Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/27/a-review-of-cosmic-trigger-a.html
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“Go find the others”
It ain’t easy, but we’re out there.
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Hail Eris, they’ve chosen the correct duration!
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Lets set up a pyramiid scheme (yes there’s two eyes in this pyramiid) of patreon, gofundme, kickstarter and indiegogo campaigns to all pay each other money but the only goal is to mount a north american production of Cosmic Trigger.
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Great review! Cosmic Trigger is one of those milestone books for certain people. I read it during my school years, while living with a bunch of media artists in a decrepit house the city was trying to evict us from for multiple code violations resulting from us frightening our neighbors with flashing lights, amplified weirdness and disturbing junk art strewn around in our yard. My thing with RAW had actually started with Illuminatus, a few weeks earlier, which one of my crazy friends left out on his coffee table. I remember flipping to the 1st page, reading and thinking, “Huh, April 23rd, that’s my birthday. Cool.”
Cosmic Trigger was next, and I inhaled it in 24hrs. For those who don’t know, in this autobiography Wilson recounts an increasingly bizarre series of coincidences that basically hijacks his life after he began messing around with occultism and other unusual belief systems. For reasons that were unclear, interrelated references to the star Sirius started popping up everywhere he looked. As he delved further into the Sirius mystery, things kept getting stranger. Finally he thought he might actually be in contact with aliens, or just going mad.
In the midst of all this, RAW came across reports by some French anthropologists describing a tribe of people in Mali called the Dogons who practiced an ancient religion focused around Sirius and alien astronauts from there who they claimed had once visited Earth. The antropologists reproduced orbital maps the Dogons made of Sirius and a tiny invisible companion star the Dogons called Digitaria. As it turned out, the Dogon’s companion star and their maps corresponded nicely with modern observations of Sirius and a recently discovered tiny, white dwarf binary companion star, Sirius B. The only problem was, how did primitive people acquire accurate, specific astronomical knowledge of an invisible star? The anthropologists had no answer to this question. The Dogons said people from there told them.
Wilson’s investigation into Sirius, synchronicity and the human mind continued, and the book blew up my head in the most delightful way. Here was an autobiographical tale better than most fiction, full of ideas that might be crazy or might not, but were eminently thought provoking - like rocket fuel poured on a young brain in search of answers to life’s mysteries. I finished the book and ran downstairs clutching the thing in my hand. I felt a major rant coming on, and my housemates were to be ranted at. They had not heard of Cosmic Trigger, yet.
I found them sitting around in the kitchen listening to some kind of unfamiliar ambient weirdness on the CD player as I barged in all wild eyed. “Holy shit, I just read the craziest, most amazing book! You have to check this out!” I said, holding out my new favorite book, like an alien bible. “By the way, what are you guys listening to?”
My friend handed me a CD case. The art looked familiar. “Oh, it’s this new ambient CD. It’s called Digitaria, it’s about the dog star Sirius.” I stood there gaping at the CD case as the blood drained out of my face and my knees turned to jelly. I recognized the art, it was the same Dogon orbital map from the Cosmic Trigger.
My friends all started laughing at me, standing there in mute astonishment, on the verge of collapse. “Check him out,” one said, “he’s not from this planet at all.” Ha. True story.
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