Fondest and Loudest Farewell:
Robert Anton Wilson 1932-2007
I will dedicate a book to this man one day. I'm quite choked up let me tell you.
I have in my head various bits and pieces of RAW's writing that sustain me with their lucidity and intelligence and visionary humour; I will post them up in tribute over the weekend.
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(The above is my original post from the 11th Jan when Bob died, I want to keep it at the top for time being; my subsequent thoughts are below)
http://hostgator.rawilson.com/prethought.shtml
I found the following in RAW's 'thoughts' page while looking for another of his posts on Gaugins division of artists into the revolutionaries and the plagiarists; it is about 9 years old and seems quite poignant and appropriate now:
"I have lost several friends and colleagues in the last couple of years (Leary and Burroughs are only the most famous ones) and it has finally really dawned on me that I am not just "getting older;" I am getting old, period. Now another friend has cancer, and another is recovering from a massive stroke.
I'm glad I have a lot of young friends, because the old ones are all leaving me.
Burroughs wrote a lot about preparing for the big casino by getting out of your body while still alive, via Tibetan and Egyptian methods. Leary also tried those methods (aided by a Lilly isolation tank) and may or may not have had his head preserved cryonically, depending on whose story you believe. I don't regard either of these ideas as preposterous or silly: Since I know nothing for sure, nothing seems really unthinkable.
Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.
Every day is full of wonderments to me: Death will probably come to me as the greatest wonderment of all. "
Amen.
