Prometheus Rising (10 page)

her dear Davy, her own boy: and coming half way across the

room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed

me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little

creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips.

88 Prometheus Rising

I
wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling

in my heart. I should have been more fit for heaven than I have

ever been since.

The dream of return to oral bio-security is too overt to require

commentary.

Similarly, in Joyce's monumental novel of the mind of a man

asleep,
Finnegans Wake,
the Father and the Father-God are

always associated with war and excretion, as Joyce scholar

William York Tindall has noted. As "Gunn, the Farther," the

terrifying anal monster combines pistol, deity and flatulence; as

"Delude of Israel," he is the jealous (territorial) Old Testament

"Lord of Hosts," i.e., of battles. His insignia, the hundred letter

thunder-word which recurs ten times in the dream, always combines

Fatherhood, menace, defecation and war: for instance, in

its first appearance on page 1, it is:

bababalalgharaghtakamminaronnkonnbronnton

nerronntounnthunntrovarrhounawnskawn

toohoohoondenthurnuk

Here we find
Baba
(Arabic, father), phonetic
Abba
(Hebrew,

father), phonetic
Canbronne
(the general who so appropriately

said
merde
when asked to surrender the territory), phonetic

Gaelic
scan
(crack: of thunder or of the anus),
ronnen
(Germanic,

excretion), the suggestive
orden
implying both Germanic

medal for valor and English
ordure,
etc. The terrifying Father-

God elsewhere "Makes his manuvres in open ordure" and

preaches all the anal-authoritarian values: "No cods before me...

Thou shall not commix idolatry... Love my label like myself."

He is the villain of the
"goddinpotty"
(garden party)—the trickster-

god who set the baited trap in the Garden of Eden; the ego

internalized in toilet-training (potty); the god of thunder and

wrath (god-din).

Fleeing him, the "unhappitants of earth" always seek his

opposite, ALP (German, dream; also the root of the first letters

of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets—
alpha
and
aleph,
the

source, the beginning)—Anna Livia Plurabella, when her name

is written in full: the waters of life combined with all beautiful

women. She is as oral and loving as "the Omniboss" is anal and

threatening:

Prometheus Rising 89

...with a beak, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, rock

drops in her tachie, tramtokens in her hair, all waived to a

point and then all inuendation, little oldfashioned mummy,

little wonderful mommy, ducking under bridges...as happy as

the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself,

deloothering the fields...

This amniotic river-woman is the perfect mother of infantile

dream memory and the Great Goddess of the ancients, the ideal

bio-survival safe, warm place and to her Joyce offers his most

fervent prayer:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the

Bringer of Plurabilites, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung,

her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Humanity, in Joyce's view as in Rattray Taylor's, is forever

leaving her to follow the Hero (Father) to "the bluddlefilth of

Waterloo" (battlefield of Waterloo with blood and excrement

superimposed to reveal the anal-territorial roots of war) and then

returning, temporarily chastened, "to list, as she bibs us, by the

waters of babalong."

In Chapter Three of
Finnegans Wake,
the "offenders"

(invaders) and "defenders" (natives) get so thoroughly mixed up

that all that remains is a composite "fender" who takes the blame

for everybody.

This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray

Taylor, Vico (Joyce's source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part

of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that

most people fearfully refuse to recognize. Whether we speak in

terms of Taylor's Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vice's cycle of

Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of

Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are

speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat.

But it only does so to the extent that people are robotized:

trapped in hard-wired reflexes.

When the accumulated facts, gimmicks, tools, techniques and

gadgets of neuro-science—the science of brain change and brain

liberation—reaches a certain critical mass, we will all be able to

free ourselves from these robot cycles.
It is the thesis of this book

that we have been approaching that critical mass for several

go Prometheus Rising

decades now and will reach the crossover point faster than you

expect.

The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity

sweeping this planet are not just another civilization falling, Vico

fashion.

They are the birth-pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of

the long nightmare of domesticated primate history

Of course, these are genetic/historical generalizations which

do not precisely match any specific family. The gracious goddess/

hostile giant archetypes are not activated in cases where the

mother is cold, rejecting, embittered etc. and the father is the

warm, supportive figure. The imprints on the first and second

circuits are statistically deviant in such families and anything

may result—a shaman, a schizophrenic, a genius, a homosexual,

an artist, a psychologist, etc.

EXERCIZE

In terms of the theory so far developed, analyze the following

characters:

;'•>

l.ScarlettO'Hara

2. King Kong

3. Odysseus

4. Hamlet

5. Bugs Bunny

6. Portnoy

7. Leopold Bloom

8. Richard M. Nixon

9. Thomas Jefferson

10. St. Paul

11. Donald Duck

12 lago

13. Jane Eyre

14. Josef Stalin

15. Joan of Arc

16. Timothy Leary

17. Aleister Crowley

18. The Author

19. Mao

Prometheus Rising

20. Carl Jung

21. The Secret Chiefs

22. Hannibal Lecter, M.D.

23. You

CHAPTER SIX

THE TIME-BINDING

SEMANTIC CIRCUIT

It says that when you put two minds together, there is always a

third mind, a third and superior mind, as an unseen collaborator.

— William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin,
The Third Mind

93

HUMAN BEINGS ARE TIME-BINDERS

The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a "map" (realitytunnel)

which can be passed on to others, even across generations.

These "maps" may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools

(with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.

94

Human beings
(domesticated primates)
are symbol-using creatures;

which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted,

that
those who rule symbols, rule us.

If Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul

can be considered living influences—and they are: look around

the world—this is only because their Signal has been carried to

us by human symbol systems. These systems include words, artworks,

music, rituals and unrecognized rituals ("games") through

which culture is transmitted. Marx and Hitler, Newton and

Socrates, Shakespeare and Jefferson, etc. continue to "rule" parts

of humanity in the same way—through the semantic circuit.

We are ruled even more, and even less consciously, by the

inventors of the wheel, the plow, the alphabet, even the Roman

roads.

Since words contain both
denotations
(referents in the

sensory-existential world) and
connotations
(emotional tones and

poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even

by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality.

This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of

organized religion.

The bio-survival circuit only divides experience into two sets:

that which is good for me or nourishing, and that which is bad

for me or threatening. The emotional-territorial circuit also

divides the world into two halves: that which is more powerful

than me (higher in the pecking order) and that which is less

powerful than me (lower in the pecking order). On this basis

socio-biological systems evolve and animal "societies" of truly

human complexity have been studied.

The semantic circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and

reconnect things,
at pleasure.
There is no end to its busy-busybusy

labeling and packaging of experience. On the personal

level, this is the "internal monologue" discovered by Joyce in

Ulysses.
On the historical level, this is the
time-binding function

described by Korzybski, which allows each generation to add

new categories to our mental library—connecting new things,

separating new things, reclassifying and reshuffling forever. In

this time-binding dimension. Einstein replaced Newton before

most of the world
1
had heard of Newton; simple arithmetic gave

1 Most of the world was illiterate until the 1970s.

95

g6 Prometheus Rising

birth to algebra, which brought forth calculus, which produced

tensor calculus, etc. Haydn and Mozart prepared the way for

Beethoven, who broke into the realms that the Romantics and

Wagnerians took over, which gave birth to what is called music

today.

So-called "future shock" has always been with us, since the

semantic circuit began functioning somewhere in pre-history. In

a symbolizing, calculating, abstracting species, all times are

"times of change." The process is however
accelerating faster as

time passes,
because the symbolizing faculty is inherently selfaugmenting.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called

"the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent

radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally

mean they have
a good mouth,
i.e., they use the semantic

circuit well.)

In terms of Transactional Analysis, the first (oral) circuit is

called the Natural Child, the second (emotional) circuit is called

the Adapted Child, and the semantic circuit is called the Adult or

Computer. In Jungian terms, the first circuit mediates
sensation,

the second circuit
feeling,
and the third circuit
reason.

The neurological components of the first circuit go back to the

oldest parts of the brain; Carl Sagan called these functions "the

reptile brain." These neural structures are at least billions of

years old. The second circuit structures appeared with the first

amphibians and mammals, somewhere around 1000 million or

500 million years ago; Sagan called them "the mammalian

brain." The semantic circuit appeared perhaps 100 thousand

years ago; Sagan called it "the human brain." It should be no

surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more

by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human

semantic (rational) circuit, or that the semantic circuit is so easily

perverted into false logics (bigotries, intolerant ideologies, fanaticisms

of all sorts) when the bio-survival circuit signals threat to

life or the emotional circuit flashes threat to status.

Cynics, satirists and "mystics" (circuit V-VIII types) have

told us over and over that "reason is a whore," i.e., that the

semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the

older, more primitive circuits. However much the Rationalist

Prometheus Rising
97

may resent this, it is always true in the short run—that is, to use

one of the Rationalist's favorite words, it is always
pragmatically

true. Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival

anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to

give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety. By frightening people

with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or