Stories
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
After awhile one of the clerks and we were cadre and company of the Pentagon personal, administration and supply and did not work in the Pentagon proper. One of the clerks requisitioned some bicycles, the American tire kind, and so after those arrived I would sign out a bike and ride into DC as we were on the state of Virginia side of the river.
My concern at the time was my feelings of automation, that I felt half-asleep much of the time. I wanted to feel more alive. I felt I was too robotic and lived in a dream world. By the same token I had decided that automation was necessary to proper function of my physical self.
At some point in DC, I made the connection that everything in the army was automatic, and that my experience in it could be thought of as study of automatic processes but as actually empirical. The army was a study of the machine. Everything was automatic. Although I do not have a precise memory of the concept at the time, I remember telling people at Winfield Street in San Francisco around the period of nineteen seventy, seventy-one, that the army had been for me a study of the machine. This may have been the beginning of the experiential studies in concepts as real circumstance I later developed in San Francisco.
A movie out at the time I saw in Washington was The Ipcress File. I have never seen it since, but I remember being influenced by it. Michael Caine the hero is captured by the bad guy and undergoes an indoctrination technique called "Induction of Psychoneurosis by Conditioned Reflex under Stress" or IPCRESS. He is tied to a chair and made to experience dis-orienting lights and noise. I even went to the Library of Congress and asked a clerk, who would come to your desk, to retrieve some book for me like a character in the movie did.
(2 of 14)
Next Page
