hadn't Stella presided over his initiation, in Dr. Iggy's chapel? Hadn't Hagbard said she would preside over George Dorn's initiation, when George was ready? Of course.
Joe always remembered that moment of ecstasy and certainty: it taught him a lot about the use and misuse of drugs and why the Illuminati went wrong. For the unconscious, which always tries to turn every good lay into a mother figure, had contaminated the insight which his supraconscious had almost given him. It was many months later, just before the Fernando Poo crisis, that he finally discovered beyond all doubt the One who was more trustworthy than all Buddhas and all sages.
Do-da, do-da, do-da-do-da-DAY…
(And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night that he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions seriously, passed an olive garden and saw the Seventeen… and with them was the Eighteenth, the one they had crucified the Friday before. Magna Mater, he swore, creeping closer, am I losing my mind? The Eighteenth, whatshisname, the preacher, had set up a wheel and was distributing cards to them. Now, he turned the wheel and called out the number at which it stopped. The centurion watched, in growing amazement, as the process was repeated several times, and the cards were marked each time the wheel stopped. Finally, the big one, Simon, shouted "Bingo!" The scion of the noble Linctus family turned and fled… Behind him, the luminous figure said, "Do this in commemoration of me."
"I thought we were supposed to do the bread and wine bit in commemoration of you?" Simon objected.
"Do both," the ghostly one said. "The bread and wine is too symbolic and arcane for some folks. This one is what will bring in the mob. You see, fellows, if you want to bring the Movement to the people, you have to start from where the people are at. You, Luke, don't write that down. This is part of the secret teachings.")
Slurp, slurp… Camp-town ladies sing this song.…
(But how do you account for a man like Drake? one of Carl Jung's guests asked at the Sunday afternoon Kaffeeklatsch where the strange young American had inspired so much speculation. Jung sucked on 'his pipe thoughtfully- wondering, actually, how he could ever cure his associates of treating him like a guru- and answered finally, "A fine mind strikes on an idea like the arrow hitting bull's-eye. The Americans have not yet produced such a mind, because they are too assertive, too outgoing. They land on an idea, even an important idea, like one of their fullbacks making a tackle. Hence, they always crumple or cripple it. Drake has such a mind. He has learned everything about power- more than Adler knows, for all his obsession on the subject- but he has not learned the important thing. That is, of course, how to avoid power. What he needs, and will probably never achieve, is religious humility. Impossible in his country, where even the introverts are extroverted most of the time.")
It was a famous novelist, who was later to win the Nobel Prize, who actually gave Drake his first lead on what the Mafia always called il Segreto. They had been talking about Joyce and his unfortunate daughter, and the novelist mentioned Joyce's attempts to convince himself that she wasn't really schizophrenic. "He told Jung, 'After all, I do the same sorts of things with language myself.' Do you know what Jung, that old Chinese sage disguised as a psychiatrist, answered? 'You are diving, but she is sinking.' Incisive, of course; and yet, all of us who write anything that goes below the surface of naturalism can understand Joyce's skepticism. We never know for sure whether we're diving or just sinking."