Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontonlogical Anarchism
by Hakim Bey
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.
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic
displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State
Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist
objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince
them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000
square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage
in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize
that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will
perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where
you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual
experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does
not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PT-art
can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories,
small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers
of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous
letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio
transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least
as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious
awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether
the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed"
or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist)
it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats,
no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be
divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries,
publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater
are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction
but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the
ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim
is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at
least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable
art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental;
be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't
be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law,
but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
AMOUR FOU IS NOT a Social Democracy, it is not a Parliament of Two. The
minutes of its secret meetings deal with meanings too enormous but too precise
for prose. Not this, not that--its Book of Emblems trembles in your hand.
Naturally it shits on schoolmasters & police, but it sneers at liberationists
& ideologues as well--it is not a clean well-lit room. A topological charlatan
laid out its corridors & abandoned parks, its ambush-decor of luminous black
& membranous maniacal red.
Each of us owns half the map--like two renaissance potentates we define
a new culture with our anathematized mingling of bodies, merging of liquids--the
Imaginal seams of our City-state blur in our sweat.
Ontological anarchism never came back from its last fishing trip. So long
as no one squeals to the FBI, CHAOS cares nothing for the future of civilization.
Amour fou breeds only by accident--its primary goal is ingestion of the
Galaxy. A conspiracy of transmutation.
Its only concern for the Family lies in the possibility of incest ("Grow
your own!" "Every human a Pharoah!")--O most sincere of readers, my semblance,
my brother/sister!--& in the masturbation of a child it finds concealed
(like a japanese-paper-flower-pill) the image of the crumbling of the State.
Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.
The Surrealists disgraced themselves by selling amour fou to the ghost-machine
of Abstraction--they sought in their unconsciousness only power over others,
& in this they followed de Sade (who wanted "freedom" only for grown-up
whitemen to eviscerate women & children).
Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders
of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels'
clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates
in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness
of obsession.
Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery demands non-ordinary
consciousness. The anglo-saxon post- Protestant world channels all its suppressed
sensuality into advertising & splits itself into clashing mobs: hysterical
prudes vs promiscuous clones & former-ex-singles. AF doesn't want to join
anyone's army, it takes no part in the Gender Wars, it is bored by equal
opportunity employment (in fact it refuses to work for a living), it doesn't
complain, doesn't explain, never votes & never pays taxes.
AF would like to see every bastard ("lovechild") come to term & birthed--AF
thrives on anti-entropic devices--AF loves to be molested by children--AF
is better than prayer, better than sinsemilla--AF takes its own palmtrees
& moon wherever it goes. AF admires tropicalismo, sabotage, break- dancing,
Layla & Majnun, the smells of gunpowder & sperm.
AF is always illegal, whether it's disguised as a marriage or a boyscout
troop--always drunk, whether on the wine of its own secretions or the smoke
of its own polymorphous virtues. It is not the derangement of the senses
but rather their apotheosis--not the result of freedom but rather its precondition. Lux et voluptas.
THE FULL MOON'S UNFATHOMABLE light-path--mid-May midnight in some State
that starts with "I," so two-dimensional it can scarcely be said to possess
any geography at all--the beams so urgent & tangible you must draw the shades
in order to think in words.
No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in images--prose is for them a code not yet fully
digested & ossified, just as for us never fully trusted.
You may write about them, so that others who have lost the silver chain may follow. Or write for them, making of STORY & EMBLEM a process of seduction into your own paleolithic
memories, a barbaric enticement to liberty (chaos as CHAOS understands it).
For this otherworld species or "third sex," les enfants sauvages, fancy & Imagination are still undifferentiated. Unbridled PLAY: at one
& the same time the source of our Art & of all the race's rarest eros.
To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style & voluptuous storehouse,
a fundamental of our alien & occult civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic,
our lunatic espionage--this is the action (let's face it) either of an artist
of some sort, or of a ten- or thirteen-year-old.
Children whose clarified senses betray them into a brilliant sorcery of
beautiful pleasure reflect something feral & smutty in the nature of reality
itself: natural ontological anarchists, angels of chaos--their gestures
& body odors broadcast around them a jungle of presence, a forest of prescience
complete with snakes, ninja weapons, turtles, futuristic shamanism, incredible
mess, piss, ghosts, sunlight, jerking off, birds' nests & eggs--gleeful
aggression against the groan-ups of those Lower Planes so powerless to englobe
either destructive epiphanies or creation in the form of antics fragile
but sharp enough to slice moonlight.
And yet the denizens of these inferior jerkwater dimensions truly believe
they control the destinies of Wild Children--& down here, such vicious beliefs actually sculpt most of the substance of happenstance.
The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather
than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing
are the same act--these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart
(as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild
children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from
behind their masks.
Too young for Harley choppers--flunk-outs, break-dancers, scarcely pubescent
poets of flat lost railroad towns--a million sparks falling from the skyrockets
of Rimbaud & Mowgli--slender terrorists whose gaudy bombs are compacted
of polymorphous love & the precious shards of popular culture--punk gunslingers
dreaming of piercing their ears, animist bicyclists gliding in the pewter
dusk through Welfare streets of accidental flowers--out-of-season gypsy
skinny-dippers, smiling sideways-glancing thieves of power- totems, small
change & panther-bladed knives--we sense them everywhere--we publish this
offer to trade the corruption of our own lux et gaudium for their perfect gentle filth.
So get this: our realization, our liberation depends on theirs--not because we ape the Family, those "misers of love" who hold hostages
for a banal future, nor the State which schools us all to sink beneath the
event-horizon of a tedious "usefulness"--no--but because we & they, the wild ones, are images of each other, linked & bordered by that silver
chain which defines the pale of sensuality, transgression & vision.
We share the same enemies & our means of triumphant escape are also the
same: a delirious & obsessive play, powered by the spectral brilliance of the wolves & their children.
CONSTELLATIONS BY WHICH TO steer the barque of the soul. "If the moslem
understood Islam he would become an idol- worshipper."--Mahmud Shabestari
Eleggua, ugly opener of doors with a hook in his head & cowrie shells for
eyes, black santeria cigar & glass of rum- -same as Ganesh, elephant-head
fat boy of Beginnings who rides a mouse. The organ which senses the numinous
atrophies with the senses. Those who cannot feel baraka cannot know the
caress of the world.
Hermes Poimandres taught the animation of eidolons, the magic in-dwelling
of icons by spirits--but those who cannot perform this rite on themselves
& on the whole palpable fabric of material being will inherit only blues,
rubbish, decay.
The pagan body becomes a Court of Angels who all perceive this place--this
very grove--as paradise ("If there is a paradise, surely it is here!"--inscription on a Mughal garden gate)..
But ontological anarchism is too paleolithic for eschatology- -things are
real, sorcery works, bush-spirits one with the Imagination, death an unpleasant
vagueness--the plot of Ovid's Metamorphoses--an epic of mutability. The personal mythscape.
Paganism has not yet invented laws--only virtues. No priestcraft, no theology
or metaphysics or morality--but a universal shamanism in which no one attains
real humanity without a vision.
Food money sex sleep sun sand & sinsemilla--love truth peace freedom & justice.
Beauty. Dionysus the drunk boy on a panther--rank adolescent sweat--Pan
goatman slogs through the solid earth up to his waist as if it were the
sea, his skin crusted with moss & lichen--Eros multiplies himself into a
dozen pastoral naked Iowa farm boys with muddy feet & pond-scum on their
thighs.
Raven, the potlatch trickster, sometimes a boy, old woman, bird who stole
the Moon, pine needles floating on a pond, Heckle/Jeckle totempole-head,
chorus-line of crows with silver eyes dancing on the woodpile--same as Semar
the hunchback albino hermaphrodite shadow-puppet patron of the Javanese
revolution.
Yemaya, bluestar sea-goddess & patroness of queers--same as Tara, bluegrey
aspect of Kali, necklace of skulls, dancing on Shiva's stiff lingam, licking
monsoon clouds with her yard-long tongue--same as Loro Kidul, jasper-green
Javanese sea-goddess who bestows the power of invulnerability on sultans
by tantrik intercourse in magic towers & caves.
>From one point of view ontological anarchism is extremely bare, stripped
of all qualities & possessions, poor as CHAOS itself--but from another point
of view it pullulates with baroqueness like the Fucking-Temples of Kathmandu
or an alchemical emblem book--it sprawls on its divan eating loukoum & entertaining
heretical notions, one hand inside its baggy trousers.
The hulls of its pirate ships are lacquered black, the lateen sails are
red, black banners with the device of a winged hourglass.
A South China Sea of the mind, off a jungle-flat coast of palms, rotten
gold temples to unknown bestiary gods, island after island, the breeze like
wet yellow silk on naked skin, navigating by pantheistic stars, hierophany
on hierophany, light upon light against the luminous & chaotic dark.
ART SABOTAGE STRIVES TO be perfectly exemplary but at the same time retain
an element of opacity--not propaganda but aesthetic shock--apallingly direct
yet also subtly angled-- action-as-metaphor.
Art Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism--creation- through-destruction--but
it cannot serve any Party, nor any nihilism, nor even art itself. Just as
the banishment of illusion enhances awareness, so the demolition of aesthetic
blight sweetens the air of the world of discourse, of the Other. Art Sabotage
serves only consciousness, attentiveness, awakeness.
A-S goes beyond paranoia, beyond deconstruction--the ultimate criticism--physical
attack on offensive art-- aesthetic jihad. The slightest taint of petty
ego-icity or even of personal taste spoils its purity & vitiates its force.
A-S can never seek power--only release it.
Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant- -A-S seeks
to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit
by delusion. This or that poet or painter cannot be condemned for lack of
vision--but malign Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate.
MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control--its machinery can be smashed.
Public book burnings--why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize
this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially
Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post , Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few
Harlequin Romances--a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around
on a clear autumn afternoon.
To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism--but
to destroy the money would have been good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission &
broadcast a few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would constitute
a feat of PT--but simply to blow up the transmission tower would be perfectly
adequate Art Sabotage. If certain galleries & museums deserve an occasional
brick through their windows--not destruction, but a jolt to complacency--then
what about BANKS? Galleries turn beauty into a commodity but banks transmute
Imagination into feces and debt. Wouldn't the world gain a degree of beauty
with each bank that could be made to tremble...or fall? But how? Art Sabotage
should probably stay away from politics (it's so boring)--but not from banks.
Don't picket--vandalize. Don't protest--deface. When ugliness, poor design
& stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the
works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing
but the heart's longing for grace.
ACROSS THE LUSTER OF the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless &
ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a dessicate blue valley travelers
find an artificial oasis, a fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing
a hidden garden.
As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut
steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone--those
within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers &
poisons.
Behind crenellations & slit-windowed towers scholars & fedayeen wake in
narrow monolithic cells. Star-maps, astrolabes, alembics & retorts, piles
of open books in a shaft of morning sunlight--an unsheathed scimitar.
Each of those who enter the realm of the Imam-of-one's-own- being becomes a sultan of inverted revelation, a monarch of abrogation & apostasy.
In a central chamber scalloped with light and hung with tapestried arabesques
they lean on bolsters & smoke long chibouks of haschisch scented with opium
& amber.
For them the hierarchy of being has compacted to a dimensionless punctum
of the real--for them the chains of Law have been broken--they end their
fasting with wine. For them the outside of everything is its inside, its
true face shines through direct. But the garden gates are camouflaged with
terrorism, mirrors, rumors of assassination, trompe l'oeil, legends.
Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink
shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman
tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns--a pavilion
set with a mosaic of calligrammes--a willow, a stream with watercress--a
fountain crystalled underneath with geometry-- the metaphysical scandal
of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage--"water,
greenery, beautiful faces."
By night Hassan-i Sabbah like a civilized wolf in a turban stretches out
on a parapet above the garden & glares at the sky, conning the asterisms
of heresy in the mindless cool desert air. True, in this myth some aspirant
disciples may be ordered to fling themselves off the ramparts into the black--but
also true that some of them will learn to fly like sorcerers.
The emblem of Alamut holds in the mind, a mandals or magic circle lost to history but embedded or imprinted in consciousness.
The Old Man flits like a ghost into tents of kings & bedrooms of theologians,
past all locks & guards with forgotten moslem/ninja techniques, leaves behind
bad dreams, stilettos on pillows, puissant bribes.
The attar of his propaganda seeps into the criminal dreams of ontological
anarchism, the heraldry of our obsessions displays the luminous black outlaw
banners of the Assassins...all of them pretenders to the throne of an Imaginal
Egypt, an occult space/light continuum consumed by still-unimagined liberties.
INVENTED BY THE CHINESE but never developed for war--a fine example of Poetic
Terrorism--a weapon used to trigger aesthetic shock rather than kill--the
Chinese hated war & used to go into mourning when armies were raised--gunpowder
more useful to frighten malign demons, delight children, fill the air with
brave & risky-smelling haze.
Class C Thunder Bombs from Kwantung, bottlerockets, butterflies, M-80's,
sunflowers, "A Forest In Springtime"-- revolution weather--light your cigarette
from the sizzling fuse of a Haymarket-black bomb--imagine the air full of
lamiae & succubi, oppressive spirits, police-ghosts. Call some kid with
a smouldering punk or kitchen match-- shaman-apostle of summer gunpowder
plots--shatter the heavy night with pinched stars & pumped stars, arsenic
& antimony, sodium & calomel, a blitz of magnesium & shrill picrate of potash.
Spur-fire (lampblack & saltpetre) portfire & iron filings-- attack your
local bank or ugly church with roman candles & purple-gold skyrockets, impromptu
& anonymous (perhaps launch from back of pick-up truck..)
Build frame-lattice lancework set-pieces on the roofs of insurance buildings
or schools--a kundalini-snake or Chaos- dragon coiled barium-green against
a background of sodium- oxalate yellow--Don't Tread On Me--or copulating
monsters shooting wads of jizm-fire at a Baptists old folks home.
Cloud-sculpture, smoke sculpture & flags = Air Art. Earthworks. Fountains
= Water Art. And Fireworks. Don't perform with Rockefeller grants & police
permits for audiences of culture-lovers. Evanescent incendiary mind-bombs,
scary mandalas flaring up on smug suburban nights, alien green thunderheads
of emotional plague blasted by orgone-blue vajra-rays of lasered feux d'artifice.
Comets that explode with the odor of hashish & radioactive charcoal--swampghouls
& will-o'-the-wisps haunting public parks--fake St. Elmo's fire flickering
over the architecture of the bourgeoisie--strings of lady-fingers falling
on the Legislature floor--salamander-elementals attack well-known moral
reformers.
Blazing shellac, sugar of milk, strontium, pitch, gum water, gerbs of chinese
fire--for a few moments the air is ozone- sharp--drifting opal cloud of
pungent dragon/phoenix smoke. For an instant the Empire falls, its princes
& governors flee to their stygian muck, plumes of sulphur from elf- flamethrowers
burning their pinched asses as they retreat. The Assassin-child, psyche
of fire, holds sway for one brief dogstar-hot night.
Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched & untouchable
--Maori Chant
Chaos perches on a sky-mountain: a huge bird like a yellow bag or red fireball,
with six feet & four wings--has no face but dances & sings.
Or Chaos is a black longhaired dog, blind & deaf, lacking the five viscera.
Chaos the Abyss comes first, then Earth/Gaia, then Desire/Eros. From these
three proceed two pairs--Erebus & old Night, Aether & Daylight. Neither
Being nor Non-being
neither air nor earth nor space:
what was enclosed? where? under whose protection?
What was water, deep, unfathomable?
Neither death nor immortality, day nor night--
but ONE breathed by itself with no wind.
Nothing else. Darkness swathed in darkness,
unmanifest water.
The ONE, hidden by void,
felt the generation of heat, came into being
as Desire, first seed of Mind...
Was there an up or down?
There were casters of seed, there were powers:
energy underneath, impulse above.
But who knows for sure?
--Rg Veda
Tiamat the Chaos-Ocean slowly drops from her womb Silt & Slime, the Horizons,
Sky and watery Wisdom. These offspring grow noisy & bumptious--she considers
their destruction.
But Marduk the wargod of Babylon rises in rebellion against the Old Hag
& her Chaos-monsters, chthonic totems--Worm, Female Ogre, Great Lion, Mad
Dog, Scorpion Man, Howling Storm--dragons wearing their glory like gods--&
Tiamat herself a great sea-serpent.
Marduk accuses her of causing sons to rebel against fathers- -she loves
Mist & Cloud, principles of disorder. Marduk will be the first to rule,
to invent government. In battle he slays Tiamat & from her body orders the
material universe. He inaugurates the Babylonian Empire--then from gibbets
& bloody entrails of Tiamat's incestuous son he creates the human race to
serve forever the comfort of gods--& their high priests & anointed kings.
Father Zeus & the Olympians wage war against Mother Gaia & the Titans, those
partisans of Chaos, the old ways of hunting & gathering, of aimless wandering,
androgyny & the license of beasts.
Amon-Ra (Being) sits alone in the primordial Chaos-Ocean of NUN creating
all the other gods by jerking off--but Chaos also manifests as the dragon
Apophis whom Ra must destroy (along with his state of glory, his shadow
& his magic) in order that the Pharoah may safely rule--a victory ritually
re-created daily in Imperial temples to confound the enemies of the State,
of cosmic Order.
Chaos is Hun Tun, Emperor of the Center. One day the South Sea, Emperor
Shu, & the North Sea, Emperor Hu (shu hu = lightning) paid a visit to Hun Tun, who always treated them well. Wishing
to repay his kindness they said, "All beings have seven orifices for seeing,
hearing, eating, shitting, etc.--but poor old Hun Tun has none! Let's drill
some into him!" So they did--one orifice a day--till on the seventh day,
Chaos died.
But...Chaos is also an enormous chicken's egg. Inside it P'an-Ku is born
& grows for 18,000 years--at last the egg opens up, splits into sky & earth,
yang & yin. Now P'an-Ku grows into a column that holds up the universe--or
else he becomes the universe (breath-->wind, eyes-->sun & moon, blood & humors-->rivers
& seas, hair & lashes-->stars & planets, sperm-->pearls, marrow-->jade,
his fleas-->human beings, etc.)
Or else he becomes the man/monster Yellow Emperor. Or else he becomes Lao
Tzu, prophet of Tao. In fact, poor old Hun Tun is the Tao itself.
"Nature's music has no existence outside things. The various apertures,
pipes, flutes, all living beings together make up nature. The "I" cannot
produce things & things cannot produce the "I," which is self-existent.
Things are what they are spontaneously, not caused by something else. Everything
is natural & does not know why it is so. The 10,000 things have 10,000 different
states, all in motion as if there were a True Lord to move them--but if
we search for evidence of this Lord we fail to find any." (Kuo Hsiang)
Every realized consciousness is an "emperor" whose sole form of rule is
to do nothing to disturb the spontaneity of nature, the Tao. The "sage"
is not Chaos itself, but rather a loyal child of Chaos--one of P'an-Ku's
fleas, a fragment of flesh of Tiamat's monstrous son. "Heaven and Earth,"
says Chuang Tzu, "were born at the same time I was, & the 10,000 things
are one with me."
Ontological Anarchism tends to disagree only with the Taoists' total quietism.
In our world Chaos has been overthrown by younger gods, moralists, phallocrats,
banker- priests, fit lords for serfs. If rebellion proves impossible then
at least a kind of clandestine spiritual jihad might be launched. Let it
follow the war-banners of the anarchist black dragon, Tiamat, Hun Tun.
Chaos never died.
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...
...but weird & naked, feathers & bones, tents sewn with crystal, black dogs,
pigeon-blood--flashes of amber limbs tangled in sheets--faces in starry
masks kissing soft creases of skin--androgynous pirates, castaway faces
of columbines sleeping on thigh-white flowers--nasty hilarious piss jokes,
pet lizards lapping spilt milk--nude break- dancing--victorian bathtub with
rubber ducks & pink boners-- Alice on ganja...
...atonal punk reggae scored for gamelan, synthesizer, saxophones & drums--electric
boogie lyrics sung by aetherial children's choir--ontological anarchist
lyrics, cross between Hafez & Pancho Villa, Li Po & Bakunin, Kabir & Tzara-
-call it "CHAOS--the Rock Video!"
No...probably just a dream. Too expensive to produce, & besides, who would
see it? Not the kids it was meant to seduce. Pirate TV is a futile fantasy,
rock merely another commodity--forget the slick gesamtkunstwerk, then. Leaflet
a playground with inflammatory smutty feuilletons-- pornopropaganda, crackpot
samizdat to unchain Desire from its bondage.
JUSTICE CANNOT BE OBTAINED under any Law--action in accord with spontaneous
nature, action which is just, cannot be defined by dogma. The crimes advocated
in these broadsheets cannot be committed against self or other but only
against the mordant crystallization of Ideas into structures of poisonous
Thrones & Dominations.
That is, not crimes against nature or humanity but crimes by legal fiat.
Sooner or later the uncovering & unveiling of self/nature transmogrifies
a person into a brigand--like stepping into another world then returning
to this one to discover you've been declared a traitor, heretic, exile.
The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from
the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat--& as soon as you begin
to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you--so don't
play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr--accept the fact that you're
a criminal & be prepared to act like one.
Paradox: to embrace Chaos is not to slide toward entropy but to emerge into
an energy like stars, a pattern of instantaneous grace--a spontaneous organic
order completely different from the carrion pyramids of sultans, muftis,
cadis & grinning executioners.
After Chaos comes Eros--the principle of order implicit in the nothingness
of the unqualified One. Love is structure, system, the only code untainted
by slavery & drugged sleep. We must become crooks & con-men to protect its
spiritual beauty in a bezel of clandestinity, a hidden garden of espionage.
Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your
head, don't sign up for the armies of anorexia or bulimia--act as if you
were already free, calculate the odds, step out, remember the Code Duello--Smoke
Pot/Eat Chicken/Drink Tea. Every man his own vine & figtree (Circle Seven Koran, Noble Drew Ali)--carry your Moorish passport with pride, don't get caught
in the crossfire, keep your back covered--but take the risk, dance before
you calcify.
The natural social model for ontological anarchism is the child-gang or
the bank-robbers-band. Money is a lie--this adventure must be feasible without
it--booty & pillage should be spent before it turns back into dust. Today
is Resurrection Day--money wasted on beauty will be alchemically transmuted
into elixir. As my uncle Melvin used to say, stolen watermelon tastes sweeter.
The world is already re-made according to the heart's desire- -but civilization
owns all the leases & most of the guns. Our feral angels demand we trespass,
for they manifest themselves only on forbidden grounds. High Way Man. The
yoga of stealth, the lightning raid, the enjoyment of treasure.
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed
& choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who refuse out
of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity--those
who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof
of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.
Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary
awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about
desired results.
The incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves,
our cacophonous ghosts--the "black magic" of envy & vendetta backfires because
Desire cannot be forced. Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.
No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe
shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you
want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that
weak blavatskian crap.
Sorcery works at creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings
into a space of untrammeled expression-- the metamorphosis of quotidian
place into angelic sphere. This involves the manipulation of symbols (which
are also things) & of people (who are also symbolic)--the archetypes supply
a vocabulary for this process & therefore are treated as if they were both
real & unreal, like words. Imaginal Yoga.
The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real--but then so must consciousness
be real since its effects are so tangible. The dullard finds even wine tasteless
but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality
of perception defines the world of intoxication--but to sustain it & expand
it to include others demands activity of a certain kind--sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature
because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow-- priests,
kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their
illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa--but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor
for mere literature--it insists that symbols must cause events as well as
private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all
eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo,
in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs
like dried dreams--the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink--wine & ganja,
meat, yantras & gestures-- rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis--the
sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated
with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where
the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
The tactics of ontological anarchism are rooted in this secret Art--the
goals of ontological anarchism appear in its flowering. Chaos hexes its
enemies & rewards its devotees...this strange yellowing pamphlet, pseudonymous
& dust-stained, reveals all...send away for one split second of eternity.
WHAT THIS TELLS YOU is not prose. It may be pinned to the board but it's
still alive & wriggling. It does not want to seduce you unless you're extremely
young & good-looking (enclose recent photo).
Hakim Bey lives in a seedy Chinese hotel where the proprietor nods out over
newspaper & scratchy broadcasts of Peking Opera. The ceiling fan turns like
a sluggish dervish- -sweat falls on the page--the poet's kaftan is rusty,
his ovals spill ash on the rug--his monologues seem disjointed & slightly
sinister--outside shuttered windows the barrio fades into palmtrees, the
naive blue ocean, the philosophy of tropicalismo.
Along a highway somewhere east of Baltimore you pass an Airstream trailer
with a big sign on the lawn SPIRITUAL READINGS & the image of a crude black
hand on a red background. Inside you notice a display of dream-books, numbers-books,
pamphlets on HooDoo and Santeria, dusty old nudist magazines, a pile of Boy's Life, treatises on fighting-cocks...& this book, Chaos. Like words spoken in a dream, portentous, evanescent, changing into perfumes,
birds, colors, forgotten music.
This book distances itself by a certain impassibility of surface, almost
a glassiness. It doesn't wag its tail & it doesn't snarl but it bites &
humps the furniture. It doesn't have an ISBN number & it doesn't want you
for a disciple but it might kidnap your children.
This book is nervous like coffee or malaria--it sets up a network of cut-outs
& safe drops between itself & its readers--but it's so baldfaced & literal-minded
it practically encodes itself--it smokes itself into a stupor.
A mask, an automythology, a map without placenames--stiff as an egyptian
wallpainting nevertheless it reaches to caress someone's face--& suddenly
finds itself out in the street, in a body, embodied in light, walking, awake,
almost satisfied.
--NYC, May 1-July 4, 1984
Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. May be freely pirated & quoted
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