Coincidance - Principia Discordia

206 COINCIDANCE
Dali, who had a Jewish wife and fled France as soon as Hitler invaded, was
speaking in a totally dispassionate and non-aristotelian fashion when he
"defended" the monster. Hitler did indeed have four balls and six foreskins,
in the same sense that Lenin had one giant buttock, as in Daii's famous
painting of him. Perhaps Daii's attitude toward Hitler would have been
clearer if he had painted it, as he painted his attitude toward Lenin, instead of
trying to verbalize the ineffable. After all, if one Russian General gets shot
by a man with the same name as America's leading conservative and
another gets shot by a man with the same name as the chap who proved
Irish was an Indo-European language, it is only logical that a third Russian
General should heist the Maltese Falcon, right?
But seriously, folks—as Bob Hope used to say—the method used by Tzara
in breaking the back of Aristotelianism was the same method used by Claud
Shannon in discovering the mathematical definition of information. Look it
up in Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Dr. Shannon cut up
prose into single words, threw them in a hat, picked them out one at a time—
just like Tristan without Isolde creating a Dada poem—and from this
Shannon produced not poetry but the ideas that allowed him to define
information as the opposite of predictability. The basic equation is elegant,
and is given also in my book Right Where You Are Silting Now and it was this
mathematical analysis that made possible the word processor on which I am
writing this.
That this word processor is called a Mackintosh—like the man who haunts
Bloom all through 16 June 1904—is "only" a coincidence, of course. Of course.
Painters explored collage extensively in the 40 years after Tzara's breakthrough,
and every motion picture director conducted extensive research in
montage, but prose and poetry, with few exceptions {Joyce, Pound, Williams)
moved backward like a crab and crawled into the Victorian or pre-
Einsteinian murk. The second quantum leap occurred in the late 1950s
when William S. Burroughs began experimenting with the cut-up and
fold-in techniques and created a prose of incredible accidental beauty and
Zen humor.
I have used various cut-up and other stochastic techniques in all my novels
and have noticed one amusing thing about the response to this: hostility is
expressed most widely if I admit that I am using "mechanical" techniques of
the Burroughs and Tzara variety. If I do not publicize this fact, there is much
less hostility. It appears that lazy readers are only terrified of the new if they
are warned in advance that it actually is novel and experimental. Otherwise
they just pass over it as a confusing passage and forget it. I am not interested
in lazy readers, however, but in the attentive and awake.
The techniques used in creating the following experiment were not possible