Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (2 page)

The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson’s, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson’s-within-reasonable-doubt.

It only remains to affirm that
Schrödinger’s Cat
, contrary to appearances, is not a mere “routine” or “shaggy shoggoth story.” Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the “neurological
police” so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.
*
Some have even proposed that
Schrödinger’s Cat
is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.

On December 1, 1983, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, a popular columnist for the New York
*
News-Times-Post
, sat down to compose his daily essay. According to his usual procedure, he breathed deeply, relaxed every muscle, and gradually forced all verbalization in his brain to stop. When he had reached the void, he waited to see what would float up to fill the vacuum. What surfaced was:

One month to go to 1984.

Benny looked at the calendar; what happened next would be portrayed by a cartoonist as a light bulb flashing on over his head. He began pounding the typewriter, comparing
the actual situation of the world with Orwell’s fantasy.

His column, headed “One Month to Go,” was read by nearly 10,000,000 people, the
News-Times-Post
being the only surviving daily paper available to the 20,000,000 citizens of the six boroughs of New York City. Nine million of the 10,000,000 readers were a little bit paranoid, this being the natural ecological result of crowding that many primates into such a congested space, and most of them agreed with the most pessimistic portions of Benedict’s estimation of Orwell’s accuracy as a prophet.

“One month to go to 1984” became a catchphrase to conclude or answer anybody’s complaint about anything. “One month to go to 1984”—soon you heard it everywhere; it reached Chicago by December 10, San Francisco by December 14, was even quoted in Bad Ass, Texas, on December 16.

By December 23 the London
Economist
printed a very scholarly article on world history from 1949, when Orwell’s book was published, to the present, enumerating dozens of parallels between Orwell’s fiction and the planet’s nightmare.

In Paris a prominent Existentialist, in an interview with
Paris Soir
, argued that living inside a book, even a book by an English masochist like Orwell, was better than living in reality. “Art has meaning but reality has none,” he said cheerfully.

   The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. The fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the trees, and even the other mammals weren’t allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren’t involved in the decision to produce such weapons.
In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter.

A handful of
alpha males
among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody else on the planet—including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics—just had to face the consequences.

Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and “superior” to the rest of the planet.

Even Benny Benedict’s “One Month to Go” column was based on that illusion. Benny had actually read Darwin once, in college a long time ago, and had heard of sciences like ethology and ecology, but the facts of evolution had never really registered on him. He never thought of himself as a primate. He never realized his friends and associates were primates. Above all, he never understood that the
alpha males
of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn’t know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed
just awful
to him.

Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing.

Some of the primates
got caught
by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught.

Those who got caught were called
no-good shits.

The term no-good shit was a deep expression of primate psychology. For instance, one wild primate (a chimpanzee) taught sign language by two domesticated primates (scientists) spontaneously put together the signs for “shit” and “scientist” to describe a scientist she didn’t like. She
was calling him shit-scientist. She also put together the signs for “shit” and “chimpanzee” for another chimpanzee she didn’t like. She was calling him shit-chimpanzee.

“You no-good shit,” domesticate primates often said to each other.

This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories.

One primate wrote a long book describing in vivid detail how his political enemies should be punished. He imagined them in an enormous
hole
in the ground, with flames and smoke and rivers of shit. This primate was named Dante Alighieri.

Another primate wrote that every primate infant goes through a stage of being chiefly concerned with biosurvival, i.e. food, i.e. Mommie’s Titty. He called this the Oral Stage. He said the infant next went on to a stage of learning mammalian politics, i.e. recognizing the Father (alpha male) and his Authority and territorial demands. He called this, with an insight that few primates shared, the Anal Stage.

This primate was named Freud. He had taken his own nervous system apart and examined his component circuits by periodically altering its structure with neurochemicals.

Among the anal insults exchanged by domesticated primates when fighting for their space were: “Up your ass,” “Go shit in your hat,” “You’re full of shit,” “Take it and stick it where the moon doesn’t shine,” and many others.

One of the most admired alpha males in the Kingdom of the Franks was General Canbronne. General Canbronne won this adulation for the answer he once gave when asked to surrender at Waterloo.

“Merde,”
was the answer General Canbronne gave.

When primates went to war or got violent in other ways, they always said they were about
to knock the shit
out of the enemy.

They also spoke of
dumping
on each other.

The primates who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs intended to dump on the other primates real hard.

   Benny Benedict’s entire philosophy of life had been shaped by an obscene novel, a murder, and a Boston Cream Pie.

The novel was called
Odysseus
and the most shocking thing about it, aside from the searing indecency of its language, was that it had been written by a famous theologian, Rev. Carl Gustav Jung of Zurich, Switzerland. Nobody had known what to make of the book when it was first published, except to fulminate against it. The story, in fourteen chapters, recounted fourteen hours in a very ordinary day as some staggeringly ordinary characters wandered about Zurich on extraordinarily ordinary business. When Jung revealed that the fourteen chapters corresponded to the fourteen Stations of the Cross, conservative critics added blasphemy to their charges against him. Later—much later—academic exegetes adopted
Odysseus
as the very model of a modern novel and wrote endless studies proving that it was an allegory on everything from the evolution of consciousness to the rise and fall of civilizations.

Benny couldn’t understand much of what these academic critics wrote, but he knew that
Odysseus
was, to him, the only book that really succeeded in making the daily seem profound. That was enough of an achievement to convince him that Jung was a genius. It also encouraged him to look at everything that happened as being marvelous in one way or another. If Jung’s characters, or some of them, happened to defecate, urinate, masturbate,
and fornicate during the fourteen hours, that was not because the theologian was trying to write pornography, but because the miracle of daily life could not be shown without all of its daily details. Benny didn’t give a flying Philadelphia fuck about the novel’s parallels with the
Odyssey
and the Stations of the Cross, which Jung admitted, or the other correspondences with body organs, colors, Tarot cards,
I Ching
hexagrams, and the romantic triangle in
Krazy Kat
, which his admirers claimed to have found. The important thing about
Odysseus
was that it demonstrated, almost scientifically, that no day was a dull day.

Jung, who regarded himself as a better psychologist than the psychologists—this was a conceit typical of theologians—claimed to have found three more circuits in the nervous system beyond Freud’s oral biosurvival circuit and anal emotional-territorial circuit. Jung said that
Odysseus
demonstrated also a semantic-hominid circuit which created a veil of words between domesticated primates and their experience, thereby differentiating them from the wild primates. He also claimed a specific socio-sexual circuit created by the process of domestication. And he added a fifth, neurosomatic circuit typical of mysticism and music, which causes primates to feel High and spaced-out.

But Benny didn’t care about all that.
Odysseus
, in his mind, was simply the book that described life the way it really is, without sentiment and emotions.

The murder changed all that. It showed Benny that every day is also a terrible day, for somebody.

On July 23, 1981, Benny’s mother, a white-haired old lady of eighty-four, left the Brooklyn Senior Citizen’s Home where she lived to walk one block to the supermarket. On the way she had her purse snatched and, according to witnesses, struggled with the thief. She was stabbed seventeen
times with a Boy Scout knife. When Benny arrived at the hospital emergency room, she was already dead, but he got a look—a long look—at her crimson, mutilated body before the doctor on duty hustled him out into the hall and shot him full of tranquilizers.

Benny was crippled psychologically in a way that he could not perfectly understand. After all, having reached the fifth decade of his life, he was well acquainted with grief: in the past ten years he had experienced the deaths of his father, his older brother, and three close friends. But murder is not just another form of grief: it is a metaphysical message like Fate knocking on the door at the beginning of Beethoven’s
Fifth
. Benny found that the whole world had turned to very fragile glass. Every police siren, every newscast, every angry voice on the street reminded him that he belonged to a dangerously violent species. Benny Benedict realized that each minute, somewhere in the world, somebody was being bashed, beaten, stabbed, shot, slashed, gassed, poisoned, robbed of life.

He could not bear to be alone at night anymore.

The Grinning Sadist began to haunt him.

This horrifying image had been imprinted upon his neurons by various movies and TV melodramas of the sixties and seventies. The Grinning Sadist invaded your home, sometimes alone and sometimes with a horde of equally moronic and vicious cohorts. You were particularly susceptible if you were blind or a woman or all alone at night, but sometimes—as in
The Dangerous Hours
—he would come with his brutal crew in the bright daytime. His business was never simply burglary, although that was part of it; his real interest was in humiliation, terror, degradation, torture of the body and spirit. And he always
grinned.

Benny’s doctor prescribed Valium, 5 mg. before bedtime. It helped Benny sleep; but when he was awake,
every noise still sounded like the Grinning Sadist furtively trying the door.

Benny bought a police lock. Every noise now sounded like the Grinning Sadist trying to force a window.

Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. “For the first year after the murder,” Senator Percy said, “my whole family lived in terror.”

Benny felt a sudden sense of relief. This must be normal, he thought; it happens to everybody who’s had a murder close to them. And it lasts only a year….

But as July 23, 1982, approached, Benny was not emerging from the terror; it was growing worse. Well, he had been reading up on grief and bereavement, and he knew the first anniversary is always a terrible time. He found the knowledge helpful; it gave him a small purchase on detachment. Also, without his doctor’s consultation, he had raised his Valium dosage at bedtime from 5 mg. to 15 mg. and sometimes 25.

Then on July 23 itself—the anniversary of the murder—the Grinning Sadist appeared.

Benny had been invited to give a talk at the Press Club on “Lousewart and Lowered Expectations.” The luncheon was excellent, but Benny ate little, knowing that a belch in the middle of the speech could destroy all communication for several minutes after. When Fred “Figs” Newton began to introduce him (…“New York’s most beloved daily columnist … an institution for over thirty years …”), Benny felt the usual twinges of stage fright, began rehearsing again his first three jokes, gave up on that and concentrated instead on his mantra
(Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum
…) and was finally in the ideal state of mixed apprehension and urgency out of which the most relaxed-sounding public speeches always come.