personal musings

I wasn’t always Pope. And I wasn’t always Shady. So it stands to reason, that I certainly wasn’t always Pope Shady. Shady came before Pope. In the winter of 1988, I went home from Antioch College for Christmas Break. I went to a redneck bonfire party and this denim clad guy I didn’t know said, “I ought to call you Shady.” He said that because I was wearing purple John Lennon glasses and it was dark out. The glasses were proscription and I didn’t have a second non-tinted pair to wear after dark.

Well, I liked the name Shady. The name Backflash just sort of occurred to me. I was always a fan of Ziggy Stardust, so I figured it was a mutation of that. It had never occurred to me how close Shady Backflash was to Snidely Whiplash, the nemesis of Dudley Do-Right.

In honor of Easter, I’d like to tell the tale of “How I Became Pope.”

My first year at Antioch I was heading to Dark Star Comics in Yellow Springs and buying and reading a lot of very strange books, many of them published by Falcon Press. Prior to my first year of college I’d never heard of Falcon Press. My first Falcon Press book was Neuropolitique, a Timothy Leary book on the Evolution of Consciousness. Leary examined the themes that became central to his scientific outlook, namely whether it was possible to “wash” brains and, if so, whether psychedelics could assist in the program. Much of the book was written while Tim Leary was in a maximum security prison, having been imprisoned for possession of two joints and labeled by Richard Nixon “the most dangerous man in America.” At one point Leary is introduced to Charles Manson, serving life in prison for orchestrating numerous very high profile “Helter Skelter” Manson Family murders.

In the course of the book Leary examines whether the Manson Family was brainwashed and whether he, himself, after all of his experiences with psychedelics had learned to “wash his own brain”… He arrives at something he calls “imprinting” and sets out to “map” the mind with an 8-circuit model. At each stage of development, he says, the mind is most vulnerable to receiving imprints. As the mind develops, new circuits are impressionable. At a later stage it is difficult to go back and re-imprint the mind, but that the use of psychedelics open up opportunities to do so. He also examines the ability of trauma and related events to make one more susceptible to new imprints. He examines the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the SLA as an example of traumatic re-imprinting.

I read and reread Neuropolitique. Then I went back in the bookstore and the woman running the store said “You must also be interested in Robert Anton Wilson.” I told her I’d never heard of Robert Anton Wilson. She pointed to a stack of books by this unknown author. I picked out one titled The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science.

A friend down the hall was studying psychology and bong hits. He majored in bong hits and minored in psychology. And even though he only stayed on campus for a year before dropping out to hang around Strawberry Fields in NYC, I learned a tremendous amount from late night conversations with him. One night we got to talking about a guy on our campus who was calling himself Tao Jaffee who wrote a long winded piece for the campus paper called “Who Is John Galt?” We were first year students and not terribly familiar with the “tempest-in-a-teapot-controversy-of-the-week” nature of LIfe At Antioch, but we were plenty curious about this whole scenario. Turns out, not much of this was as unique as we’d thought. John Galt was from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the question “Who Is John Galt?” was lifted directly from there. There is even a website called whoisjohngalt.com. But the rumors swirling around Tao Jaffee were that he’d started a cult.

That’s when I decided I wanted to start a cult of my own. My friend was railing against my book The New Inquisition, so I started The Counter-Revolution Against The New Inquisition and declared “we’re starting a cult! Give me your lunch money!”

Another friend was working on launching an “alternative campus paper” and agreed to run my first article as Shady Backflash.

The cult never got off the ground in spite of numerous attempts on my part to keep restarting it. In the end, I didn’t have much to offer. Even my philosophy was half-baked, warmed over reworkings of R.A. Wilson and Leary, sprinkled with esoteric Deadheadisms.

The following year I returned to campus, but had a rather traumatic and abrupt departure for brain surgery on September 23, 1989. (Readers of R.A. Wilson will note this significance of The Number 23.)

When I returned in the spring, I returned to Dark Star Comics for my fix of Falcon Press books. I picked up another Robert Anton Wilson book, this one titled Coincidance.

At the time that I was reading Coincidance, I was also writing a term paper on “Acausal Coincidental Principle and Ceremonial Magick”. Acausal Coincidental Principle is one of those long-winded bullshit terms that seems to say a lot and nothing at the same time. I was hoping that Coincidance could help me understand What It All Meant. Essentially what I was trying to get at was the idea of seemingly unrelated things coming up at the same time in the form of “meaningful coincidence”. I read books on empiricism by A.J. Ayer. And I read all the prominent writings of the time on Synchronicity. I read about Jung and Pauli. I read about seriality. I read Koestler’s investigations. No one really knew how to explain the occurrence of causally unrelated events happening at the same time. Today I see that there is a prominent sentence in the scientific world to deal with this strangeness: “correlation does not imply causation.”

Casauity is something we all understand. Baseball is the perfect example of causality. Someone throws a ball. Someone swings a bat. The bat either hits or misses the ball, and the outcome begins to dictate the movements of the play. If the bat connects with the ball, the ball flies through the air and the batter runs. If it misses, well, there are a few variations, but in the vast majority of them, the batter doesn’t run for a base. Most scientific models are based upon the causal model of the world. Or at least they were until Einstein, who introduced the idea of relativity and when he began to delve into quantum mechanics, even he did not even accept many of the results of his own findings, going so far as to proclaim “God does not play dice with the universe.” Stephen Hawking retorted “God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.” (As has been stated elsewhere, God does so in the dark and the dice are loaded.)

The gist of what I was trying to understand in college was whether or not there was a way to increase the frequency of the occurrence of meaningful coincidences. It seemed like a lofty ambition, but I was doing a lot of acid at the time and seeing meaningful coincidences everywhere.

In the course of writing this paper, I hoped that Robert Anton Wilson would provide some insights. So I began reading Coincidance. And in case that book did not provide enough insight, I picked up a giant doorstop of a book titled The Illuminatus Trilogy. Coincidance, as the name implies, was a look at meaningful coincidences. The doorstop was a trilogy that wove historical data about The Illuminati in with very strange humor and sci-fi elements. I came to learn, in the course of reading R.A. Wilson, that he lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio when he was writing the books and that portions of the Illuminatus Trilogy were set on my college campus and the adjacent nature preserve, The Glen Helen.

I had also gotten a gig writing for The Antioch Record, the campus paper. The Record editors humored me by letting me write a column as Shady Backflash alongside my more mundane campus coverage. I’d been influenced by the R.A. Wilson writings enough at this point that I began to expand on the idea of a campus cult to a religion and wrote a quick article called “Shady For Pope.” I wrote that I was expanding from politics to religion and sought to attract converts.

The following week, a friend, John Wells, was convinced to render a cartoon of me as the Heirophant Tarot card, wearing a propellar hat and holding an ankh. Above the Heirophant were the words Shady For Pope. As a last second addition one of the editors found a Weekly World News Headline that read “As If She Didn’t Suffer Enough With Brain Surgery” and blacked out the S and made the “h” into a capital letter. It was perfect! The cartoon appeared on the back of the school paper.

Then a series of very strange things happened. Someone gave me a card that read “The Bearer of this card is an official and authorized Pope” (you can create your own here.) Then someone else gave me a photocopied stack of papers titled The Principia Discordia. But that was only the beginning of the weirdness. In the course of reading Coincidance, I saw the Pope card replicated in the back of the book under a caption “You Too Can Be A Pope.” And I learned that the entire Illuminatus Trilogy that I was reading was based upon this “book” called The Principia Discordia that I’d been handed in a stack of photocopied pages.

So there I was back on campus staring at a term paper on Acausal Coincidental Principle analyzing whether I could “invoke” coincidence. I didn’t do it by ritual, but, rather, I’d inadvertantly opened a portal for Eris Discordia, the Greek Goddess of Chaos and Discord to wander into my life and introduce herself.

And so even though I believed I was starting my own religion, The Born Again Pagan, Christian Mystic, Zen Gypsy Warlock, Psychedelic Mind-Fucked Church, unseen forces were conspiring to draft me into theirs. I kept my religion, but expanded my cult portfolio to be poly-denominational and omnidirectional. I’ve been a proud Discordian Pope ever since. The Discordians, I’ve come to learn, define a Pope as “someone not under the authority of the authorities.” What is it they say? When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive? I guess The Secret MisChiefs decided I was ready to be Pope.