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A paranoid schizophrenic far-right religious fanatic begins receiving messages from god to kill a popular stage magician whose teachings form a disruption to various staid conservative American values. He also begins receiving noise signals (sex scenes, occult images, philosophical precepts, bits of memory) all of which appear elsewhere in the book, happening to other characters. Fortunately (?) he's able to sift through the chaos, which he classifies as confusion tactics by the devil, to isolate the real message, from god, that he commit murder. And unfortunately, he does. How does he know which message was the "true" message amidst the mess of information he's receiving? Clearly he doesn't, since everything he sees is part of the book's narrative reality EXCEPT the bit he chooses as the one real message in the mess of inputs (all of which, since he is hearing voices in classic paranoid schizophrenic mode, originate in fact in his own brain). From this, he chooses to believe the one bit of information that conforms to his preexisting biases / world view. This is essentially a parable of how we all comprehend reality, thus it's a crux of the novel. We don't perceive reality, no one can perceive that. We perceive our own perceptions, which exist in our own minds, not in the external world. We all have to sift through the (often contradictory) contents of our thoughts to create our own "reality tunnel", Wilson's representation of the narrow path of comprehension that any one perspective is inherently restricted to. Put simply: each of us constructs all of reality from the information existing in our own brains. This would be solipsism, but I don't think Wilson would say we're actually so isolated. We exist amongst other subjective reality tunnels, all different, amongst other lives, and with an open mind / empathy we can reroute our reality tunnels at will. Maybe it's only when we don't that we end up letting our own reflected thoughts tell us to kill a stranger.

This is one understanding of The Trick Top Hat, one very specific reality tunnel I selected through careful filtering of the perceptions/reflections generated during my reading of it. Perhaps because it conforms to certain inclinations I already possess. Wilson never says all of this, exactly, and he also says a lot of pure nonsense. Sophomoric gags, Pynchonesque conspiracies, postmodern authorial confusion, male gaze erotic fantasies, Valis-like spiritual confusion. Noise noise NOISE pulverized into little bite sized intercuts of received information. It's an invitation to sift one's philosophical reality from the dross. In an interview with Robert Anton Wilson jammed somewhere into the middle, he comments on how his prior Illuminatus Trilogy constructed its world then discredited it, leaving the literal reader to dismiss anything he'd said, and the astute reader to create meaning from selective understanding of what is true and what is false. This, supposedly, is how secret societies function: revealing and debunking themselves so that all the information is there, but none of it looks true. This novel feels like a more complicated and ambivalent version of that process.

Why, for instance, is the whole middle-part essentially porn? Not in any prudish sense of obscene content -- sex is sex, it's fine -- but in the formal sense of the sex scenes (an orgy, a few trysts, an orgasm research lab, various isolated moments of repression coming undone) largely overrun and outweigh the scientific/philosophic/narrative content. There are a few reasons for this. It's the general postmodern deintellectualization trick of inserting sex, the great unifier, to broaden its appeal (but to who -- as I said, it's very male gaze... and even to this particular mostly-male gaze, that sort of thing gets boring, let alone presumably to other reader-gazes). In another self-explanation, we hear about the life experiences of the purported author of the book-within-a-book-within-a-book we're reading, Roberta Wilson, who was eight when WWII began, thirteen when it finished, and lived continuously through other wars and conflicts, including of course the the conflagration of Vietnam, only to find that the popular entertainment media was a mess of "violence and mayhem." That violence, war, and mayhem should be mass culture and sex deemed obscene (my reality tunnel of Wilson believes he would say) is the true obscenity. This is not exactly a radical position, but it remains a fair one. So yes, why not let the erotic replace the aggressive as the filler plot? Again, if only it wasn't so trapped in male fantasy. I don't think Wilson had bad intentions, but he puts forth a world where the sexual revolution continues further past the seventies, and allow me to ask: who was most liberated by the sexual revolution? The freedom of that era went most to those who were already freest, men, and this asymmetry seems to be sadly maintained in Wilson's "utopian" fantasy. The men are scientists, authors, publishing magnates, philosophers, while the women are pop stars, models, "tantric engineers" which is Wilson attempting to bestow honor and respect on the important work being done by the prostitutes who are still, after all, serving the men of the story. This came out of the 70s and it shows. It might completely drive you from the pages. Fortunately the women, whatever their vocations here, are never portrayed as frivolous or unintelligent, and though it may only be the exception that underlines the rule, Wilson also put a black women anarchist in the whitehouse of his utopia.

This is worth noting a little further, because another of the (surprise!) very smart things Wilson has to say here is obliquely embedded in it. The first acts of President Hubbard were to abolish non-voluntary work (advances in automation), poverty (guaranteed basic income), and prison (vast realignment of penal codes, which in turn makes most crime cease to exist, and thus criminals). This is all well and good as far as utopias go (and can we have it please), but the bit that jumped out at me was that it wasn't accomplished by evolutionary processes, but by vast sudden realignment of all of society so that it shakes out in a new form and the problems of transition are worked out as a matter of course. This may be extremely optimistic (utopian) but from the depths of 2019, as slow evolutionary improvement of our country in even the most basic ways (health care, immigration, you name it) is trapped in brutal deadlock or degrading further, it seems that other means are not working out. The Situationists, in 1968 calling for a mass societal change that would then lead to its own solutions, would have agreed. The New Green Deal is fervently opposed on various practicalities that in no way make it less essential for basic human survival. Slow evolutionary change based on having all the solutions and answers ready is at a standstill. What we're doing isn't working. What do we have to lose? So I appreciated this vastly underdeveloped side point tucked away between the erotic acts.

So this is smart, it's stupid, it's intriguing, it's dated and objectionable. Robert Anton Wilson holds a Ph.D in Psychology from a disaccredited Alternative University once operating in California. His understanding that LSD may expand one's choice of reality tunnel is based on close association with Timothy Leary. Take from this what you may. He's a questionable oracle at best, but aren't all oracles? It's up to you then: choose your reality tunnel and toss out the rest. It's your reality.