John Higgs

John’s Blog

In a short novel I wrote called The Brandy of the Damned, the characters find pages from an alternative bible. One reads:

If you apply meaning to a thing you have made, then you have art.
If you apply meaning to a person, then you have love.
If you apply meaning to the universe, then you have God.
Meaning is free.
There is an inexhaustible supply of meaning.
So what’s the fucking problem?

The problem is, of course, that meaning is not fixed. It ebbs and flows like the tide. Sometimes you are drenched in the stuff, and life is self-evidently worthwhile and full of purpose and humour. And at others, it all drains away, and you are left with the horrors. In Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson shows us how to navigate these waters, both when life is too meaningful and when all meaning is gone.

– John Higgs, from his Introduction in the new Hilaritas Press edition of Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati