The Walls Came Tumbling Down

By Robert Anton Wilson, Gregory Arnott and Bobby Campbell

THE GREATEST MOVIE NEVER MADE!?! No director could capture it, no film could contain it, coming soon to the mind's eye within you: The Walls Came Tumbling Down! - A modern American story about the terror of accidentally stumbling into the cosmic circus of other-worldly consciousness, with no map or clue how to navigate the abyss and safely retur

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press, LLC.
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781952746239

Book preview

cover-image, The Walls Came Tumbling Down-12-6-2021

The Walls Came

Tumbling Down

Robert Anton Wilson

Foreword by

Gregory Arnott

Afterword by

Bobby Campbell

Eulogy for

Robert Anton Wilson

by Alan Moore

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Picture 146

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Copyright © 1997 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

International Standard Book Number (eBook): 978-1-952746-23-9

International Standard Book Number (Print): 978-1-952746-24-6

First Edition 1997

Second Printing 1998

Second Edition 2022

Cover Design by amoeba

Book Design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com

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Contents

Foreword by Gregory Arnott

Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson

How to Read a Film Script

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Afterword by Bobby Campbell

Eulogy for Robert Anton Wilson by Alan Moore

Foreword

by Gregory Arnott

Robert Anton Wilson

at The End of History

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true to the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of a better life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.

– Plato (aping Socrates), The Republic

If you must hallucinate, you might as well hallucinate to pretty things. Right?

– Robert Anton Wilson,

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

The End of History wasn’t as exciting as the name suggested, but it did lead to a lot of interesting ideas that we might find frivolous nowadays, with History still chugging merrily along and all that. One such interesting idea- proposed, recanted and recently reaffirmed by Francis Fukuyama, was that in an age of Western liberal hegemony there were no other governmental structures to turn to. In the light of the continuing, current century, it probably can’t be excused that during the Nineties our cultural imagination took this to mean that, now finding itself deprived of the existential threat of nuclear warfare, the government was an omnipotent, omniscient super structure tugging at the strings of all aspects of life, even reality. The Nineties, fueled by the debut of the Internet and the easy exchange of previously obscure information, as well as the popularization of conspiratorial thinking in mainstream entertainment (best exemplified by Chris Carter’s The X Files) was an age of wild conspiratorial and magical thinking. It should be noted that we have always lived in interesting times, but the flavor changes; I am not trying to claim that conspiracy theory and magical thinking were the exclusive purview of the end of the twentieth century, but it was a Wild West of theorizing, where you never knew if someone would fire off a mad idea from the hip. Naturally, this was a period where Robert Anton Wilson thought he might finally have the wider audience he felt he deserved.

And why wouldn’t Wilson deserve a wider audience? I’m sure, reader, since you have picked up this relatively obscure book, that you agree with our author’s self-assessment. After all, Wilson, along with Robert Shea, penned the magisterial Illuminatus! twenty years before the fall of the Soviet Union and continued to pursue the dizzying principles of the malleability of reality over the next two decades (and beyond). As Wilson informs us, The Walls Came Tumbling Down was written two years before the advent of the Nineties and Fukuyama’s premature pronouncement. Wilson was decidedly ahead of the curve and tuned in to the wave of alternate beliefs that would lead to the New Age, which is perhaps, aside from all the political upheaval and reorganization of Western society, the most potent legacy of the Sixties. He was ready for the expansion of thought around spirituality, belief and drug use and the questioning of the general precepts about the world we live in; he probably felt he had helped to engineer it. The Nineties should have been the biggest time of his life.

The Nineties should have been a lot of things, but they weren’t. Too late we realized that history doesn’t end and the threat of nuclear annihilation never left; conspiracy thinking has turned from a cottage industry into some dull, competing reality of horse tranquilizers, ritual pedophilia and crisis actors. Governments, far from being the grim, nefarious edifice that oppresses and controls, are nothing more than the biggest (richest), loudest apes taking over the tribe and dictating what everyone else will do. In America, like it or not, we have a government of the people and by the people; it’s a real shame that the people are so devastatingly stupid. Instead of worrying about hybrid activities with the grey aliens, we should have been concerned about the rise of corporations. When history ended, it was the day that capitalism truly began to feel alive. But this is all from the uncomfortable perspective of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Let us return to the twentieth.

While Wilson may have penned his script before the advent of conspiracy-mania, the book was published well after The X Files had started encouraging everyone to trust no one and Whitley Strieber’s Communion had ended up on bestseller lists. UFOs, along with nuclear weaponry and chaos theory, are one of the legacies of the twentieth century and saw off that century with a bang; the fall of the Soviet Union supposedly opened up decades of weird encounters to researchers, while civilians were able to film lights over Phoenix, AZ. I do wonder how much, if any, of the script was revised before its 1997 publication. Along with the little green-to-grey men, Wilson was able to make his script about another favorite whipped horse—academia. Like conspiracy, the Nineties saw a burst of interest in the ways that academia influences society at large, another product of the Sixties coming to fruition. The Nineties were the time of political correctness and the birth of another wave of feminism, both topics about which Wilson had a lot to say. Perhaps as an ironic countermeasure to the mid-to-late twentieth century, Wilson’s campus is peopled with figures who were already falling out of popular favor in the last decade of the twentieth century: the melancholy, adulterous professor, the hard-drinking academic couple and the seductive hippie student. Don’t expect clear lessons in these dragon-strewn territories such as those taught in light-hearted film fare like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or The Graduate.

Before discussing the deeper meaning, or the message, of The Walls Came Tumbling Down, we should discuss the film that could have been. As Twin Peaks has often been hailed as a forerunner of The X-Files, it is retroactively unsurprising that Wilson’s proposed film also echoes Lynch and Frost’s serialized masterpiece. Wilson’s plot is dizzying, and might have been downright confusing for unprepared audiences in light of its myriad time shifts. The proposed title, The Man Who Murdered God, is an allusion to a reoccurring motif where the film flashes towards a previous life of our professorial protagonist as the Roman soldier who inflicted the wound in the side of Christ. This act of brutal compassion also frames Michael Ellis as a modern day version of the Wandering Jew, cursed to be a symbol of mankind as a whole and to explore the avenues of spacetime that mankind would or will expand unto. Moments of Lynchian humor are scattered throughout the script; one scene sees an increasingly heated collegiate discussion of the implications of Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation interspersed with one participant fixating on and uttering non sequiturs about anchovies as a pizza topping. The camera work is obviously inspired by Welles but, in a pretty profound way, is more daring. Had this been filmed, it would have been considered a visual treat by some and a confusing mess of flashbacks, odd shots and voiceovers by others.

The proposed film, Wilson informs us in his introduction, was really about society changing from an infophobic to an infophiliac age. (Or, to use Wilson’s preferred terminology. a neophobic age to a neophilic one.) Michael Ellis, the professor at the center of the story, had to be drawn, by hook and by crook, away from stodgy academic thought to become more open to the possibilities of reality. As with many of Wilson’s protagonists, this process is neither comfortable or entirely just; acceptance of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is part of the lesson. Wilson emphasizes the melodramatic qualities of the transformation, drawing in the absurdities that would later become ubiquitous with the times.

There are many troubling qualities to this transformation: the quasi-mystical reality that Ellis is drawn towards is not presented as a gentle New Age Nirvana; the threat of nuclear war and the possible guilt of scientists for participating in that threat hangs heavy on the protagonist (and therefore the audience), and unsurprisingly, parallel universes abound. Readers of Masks of the Illuminati and Schrödinger's Cat will recognize some of these motifs which Wilson developed in the Eighties- like most of his books, much is lost before whatever-it-may-be is won. For all the optimism in his nonfiction, Wilson tended towards extreme uncertainty and the subsequent discomfort that comes with that territory in his fiction. As in most of his fiction, drugs, conspiracy and quantum physics seem to be Wilson’s best analog for these dramatic transformative experiences and are directly related to the protagonist’s fate.

A large part of the lesson learned by Dr. Ellis is one of responsibility and unity with all mankind. In a way, this flies in the face of an