RAWRIENTALISM.

RAWrientalism. (first draft edited 2007)
Steven James Pratt.


RAW: Robert Anton Wilson
rientalism: Orientalism.

"The two philosophers most frequently mentioned in Finnegans Wake, Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno of Nola, taught a dialectic of resolution of opposites. Joseph Needham in his monumental Science and Civilization in China, repeatedly mentions both Bruno and Nicholas as the only two Occidental philosophers before Liebnitz to have a basically Taoist outlook" --RAW

A secret cabal and myself have both been reading and studying many texts and ideas put together by RAW, for me over just the last 10 years, but with a more intense and deeper study over the last 6 years that has included remarkable meetings with him and equally remarkable internet supported--Edutainment classes--with him and many other RAWfull minds at the Maybelogic Academy from 2004-2006.

Around the period that RAW went passing through the Lower lights and bardo states into that great Gig in the numberless skies, i was rather frantically writing and going back through my notes to try and represent RAW, to pay tribute to him, his lives and ideas. Roughly eleven months later, after many inspiring and ground breaking multimedia tributes around the world to RAW, i feel like i have a title: RAWrientalism.

"This book intends to change your way of percieving/conceiving the world, without drugs or drums or voodoo, simply by using words in certain special ways." --RAW, E-mail to the Universe.

RAW's condensed experience montage or "coex system" of communication, his certain special ways of using words and language have a distinctive "Oriental" flavor to them. Rawrietalism is related to the spatialized conceptions of time in themes of Chinese poetry. Ezra Pound and James Joyce as two great western WARRIORS, whose glossings RAW applied like a Renaissance master; to finish off a Canvases at the exhibit of his Oriental Coex Systems: Taoism and Quantum Mechanics. RAW's first published article called "The Tao of Joyce. (Realist 1959)" makes clear to me that RAW was involved deeply in RAWrientalist studies for over fifty years. "Taoists were familiar with these relativistic considerations long before Einstein." he writes.

"The purpose of this present brief essay is to show that the Chinese philosophy of the Tao contributed largely to the shape of Joyce's affirmation. "Laotsey taotsey" (page 242), or Lao-Tse's doctrine of the Tao, explains a great many things about Finnegans Wake: the river-woman symbol, the Shem-Shaun dualism, the special quality of Joyce's humor, the "time" philosophy underlying its form." --RAW.

The meters of RAW's prose and the collision of iconographic images from the History of the world, and popular western culture attain the goals set by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Marshall Mcluhan, Timothy Leary but with just words. Just words and a limitless imagination and optimism and compassion to fill their boots. To calibrate and sensitize the neural mechanisms of perception, to help us "see" better. To attain Relaxation and powerful insights and an increased sense of the contents of one's memories. Technically and methodologically RAW delivers neuro-linguistic equations, balanced and tested and re-balanced, grammatically balanced, semantically balanced with the engineering skills of any Watchmaker or Geneticist.

I think that a kind of sub-structure or "binding" agent throughout RAW's texts, this language vs. the equation equation; has the strongest affinity with the principles of Taoism and Quantummechanics, that i can locate. If the paradox of locating the "non-local" in RAW literature helps describe a "non-thing": invisible RAWrientalism, "Coex systems" which conceal themselves everywhere within the environment, maybe comparable with what Philip K. Dick describes as ZEBRA and VALIS?

This remarkable and limitless abilities that RAW had for understanding Mathematical structures, logics, probabilities, operationalist languages, General Semantics, Clionical and Experimental Psychology, Journalism, Prose Fiction, Critical writing and letter writing were all used in a humanitarian effort to balance the equation IMHO.

Maybe RAW's technical and practical skills as a satirist and writer are equalled elsewhere in the dungeons of the literary world, but it was the content, both the quality of the subjective content and the "time-binded" always challenging, cultural content of RAW's writing that sets him apart from everybody else. The despicable, the Taboo, the stuff that nobody else sane dare write about, these are the things RAW applied his Genius and methodological "process" too, and so freeing all humanity from the chains of fear and Terror that hold us down. Somebody unafraid to follow their own way to resolving their life-cycling equations. Always questioning everything wherever it takes the mind, but holding true to structures and frameworks and models at the same time. And having good cheer and Hilaritas. A balanced "center" or balanced "Stereo" mix between left and right brain characteristics. What i choose to call Rawriental Daoism.

Raw's Ideogramic Method?

"The Tao is in the dung," said Chuang Chou.

RAW managed to distill "ideogramic Method" through the lens of Ezra Pound as, what i now newly call; RAWriental perception--a window of visual meaning with an equal persuasion and power as linguistic sequence. "ideogramic Method" makes sense as a typical Rawriental journey beyond language where alphabet, predicate and subject seem to deconstruct, synthesize and resurrect themselves into a picture-word, a sigil, or a poetic experience of "epiphany" in the mind. But writing about pictures like writing about people in this special way seems to me to contains a continuous flow backwards and forwards, a "process" of metempsychosis. A constant questioning and establishment of free-space for "mind" to add its own subjective meaning and playful commentary. Like the "space" a legendary Jazz master would create seemingly out of nothing, again the fullness of emptyness; expansion and contraction, appearance and disappearance, the non-location of the Tao in Raw's writs.

My tribute to RAW for the most part relates to the peace that comes from balanced communication, his Taoist, Zen-Buddhist qualities as a wise man of the West and his continued influence on peaceful optimistic and co-operative communications between cultures. Spreading Oriental like intelligence of a beneficial nature to allsentient beings.