We have just discovered Hakim Bey (not his real name--what is a real name?) who calls himself a Sufi-Anarchist and that's how we came across him, thinking anarchistically yesterday afternoon during a The Daily Growler staff self-boredom session where we were discussing a continuation of the "dinner party" metaphor of Anarchy--the model for the 19th Century Anarchists and thus, and through the insisting-we-watch-it pestering of thegrowlingwolf who discovered this video, we watched a YouTube interview with this babbler/writer Hakim Bey, which we'd link here but the interview isn't very interesting and is cockamamie and badly conducted by a guy who sounds like a fop--though on further pestering from the Wolf Man we Googled the man and found his writings. Whoooo boy, right up our alley. What attracted us to this heathen?--OK, we're not that excited about the "magical" and occultish aspects of H.B., but then he is a Sufi, but we are attracted to his "pirated" concept of "Temporary Autonomous Zones" ("It happens," as Bey says) (we are Gestaltists already), a concept conceived as a spontaneous space (a magical community) from which we all should run for and hide in as we recognize the ultimate Utter Chaos into which we are drifting (Praise the Lard) and trying to answer the question does the isolation of oneself with others of the same accord give you a bubble in which to swim against the coming tide of Utter Chaos. Isolation can't be reached by fiat (the Pirate metaphor in Anarchy) not in these days of crooked governments and corporate rule with private armies and gung ho anti-individual assassins--and of course Anarchy is antigovernment and anticorporate, which is against the law today, isn't it?
So, here, take a little Sufi-Anarchist trip into Chaos with Hakim Bey--it's a whirligig ride through a wordy airspace clogged with conflicting thoughts and anticommunications, very anticivilization and pro-poetry. Hakim Bey, Praise the Lard, could be the Anti-Christ! How can we not like this dude?
CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM
(Dedicated to Ustad Mahmud Ali Abd al-Khabir)
Chaos
CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.
No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age--shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.
Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror--everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.
Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.
Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.
The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they'd call it an act of terrorism--so let's take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.
Here's another little excerpt from what Bey calls "Pornography." Everything is ANTI-. We love it; a whirlpool of words smashed into rabid/real/sane/NOW thinking and writing.
Pornography
IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.
A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.
In N. India even non-musical recitation provokes noise & motion, each good couplet applauded, "Wa! Wa!" with elegant hand-jive, tossing of rupees--whereas we listen to poetry like some SciFi brain in a jar--at best a wry chuckle or grimace, vestige of simian rictus--the rest of the body off on some other planet.
In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison--a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all--a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence--shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought--world without risk or eros.
So poetry is dead again--& even if the mumia from its corpse retains some healing properties, auto-resurrection isn't one of them.
If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. At any cost re-connect poetry to the body. Not crimes against bodies, but against Ideas (& Ideas-in-things) which are deadly & suffocating. Not stupid libertinage but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love. In England some pornographic books are still banned. Pornography has a measurable physical effect on its readers. Like propaganda it sometimes changes lives because it uncovers true desires.
Our culture produces most of its porn out of body-hatred-- but erotic art in itself makes a better vehicle for enhancement of being/consciousness/bliss--as in certain oriental works. A sort of Western tantrik porn might help galvanize the corpse, make it shine with some of the glamor of crime.
America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid. Only images count--the censors love snaps of death & mutilation but recoil in horror at the sight of a child masturbating--apparently they experience this as an invasion of their existential validity, their identification with the Empire & its subtlest gestures.
No doubt even the most poetic porn would never revive the faceless corpse to dance & sing (like the Chinese Chaos- bird)--but...imagine a script for a three-minute film set on a mythical isle of runaway children who inhabit ruins of old castles or build totem-huts & junk-assemblage nests--mixture of animation, special-effects, compugraphix & color tape-- edited tight as a fastfood commercial...
Hakim Bey, not his real name (is he in Baltimore, a seedy hotel in China, or the mythical Babylon?)
thestaff
for The Daily Growler
Does the name Woodrow Wilson Day mean anything to anybody?
Hakim Bey believes all creativity is STOLEN from somewhere else--or pirated--so it's alright to plagiarize--it's alright to commingle ideas without referencing them because once you incorporate them into your TAZ and put them into your words they become yours anyway--fuck copyrights.
Recommended food for your ears and thus your inner mechanisms: Charles Ives Piano Sonata No. 1 performed by a Brit lad named Philip Mead--Mead plays this the hardy high-flung virtuosic way of the master Charlie Ives himself--not the namby-pamby ways overClassicalized "learned" performers interpret it--Virgil Thomson called classical performers "executioners." So "We have come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves...." and Mr. Mead sounds American to we ethnoeccentric assholes.
Rest in War.
thestaff
for The Daily Growler
2 comments:
His real name is Peter Lamborn Wilson -- an interesting character.
Aren't we all born of lambs?
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