Um dos grandes escritores do século 20 – e um de seus pensadores mais provocadores -, Robert Anton Wilson morreu em 2007, deixando na Terra um legado que unia as teorias conspiratórias mais excêntricas à natureza criativa do ser humano, celebrando a paranóia como inspiração ao recuperar tradições esquecida para apontar prováveis futuros, mas sem colher os méritos literários de outros gigantes do livro que lidam com temas parecidos, como Thomas Pynchon e Don DeLillo. Alan Moore, um de seus pupilos mais famosos e filho direto do cinismo paranóico pós-Trilogia Illuminati (a grande obra de RAW), celebrou a importância do autor em um evento em março de 2007, no Queen Elizabeth Hall, em Londres:

O vídeo é uma dica do José (valeu!) e a transcrição em inglês eu encontrei no site Decondicionamento.org, que também traz a tradução do texto para o espanhol. Se alguém quiser traduzir pro português, é só colar nos comentários que eu publico aqui:

“It’s not in Magick’s nature to let anybody go. So let’s do with Time not being what it’s seems – something about the Gesternheutemorgenswelt – things happening all at once, the way they do in dreams.

And somewhere it’s still 1932 – it’s Brooklyn – sepia dust… depression streets… neutrons distilling, Lovecraft still alive – fat Irish cops abandoning their beats and breaking into a spontaneous ballet, with night sticks twirling, dancing on the stoops as though through Joyce’s Dublin, on one timeless day.

They gather round the New York natal Crib of Mrs. Wilson’s pride and joy, to stand with newsboys, gangsters — dig each other in the ribs, all tearful and red faced, sing “Danny Boy”.

The nuns of Flatbush, glaring and unkissed, line up to smack their rulers on his wrists, promoting Sister Kinney’s Polio cure, and all of this could be in the imagination of a squirrel, furiously circling a tree — all of these people, moments and events could be no more than thoughts, suspended simultaneously within the snow-globed consciousness of Luna Wilson, dreaming in the ice…

To question everything – that’s still your only man, your best advice.

And somewhere, Orson Welles’ voice is leaking from old radios – The Shadow knows if Arlen Reilly scripted those specific shows, but… suddenly it’s 1958 – They’ve set the matrimonial date.

In a Lysergic Spin Drift spray that grades from pink to tangerine, the chemist Albert Hoffman rose upon the day astride his jelly bike, while Leary rides down from an altered state.

The decade’s beatnik H-Bomb clock ticks over to the sixties, as they kiss and grin and celebrate — until the lovely trouble starts. First Krassner’s Realist. Then the rabid raunch of Hefner’s pulsoid swoon, wearing their hearts upon their paisley sleeves, and psychedelic badges on their hearts.

Soon he’s reporting on the tensions swirling around the Democratic armies of the 9th Convention in Chicago, 1968. Tear gas grenades fired by police describe a fuming parabolic arc, as William Burroughs and John Genet take each other by the arm and with great dignity, with years of bright experience between them, with soaked handkerchiefs worn like hour hooped bandannas, quit the park.

Up with Bob Shea at Playboy After Dark, and chuckling over creepy letters from John Birchers, detailing conspiracies compiled from Nesta Webster’s library shelves, our men read all the best bits out aloud, and… then decide to cook one up themselves.

While elsewhere in the yesterday-today-tomorrow world, it’s the mid-seventies. The Unified Field Theorem of American Anxiety become a textbook guide to hilarious Occult anarchy, a trilogy that pulled it all together and changed paranoia from an illness into an illuminating game, before Dan Brown and David Icke hit town to change it back again.

A wrong-doing’s end paper movie full of sex, drugs, yellow submarines, Bavarians, fnord, Marilyn Monroe, and dazzling dime store profundity:

“Tell us, John Dillinger, how did you manage to escape from that locked cell?”

“Same way that you break out of any prison, hell, I just walked through the wall into the fire…”

’71 it’s written – published four years later, and just one year after that served up entire on stage — Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theater of Liverpool — Bill Drummond working in the wings who, feeling Justified and Ancient and inspired, moves on to other things…

And during all this there’s been dog-faced messages from Sirius, coincidences piped in by The Crew That Never Rests, new ways of seeing…

And when Bob and Arlen’s 15 year old daughter Luna is shot dead during a stick-up job, he points out that her killer was a young Native American compelled to rob, a brutal and oppressive history, opposes the death penalty, and stands as an extraordinary, an exemplary human being.

In another district of the Gesternheutemorgenswelt meanwhile it’s Sunday, March 18th, 2007, and, well, here we are… for one last 23 skidoo, clearing the wire with an important signal coming through from the agnostic wing of Heaven. Robert Anton Wilson went out through the wall into the fire, into the simultaneous parity of eternity, into the splendid timeless fanfare of a life that he has somehow managed to survive, with 35 books weaving his idea in their spectacular diversity, weaving his luminescent consciousness into the intellectual DNA of our painfully slow developing society, and dancing somewhere with his wife, back when he could still dance, and she was still alive.

Researching pookas, watching “Harvey” in the cathode light, another Wilson on screen finds them in a dictionary described as: “Rabbit spirits working mischief with reality, and Mr. Wilson, how are you tonight?”

I saw him in a psychedelic vision once, with other Magi in a room outside time and shining white, a real Illuminati, a Crew That Never Rests but works without respite to include everyone – every last one of us – within their light.

Oh Mr. Wilson, how are you tonight?