Acknowledgments

Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism was first published in 1985 by Grim Reaper Press of Weehawken, New Jersey; a later re-issue was published in Providence, Rhode Island, and this edition was pirated in Boulder, Colorado. Another edition was released by Verlag Golem of Providence in 1990, and pirated in Santa Cruz, California, by We Press. “The Temporary Autonomous Zone” was performed at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and on WBAI-FM in New York City, in 1990.

Thanx to the following publications, current and defunct, in which some of these pieces appeared (no doubt I’ve lost or forgotten many — sorry!): KAOS (London); Ganymede (London); Pan (Amsterdam); Popular Reality; Exquisite Corpse (also Stiffest of the Corpse, City Lights); Anarchy (Columbia, MO); Factsheet Five; Dharma Combat; OVO; City Lights Review; Rants and Incendiary Tracts (Amok); Apocalypse Culture (Amok); Mondo 2000; The Sporadical; Black Eye; Moorish Science Monitor; FEH!; Fag Rag; The Storm!; Panic (Chicago); Bolo Log (Zurich); Anathema; Seditious Delicious; Minor Problems (London); AQUA; Prakilpana.

Also, thanx to the following individuals: Jim Fleming; James Koehnline; Sue Ann Harkey; Sharon Gannon; Dave Mandl; Bob Black; Robert Anton Wilson; William Burroughs; “P.M.”; Joel Birroco; Adam Parfrey; Brett Rutherford; Jake Rabinowitz; Allen Ginsberg; Anne Waldman; Frank Torey; Andr Codrescu; Dave Crowbar; Ivan Stang; Nathaniel Tarn; Chris Funkhauser; Steve Englander; Alex Trotter. — March, 1991

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.

Poetic Terrorism

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

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.

Wild Children

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 tenor 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.

Paganism

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

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.

The Assassins

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.

Pyrotechnics

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.

Chaos Myths

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.

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...

...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.

Crime

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.

Sorcery

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

Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy

Communique #1 (spring 1986)

I. Slogans & Mottos for Subway Graffiti & Other Purposes

ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANISM

POETIC TERRORISM

(for scrawling or rubberstamping on advertisements:)

THIS IS YOUR TRUE DESIRE

MARXISM-STIRNERISM

STRIKE FOR INDOLENCE & SPIRITUAL BEAUTY

YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE BEAUTIFUL FEET

THE CHAINS OF LAW HAVE BEEN BROKEN

TANTRIK PORNOGRAPHY

RADICAL ARISTOCRATISM

KIDS’ LIB URBAN GUERILLAS

IMAGINARY SHIITE FANATICS

BOLO’BOLO

GAY ZIONISM

(SODOM FOR THE SODOMITES)

PIRATE UTOPIAS

CHAOS NEVER DIED

Some of these are “sincere” slogans of the A.O.A. — others are meant to rouse public apprehension & misgivings — but we’re not sure which is which. Thanx to Stalin, Anon., Bob Black, Pir Hassan (upon his mention be peace), F. Nietzsche, Hank Purcell Jr., “P.M.,” & Bro. Abu Jehad al-Salah of the Moorish Temple of Dagon.

II. Some Poetic-Terrorist Ideas Still Sadly Languishing in the Realm of “Conceptual Art”

Walk into Citibank or Chembank computer customer service area during busy period, take a shit on the floor, & leave. Chicago May Day ’86: organize “religious” procession for Haymarket “Martyrs” — huge banners with sentimental portraits, wreathed in flowers & streaming with tinsel & ribbon, borne by penitenti in black KKKatholic-style hooded gowns — outrageous campy TV acolytes with incense & holy water sprinkle the crowd — anarchists w/ash-smeared faces beat themselves with little flails & whips — a “Pope” in black robes blesses tiny symbolic coffins reverently carried to Cemetery by weeping punks. Such a spectacle ought to offend nearly everyone. Paste up in public places a xerox flyer, photo of a beautiful twelve-year-old boy, naked and masturbating, clearly titled: THE FACE OF GOD. Mail elaborate & exquisite magickal “blessings” anonymously to people or groups you admire, e.g. for their politics or spirituality or physical beauty or success in crime, etc. Follow the same general procedure as outlined in Section 5 below, but utilize an aesthetic of good fortune, bliss or love, as appropriate. Invoke a terrible curse on a malign institution, such as the New York Post or the MUZAK company. A technique adapted from Malaysian sorcerers: send the Company a package containing a bottle, corked and sealed with black wax. Inside: dead insects, scorpions, lizards or the like; a bag containing graveyard dirt (“gris-gris” in American HooDoo terminology) along with other noxious substances; an egg, pierced with iron nails and pins; and a scroll on which an emblem is drawn (see p. 57).

(This yantra or veve invokes the Black Djinn, the Self’s dark shadow. Full details obtainable from the A.O.A.) An accompanying note explains that the hex is sent against the institution & not against individuals — but unless the institution itself ceases to be malign, the curse (like a mirror) will begin to infect the premises with noxious fortune, a miasma of negativity. Prepare a “news release” explaining the curse & taking credit for it in the name of the American Poetry Society. Mail copies of this text to all employees of the institution & to selected media. The night before these letters arrive, wheatpaste the institutional premises with xerox copies of the Black Djinn’s emblem, where they will be seen by all employees arriving for work next morning.

(Thanx to Abu Jehad again, & to Sri Anamananda — the Moorish Castellan of Belvedere Weather Tower — & other comrades of the Central Park Autonomous Zone, & Brooklyn Temple Number 1)

Communique #2: The Kallikak Memorial Bolo & Chaos Ashram: A Proposal

Nursing an obsession for Airstream trailers — those classic miniature dirigibles on wheels — & also the New Jersey Pine Barrens, huge lost backlands of sandy creeks & tar pines, cranberry bogs & ghost towns, population around 14 per sq. mile, dirt roads overgrown with fern, brokenspine cabins & isolated rusty mobile homes with burnt-out cars in the front yards

land of the mythical Kallikaks — Piney families studied by eugenicists in the 1920’s to justify sterilization of rural poor. Some Kallikaks married well, prospered, & waxed bourgeois thanx to good genes — others however never worked real jobs but lived off the woods — incest, sodomy, mental deficiencies galore — photos touched up to make them look vacant & morose — descended from rogue Indians, Hessian mercenaries, rum smugglers, deserters — Lovecraftian degenerates

come to think of it the Kallikaks might well have produced secret Chaotes, precursor sex radicals, Zerowork prophets. Like other monotone landscapes (desert, sea, swamp), the Barrens seem infused with erotic power — not vril or orgone so much as a languid disorder, almost a sluttishness of Nature, as if the very ground & water were formed of sexual flesh, membranes, spongy erectile tissue. We want to squat there, maybe an abandoned hunting/fishing lodge with old woodstove & privy — or decaying Vacation Cabins on some disused County Highway — or just a woodlot where we park 2 or 3 Airstreams hidden back in the pines near creek or swimming hole. Were the Kallikaks onto something good? We’ll find out

somewhere boys dream that extraterrestrials will come to rescue them from their families, perhaps vaporizing the parents with some alien ray in the process. Oh well. Space Pirate Kidnap Plot Uncovered — “Alien” Unmasked As Shiite Fanatic Queer Poet — UFOs Seen Over Pine Barrens — “Lost Boys Will Leave Earth,” Claims So-Called Prophet Of Chaos Hakim Bey

runaway boys, mess & disorder, ecstasy & sloth, skinny-dipping, childhood as permanent insurrection — collections of frogs, snails, leaves — pissing in the moonlight — 11, 12, 13 — old enough to seize back control of one’s own history from parents, school, Welfare, TV — Come live with us in the Barrens — we’ll cultivate a local brand of seedless rope to finance our luxuries & contemplation of summer’s alchemy — & otherwise produce nothing but artifacts of Poetic Terrorism & mementos of our pleasures

going for aimless rides in the old pickup, fishing & gathering, lying around in the shade reading comics & eating grapes — this is our economy. The suchness of things when unchained from the Law, each molecule an orchid, each atom a pearl to the attentive consciousness — this is our cult. The Airstream is draped with Persian rugs, the lawn is profuse with satisfied weeds

the treehouse becomes a wooden spaceship in the nakedness of July & midnight, half-open to the stars, warm with epicurean sweat, rushed & then hushed by the breathing of the Pines. (Dear Bolo Log: You asked for a practical & feasible utopia — here it is, no mere post-holocaust fantasy, no castles on the moon of Jupiter — a scheme we could start up tomorrow — except that every single aspect of it breaks some law, reveals some absolute taboo in U.S. society, threatens the very fabric of etc., etc. Too bad. This is our true desire, & to attain it we must contemplate not only a life of pure art but also pure crime, pure insurrection. Amen.)

(Thanx to the Grim Reaper & other members of the Si Fan Temple of Providence for YALU, GANO, SILA, & ideas)

Communique #3: Haymarket Issue

“I need only mention in passing that there is a curious reappearance of the Catfish tradition in the popular Godzilla cycle of films which arose after the nuclear chaos unleashed upon Japan. In fact, the symbolic details in the evolution of Godzilla filmic poplore parallel in a quite surprising way the traditional Japanese and Chinese mythological and folkloric themes of combat with an ambivalent chaos creature (some of the films, like Mothra, directly recalling the ancient motifs of the cosmic egg/gourd/cocoon) that is usually tamed, after the failure of the civilizational order, through the special and indirect agency of children.” — Girardot, Myth & Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-t’un)

In some old Moorish Science Temple (in Chicago or Baltimore) a friend claimed to have seen a secret altar on which rested a matched pair of six shooters (in velvet-lined case) & a black fez. Supposedly initiation to the inner circle required the neophyte Moor to assassinate at least one cop. /// What about Louis Lingg? Was he a precursor of Ontological Anarchism? “I despise you” — one can’t help but admiring such sentiments. But the man dynamited himself aged 22 to cheat the gallows...this is not exactly our chosen path. /// The IDEA of the POLICE like hydra grows 100 new heads for each one cut off — and all these heads are live cops. Slicing off heads gains us nothing, but only enhances the beast’s power till it swallows us. /// First murder the IDEA — blow up the monument inside us — & then perhaps...the balance of power will shift. When the last cop in our brain is gunned down by the last unfulfilled desire — perhaps even the landscape around us will begin to change.../// Poetic Terrorism proposes this sabotage of archetypes as the only practical insurrectionary tactic for the present. But as Shiite Extremists eager for the overthrow (by any means) of all police, ayatollahs, bankers, executioners, priests, etc., we reserve the option of venerating even the “failures” of radical excess. /// A few days unchained from the Empire of Lies might well be worth considerable sacrifice; a moment of exalted realization may outweigh a lifetime of microcephalic boredom & work. /// But this moment must become ours — and our ownership of it is seriously compromised if we must commit suicide to preserve its integrity. So we mix our veneration with irony — it’s not martyrdom itself we propose, but the courage of the dynamiter, the self-possession of a Chaos-monster, the attainment of criminal & illegal pleasures.

Communique #4: The End of the World

The A.O.A. declares itself officially bored with the End of the World. The canonical version has been used since 1945 to keep us cowering in fear of Mutual Assured Destruction & in snivelling servitude to our super-hero politicians (the only ones capable of handling deadly Green Kryptonite)...

What does it mean that we have invented a way to destroy all life on Earth? Nothing much. We have dreamed this as an escape from the contemplation of our own individual deaths. We have made an emblem to serve as the mirror-image of a discarded immortality. Like demented dictators we swoon at the thought of taking it all down with us into the Abyss.

The unofficial version of the Apocalypse involves a lascivious yearning for the End, & for a post-Holocaust Eden where the Survivalists (or the 144,000 Elect of Revelations) can indulge themselves in orgies of Dualist hysteria, endless final confrontations with a seductive evil...

We have seen the ghost of Rene Guenon, cadaverous & topped with a fez (like Boris Karloff as Ardis Bey in The Mummy) leading a funereal No Wave Industrial-Noise rock band in loud buzzing blackfly-chants for the death of Culture & Cosmos: the elitist fetishism of pathetic nihilists, the Gnostic self-disgust of “post-sexual” intellectoids.

Are these dreary ballads not simply mirror-images of all those lies & platitudes about Progress & the Future, beamed from every loudspeaker, zapped like paranoid brain-waves from every schoolbook & TV in the world of the Consensus? The thanatosis of the Hip Millenarians extrudes itself like pus from the false health of the Consumers’ & Workers’ Paradises.

Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant — the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past — imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world — despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb — a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture.

The “normative” past or the future heat-death of the universe mean as little to us as last year’s GNP or the withering away of the State. All Ideal pasts, all futures which have not yet come to pass, simply obstruct our consciousness of total vivid presence.

Certain sects believe that the world (or “a” world) has already come to an end. For Jehovah’s Witnesses it happened in 1914 (yes folks, we are living in the Book of Revelations now). For certain oriental occultists, it occurred during the Major Conjunction of the Planets in 1962. Joachim of Fiore proclaimed the Third Age, that of the Holy Spirit, which replaced those of Father & Son. Hassan II of Alamut proclaimed the Great Resurrection, the immanentization of the eschaton, paradise on earth. Profane time came to an end somewhere in the late Middle Ages. Since then we’ve been living angelic time — only most of us don’t know it.

Or to take an even more Radical Monist stance: Time never started at all. Chaos never died. The Empire was never founded. We are not now & never have been slaves to the past or hostages to the future.

We suggest that the End of the World be declared a fait accompli; the exact date is unimportant. The ranters in 1650 knew that the Millenium comes now into each soul that wakes to itself, to its own centrality & divinity. “Rejoice, fellow creature,” was their greeting. “All is ours!”

I want no part of any other End of the World. A boy smiles at me in the street. A black crow sits in a pink magnolia tree, cawing as orgone accumulates & discharges in a split second over the city...summer begins. I may be your lover...but I spit on your Millenium.

Communique #5: “Intellectual S/M Is the Fascism of the Eighties — The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It”

COMRADES!

Recently some confusion about “Chaos” has plagued the A.O.A. from certain revanchist quarters, forcing us (who despise polemics) at last to indulge in a Plenary Session devoted to denunciations ex cathedra, portentous as hell; our faces burn red with rhetoric, spit flies from our lips, neck veins bulge with pulpit fervor. We must at last descend to flying banners with angry slogans (in 1930’s type faces) declaring what Ontological Anarchy is not.

Remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a principle of continual creation than of any nihil, void in the sense of potentia, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”)

From this alchemy we quintessentialize an aesthetic theory. Chaote art may act terrifying, it may even act grand guignol, but it can never allow itself to be drenched in putrid negativity, thanatosis, schadenfreude (delight in the misery of others), crooning over Nazi memorabilia & serial murders. Ontological Anarchy collects no snuff films & is bored to tears with dominatrices who spout french philosophy. (“Everything is hopeless & I knew it before you did, asshole. Nyahh!”)

Wilhelm Reich was driven half mad & killed by agents of the Emotional Plague; maybe half his work derived from sheer paranoia (UFO conspiracies, homophobia, even his orgasm theory), BUT on one point we agree wholeheartedly — sexpol: sexual repression breeds death obsession, which leads to bad politics. A great deal of avant-garde Art is saturated with Deadly Orgone Rays (DOR). Ontological Anarchy aims to build aesthetic cloud-busters (OR-guns) to disperse the miasma of cerebral sado-masochism which now passes for slick, hip, new, fashionable. Self-mutilating “performance” artists strike us as banal & stupid — their art makes everyone more unhappy. What kind of two-bit conniving horseshit...what kind of cockroach-brained Art creeps cooked up this apocalypse stew?

Of course the avant-garde seems “smart” — so did Marinetti & the Futurists, so did Pound & Celine. Compared to that kind of intelligence we’d choose real stupidity, bucolic New Age blissed-out inanity — we’d rather be pinheads than queer for death. But luckily we don’t have to scoop out our brains to attain our own queer brand of satori. All the faculties, all the senses belong to us as our property — both heart & head, intellect & spirit, body & soul. Ours is no art of mutilation but of excess, superabundance, amazement.

The purveyors of pointless gloom are the Death Squads of contemporary aesthetics — & we are the “disappeared ones.” Their make-believe ballroom of occult 3rd-Reich bric-a-brac & child murder attracts the manipulators of the Spectacle — death looks better on TV than life — & we Chaotes, who preach an insurrectionary joy, are edged out towards silence.

Needless to say we reject all censorship by Church & State — but “after the revolution” we would be willing to take individual & personal responsibility for burning all the Death Squad snuff-art crap & running them out of town on a rail. (Criticism becomes direct action in an anarchist context.) My space has room neither for Jesus & his lords of the flies nor for Chas. Manson & his literary admirers. I want no mundane police — I want no cosmic axe-murderers either; no TV chainsaw massacres, no sensitive poststructuralist novels about necrophilia.

As it happens, the A.O.A. can scarcely hope to sabotage the suffocating mechanisms of the State & its ghostly circuitry — but we just might happen to find ourselves in a position to do something about lesser manifestations of the DOR plague such as the Corpse-Eaters of the Lower East Side & other Art scum. We support artists who use terrifying material in some “higher cause” — who use loving/sexual material of any kind, however shocking or illegal — who use their anger & disgust & their true desires to lurch toward self-realization & beauty & adventure. “Social Nihilism,” yes — but not the dead nihilism of gnostic self-disgust. Even if it’s violent & abrasive, anyone with a vestigial 3rd eye can see the differences between revolutionary pro-life art & reactionary pro-death art. DOR stinks, & the chaote nose can sniff it out — just as it knows the perfume of spiritual/sexual joy, however buried or masked by other darker scents. Even the Radical Right, for all its horror of flesh & the senses, occasionally comes up with a moment of perception & consciousness-enhancement — but the Death Squads, for all their tired lip service to fashionable revolutionary abstractions, offer us about as much true libertarian energy as the FBI, FDA, or the double-dip Baptists.

We live in a society which advertises its costliest commodities with images of death & mutilation, beaming them direct to the reptilian back-brain of the millions thru alpha-wave-generating carcinogenic reality-warping devices — while certain images of life (such as our favorite, a child masturbating) are banned & punished with incredible ferocity. It takes no guts at all to be an Art Sadist, for salacious death lies at the aesthetic center of our Consensus Paradigm. “Leftists” who like to dress up & play Police-&-Victim, people who jerk off to atrocity photos, people who like to think & intellectualize about splatter art & highfalutin hopelessness & groovy ghoulishness & other people’s misery — such “artists” are nothing but police-without-power (a perfect definition for many “revolutionaries” too). We have a black bomb for these aesthetic fascists — it explodes with sperm & firecrackers, raucous weeds & piracy, weird Shiite heresies & bubbling paradise-fountains, complex rhythms, pulsations of life, all shapeless & exquisite.

Wake up! Breathe! Feel the world’s breath against your skin! Seize the day! Breathe! Breathe!

(Thanx to J. Mander’s Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television; Adam Exit; & the Moorish Cosmopolitan of Williamsburg)

Communique #6

I. Salon Apocalypse: “Secret Theater”

As long as no Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of...an insurrection?

Never mind if it’s “impossible.” What else can we hope to attain but the “impossible”? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?

If art has died, or the audience has withered away, then we find ourselves free of two dead weights. Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist — & potentially every audience has regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences.

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images we’ve been “given” by the organizers of this salon — murder, war, famine, & greed).

We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness — but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure.

For example, the man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacifist & refused to fight for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree..

One day a former fellow-officer came to visit him & accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting — & the officer fell into a rage, drew his sword, & struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the officer & returned his sword. Again & again the officer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire — but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him.

The officer of course became his first disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. We might contemplate some form of metadrama meant to capture a taste of this performance, which gave rise to a wholly new art, a totally non-violent way of fighting — war without murder, “the sword of life” rather than death.

A conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence — at the millennium rather than the apocalypse — or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization & liberation.

Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared — only to re-appear on another plane, where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?

(Note: The “Salon Apocalypse” was organized by Sharon Gannon in July, 1986.)

II. Murder — War — Famine — Greed

The manichees & cathars believed that the body can be spiritualized — or rather, that the body merely contaminates pure spirit & must be utterly rejected. The Gnostic perfecti (radical dualists) starved themselves to death to escape the body & return to the pleroma of pure light. So: to evade the evils of the flesh — murder, war, famine, greed — paradoxically only one path remains: murder of one’s own body, war on the flesh, famine unto death, greed for salvation.

The radical monists however (Ismailis, Ranters, Antinomians) consider that body & spirit are one, that the same spirit which pervades a black stone also infuses the flesh with its light; that all lives & all is life.

“Things are what they are spontaneously...everything is natural...all in motion as if there were a True Lord to move them — but if we seek for evidence of this lord we fail to find any.” (Kuo Hsiang)

Paradoxically, the monist path also cannot be followed without some sort of “murder, war, famine, greed”: the transformation of death into life (food, negentropy) — war against the Empire of Lies — “fasting of the soul,” or renunciation of the Lie, of all that is not life — & greed for life itself, the absolute power of desire.

Even more: without knowledge of the darkness (“carnal knowledge”) there can exist no knowledge of the light (“gnosis”). The two knowledges are not merely complementary: say rather identical, like the same note played in different octaves. Heraclitus claims that reality persists in a state of “war.” Only clashing notes can make harmony. (“Chaos is the sum of all orders.”) Give each of these four terms a different mask of language (to call the Furies “The Kindly Ones” is not mere euphemism but a way of uncovering yet more meaning). Masked, ritualized, realized as art, the terms take on their dark beauty, their “Black Light.”

Instead of murder say the hunt, the pure paleolithic economy of all archaic and non-authoritarian tribal society — “venery,” both the killing & eating of flesh & the way of Venus, of desire. Instead of war say insurrection, not the revolution of classes & powers but of the eternal rebel, the dark one who uncovers light. Instead of greed say yearning, unconquerable desire, mad love. And then instead of famine, which is a kind of mutilation, speak of wholeness, plenty, superabundance, generosity of the self which spirals outward toward the Other.

Without this dance of masks, nothing will be created. The oldest mythology makes Eros the firstborn of Chaos. Eros, the wild one who tames, is the door through which the artist returns to Chaos, the One, and then re-returns, comes back again, bearing one of the patterns of beauty. The artist, the hunter, the warrior: one who is both passionate and balanced, both greedy & altruistic to the utmost extreme. We must be saved from all salvations which save us from ourselves, from our animal which is also our anima, our very lifeforce, as well as our animus, our animating self-empowerment, which may even manifest as anger & greed. BABYLON has told us that our flesh is filth — with this device & the promise of salvation it enslaved us. But — if the flesh is already “saved,” already light — if even consciousness itself is a kind of flesh, a palpable & simultaneous living aether — then we need no power to intercede for us. The wilderness, as Omar says, is paradise even now.

The true proprietorship of murder lies with the Empire, for only freedom is complete life. War is Babylonian as well — no free person will die for another’s aggrandizement. Famine comes into existence only with the civilization of the saviors, the priest-kings — wasn’t it Joseph who taught Pharaoh to speculate in grain futures? Greed — for land, for symbolic wealth, for power to deform others’ souls & bodies for their own salvation — greed too arises not from “Nature nature-ing,” but from the damming up & canalization of all energies for the Empire’s Glory. Against all this, the artist possesses the dance of masks, the total radicalization of language, the invention of a “Poetic Terrorism” which will strike not at living beings but at malign ideas, dead-weights on the coffin-lid of our desires. The architecture of suffocation and paralysis will be blown up. only by our total celebration of everything — even darkness.

— Summer Solstice, 1986

Communique #7: Psychic Paleolithism & High Technology: A Position Paper

Just because the A.O.A. talks about “Paleolithism” all the time, don’t get the idea we intend to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.

We have no interest in going “back to the land” if the deal includes the boring life of a shit-kicking peasant — nor do we want “tribalism” if it comes with taboos, fetishes & malnutrition. We have no quarrel with the concept of culture — including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization.

What we like about Paleolithic life has been summed up by the Peoples-Without-Authority School of anthropology: the elegant laziness of hunter/gatherer society, the 2-hour workday, the obsession with art, dance, poetry & amorousness, the “democratization of shamanism,” the cultivation of perception — in short, culture.

What we dislike about civilization can be deduced from the following progression: the “Agricultural Revolution”; the emergence of caste; the City & its cult of hieratic control (“Babylon”); slavery; dogma; imperialism (“Rome”). The suppression of sexuality in “work” under the aegis of “authority.” “The Empire never ended.”

A psychic paleolithism based on High-Tech — post-agricultural, post-industrial, “Zerowork,” nomadic (or “Rootless Cosmopolitan”) — a Quantum Paradigm Society — this constitutes the ideal vision of the future according to Chaos Theory as well as “Futurology” (in the Robert Anton Wilson-T. Leary sense of the term).

As for the present: we reject all collaboration with the Civilization of Anorexia & Bulimia, with people so ashamed of never suffering that they invent hair shirts for themselves & others — or those who gorge without compassion & then spew the vomit of their suppressed guilt in great masochistic bouts of jogging & dieting. All our pleasures & self-disciplines belong to us by Nature — we never deny ourselves, we never give up anything; but some things have given up on us & left us, because we are too large for them. I am both caveman & starfaring mutant, con-man & free prince. Once an Indian Chief was invited to the White House for a banquet. As the food passed round, the Chief heaped his plate to the max, not once but three times. At last the honky sitting next to him says, “Chief, heh-heh, don’t you think that’s a little too much?” “Ugh,” the Chief replies, “little too much just right for Chief!”

Nevertheless, certain doctrines of “Futurology” remain problematic. For example, even if we accept the liberatory potential of such new technologies as TV, computers, robotics, Space exploration, etc., we still see a gap between potentiality & actualization. The banalization of TV, the yuppification of computers & the militarization of Space suggest that these technologies in themselves provide no “determined” guarantee of their liberatory use.

Even if we reject the Nuclear Holocaust as just another Spectacular Diversion orchestrated to distract our attention from real problems, we must still admit that “Mutual Assured Destruction” & “Pure War” tend to dampen our enthusiasm for certain aspects of the High-Tech Adventure. Ontological Anarchy retains its affection for Luddism as a tactic: if a given technology, no matter how admirable in potentia (in the future), is used to oppress me here & now, then I must either wield the weapon of sabotage or else seize the means of production (or perhaps more importantly the means of communication). There is no humanity without techne — but there is no techne worth more than my humanity.

We spurn knee-jerk anti-Tech anarchism — for ourselves, at least (there exist some who enjoy farming, or so one hears) — and we reject the concept of the Technological Fix as well. For us all forms of determinism appear equally vapid — we’re slaves of neither our genes nor our machines. What is “natural” is what we imagine & create. “Nature has no Laws — only habits.”

Life for us belongs neither to the Past — that land of famous ghosts hoarding their tarnished grave-goods — nor to the Future, whose bulbbrained mutant citizens guard so jealously the secrets of immortality, faster-than-light flight, designer genes & the withering of the State. Aut nunc aut nihil. Each moment contains an eternity to be penetrated — yet we lose ourselves in visions seen through corpses’ eyes, or in nostalgia for unborn perfections.

The attainments of my ancestors & descendants are nothing more to me than an instructive or amusing tale — I will never call them my betters, even to excuse my own smallness. I print for myself a license to steal from them whatever I need — psychic paleolithism or high-tech — or for that matter the gorgeous detritus of civilization itself, secrets of the Hidden Masters, pleasures of frivolous nobility & la vie boheme.

La decadence, Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, plays as deep a role in Ontological Anarchy as health — we take what we want of each. Decadent aesthetes do not wage stupid wars nor submerge their consciousness in microcephalic greed & resentment. They seek adventure in artistic innovation & non-ordinary sexuality rather than in the misery of others. The A.O.A. admires & emulates their sloth, their disdain for the stupidity of normalcy, their expropriation of aristocratic sensibilities. For us these qualities harmonize paradoxically with those of the Old Stone Age & its overflowing health, ignorance of hierarchy, cultivation of virtu rather than Law. We demand decadence without sickness, & health without boredom!

Thus the A.O.A. gives unqualified support to all indigenous & tribal peoples in their struggle for complete autonomy — & at the same time, to the wildest, most Spaced-out speculations & demands of the Futurologists. The paleolithism of the future (which for us, as mutants, already exists) will be achieved on a grand scale only through a massive technology of the Imagination, and a scientific paradigm which reaches beyond Quantum Mechanics into the realm of Chaos Theory & the hallucinations of Speculative Fiction.

As Rootless Cosmopolitans we lay claim to all the beauties of the past, of the orient, of tribal societies — all this must & can be ours, even the treasuries of the Empire: ours to share. And at the same time we demand a technology which transcends agriculture, industry, even the simultaneity of electricity, a hardware that intersects with the wetware of consciousness, that embraces the power of quarks, of particles travelling backward in time, of quasars & parallel universes.

The squabbling ideologues of anarchism & libertarianism each prescribe some utopia congenial to their various brands of tunnel-vision, ranging from the peasant commune to the L-5 Space City. We say, let a thousand flowers bloom — with no gardener to lop off weeds & sports according to some moralizing or eugenical scheme. The only true conflict is that between the authority of the tyrant & the authority of the realized self — all else is illusion, psychological projection, wasted verbiage.

In one sense the sons & daughters of Gaia have never left the paleolithic; in another sense, all the perfections of the future are already ours. Only insurrection will “solve” this paradox — only the uprising against false consciousness in both ourselves & others will sweep away the technology of oppression & the poverty of the Spectacle. In this battle a painted mask or shaman’s rattle may prove as vital as the seizing of a communications satellite or secret computer network.

Our sole criterion for judging a weapon or a tool is its beauty. The means already are the end, in a certain sense; the insurrection already is our adventure; Becoming IS Being. Past & future exist within us & for us, alpha & omega. There are no other gods before or after us. We are free in TIME — and will be free in SPACE as well.

(Thanx to Hagbard Celine the Sage of Howth & Environs)

Communique #8: Chaos Theory & the Nuclear Family

Sunday in Riverside Park the Fathers fix their sons in place, nailing them magically to the grass with baleful ensorcelling stares of milky camaraderie, & force them to throw baseballs back & forth for hours. The boys almost appear to be small St Sebastians pierced by arrows of boredom.

The smug rituals of family fun turn each humid Summer meadow into a Theme Park, each son an unwitting allegory of Father’s wealth, a pale representation 2 or 3 times removed from reality: the Child as metaphor of Something-or-other.

And here I come as dusk gathers, stoned on mushroom dust, half convinced that these hundreds of fireflies arise from my own consciousness — Where have they been all these years? why so many so suddenly? — each rising in the moment of its incandescence, describing quick arcs like abstract graphs of the energy in sperm.

“Families! misers of love! How I hate them!” Baseballs fly aimlessly in vesper light, catches are missed, voices rise in peevish exhaustion. The children feel sunset encrusting the last few hours of doled-out freedom, but still the Fathers insist on stretching the tepid postlude of their patriarchal sacrifice till dinnertime, till shadows eat the grass.

Among these sons of the gentry one locks gazes with me for a moment — I transmit telepathically the image of sweet license, the smell of TIME unlocked from all grids of school, music lessons, summer camps, family evenings round the tube, Sundays in the Park with Dad — authentic time, chaotic time.

Now the family is leaving the Park, a little platoon of dissatisfaction. But that one turns & smiles back at me in complicity — “Message Received” — & dances away after a firefly, buoyed up by my desire. The Father barks a mantra which dissipates my power.

The moment passes. The boy is swallowed up in the pattern of the week — vanishes like a bare-legged pirate or Indian taken prisoner by missionaries. The Park knows who I am, it stirs under me like a giant jaguar about to wake for nocturnal meditation. Sadness still holds it back, but it remains untamed in its deepest essence: an exquisite disorder at the heart of the city’s night.

Communique #9: Double-Dip Denunciations

I. Xtianity

Again & again we hope that attitudinizing corpse has finally breathed its last rancorous sigh & floated off to its final pumpkinification. Again & again we imagine the defeat of that obscene flayed death-trip bogey nailed to the walls of all our waiting rooms, never again to whine at us for our sins...

but again & again it resurrects itself & comes creeping back to haunt us like the villain of some nth rate snuff-porn splatter film — the thousandth re-make of Night of the Living Dead — trailing its snail-track of whimpering humiliation...just when you thought it was safe in the unconscious...it’s JAWS for JESUS. Look out! Hardcore Chainsaw Baptists!

and the Leftists, nostalgic for the Omega Point of their dialectical paradise, welcome each galvanized revival of the putrescent creed with coos of delight: Let’s dance the tango with all those marxist bishops from Latin America — croon a ballad for the pious Polish dockworkers — hum spirituals for the latest afro-Methodist presidential hopeful from the Bible Belt...

The A.O.A. denounces Liberation Theology as a conspiracy of stalinist nuns — the Whore of Babylon’s secret scarlet deal with red fascism in the tropics. Solidarnosc? The Pope’s Own Labor Union — backed by the AFL/CIO, the Vatican Bank, the Freemason Lodge Propaganda Due, and the Mafia. And if we ever voted we’d never waste that empty gesture on some Xtian dog, no matter what its breed or color.

As for the real Xtians, those bored-again self-lobotomized bigots, those Mormon babykillers, those Star Warriors of the Slave Morality, televangelist blackshirts, zombie squads of the Blessed Virgin Mary (who hovers in a pink cloud over the Bronx spewing hatred, anathema, roses of vomit on the sexuality of children, pregnant teenagers & queers)...

As for the genuine death-cultists, ritual cannibals, Armageddon-freaks — the Xtian Right — we can only pray that the RAPTURE WILL COME & snatch them all up from behind the steering wheels of their cars, from their lukewarm game shows & chaste beds, take them all up into heaven & let us get on with human life.

II. Abortionists & Anti-abortionists

Rednecks who bomb abortion clinics belong in the same grotesque category of vicious stupidity as bishops who prattle Peace & yet condemn all human sexuality. Nature has no laws (“only habits”), & all law is unnatural. Everything belongs to the sphere of personal/imaginal morality — even murder.

However, according to Chaos Theory, it does not follow that we are obliged to like & approve of murder — or abortion. Chaos would enjoy seeing every bastard love-child carried to term & birthed; sperm & egg alone are mere lovely secretions, but combined as DNA they become potential consciousness, negentropy, joy.

If “meat is murder!” as the Vegans like to claim, what pray tell is abortion? Those totemists who danced to the animals they hunted, who meditated to become one with their living food & share its tragedy, demonstrated values far more humane than the average claque of “pro-Choice” feminoid liberals.

In every single “issue” cooked up for “debate” in the patternbook of the Spectacle, both sides are invariably full of shit. The “abortion issue” is no exception..

Communique #10: Plenary Session Issues New Denunciations — Purges Expected

To offset any sticky karma we might have acquired thru our pulpit-thumping sermonette against Xtians & other end-of-the-world creeps (see last ish) & just to set the record straight: the A.O.A. also denounces all born-again knee-jerk atheists & their frowsy late-Victorian luggage of scientistic vulgar materialism. ///// We applaud all anti-Xtian sentiment, of course — & all attacks on all organized religions. But...to hear some anarchists talk you’d think the sixties never happened and no one ever dropped LSD. ///// As for the scientists themselves, the Alice-like madnesses of Quantum & Chaos Theory have driven the best of them towards taoism & vedanta (not to mention dada) — & yet if you read The Match or Freedom you might imagine science was embalmed with Prince Kropotkin — & “religion” with Bishop Ussher. ///// Of course one despises the Aquarian brownshirts, the kind of gurus lauded recently in the New York Times for their contributions to Big Business, the franchise-granting yuppie zombie cults, the anorexic metaphysics of New Age banality...but OUR esotericism remains undefiled by these mediocre money-changers & their braindead minions. ///// The heretics & antinomian mystics of Orient & Occident have developed systems based on inner liberation. Some of these systems are tainted with religious mysticism & even social reaction — others seem more purely radical or “psychological” — & some even crystallize into revolutionary movements (millenarian Levellers, Assassins, Yellow Turban Taoists, etc.) Whatever their flaws they possess certain magical weapons which anarchism sorely lacks: (1) A sense of the meta-rational (“metanoia”), ways to go beyond laminated thinking into smooth (or nomadic or “chaotic”) thinking & perception; (2) an actual definition of self-realized or liberated consciousness, a positive description of its structure, & techniques for approaching it; (3) a coherent archetypal view of epistemology — that is, a way of knowing (about history, for example) that utilizes hermeneutic phenomenology to uncover patterns of meaning (something like the Surrealists’ “Paranoia Criticism”); (4) a teaching on sexuality (in the “tantrik” aspects of various Paths) that assigns value to pleasure rather than self-denial, not only for its own sake but as a vehicle of enhanced awareness or “liberation”; (5) an attitude of celebration, what might be called a “Jubilee concept,” a cancelling of psychic debt thru some inherent generosity in reality itself; (6) a language (including gesture, ritual, intentionality) with which to animate & communicate these five aspects of cognition; and (7) a silence. ///// It’s no surprise to discover how many anarchists are ex-Catholics, defrocked priests or nuns, former altar boys, lapsed born-again baptists or even ex-Shiite fanatics. Anarchism offers up a black (& red) Mass to de-ritualize all spook-haunted brains — a secular exorcism — but then betrays itself by cobbling together a High Church of its own, all cobwebby with Ethical Humanism, Free Thought, Muscular Atheism, & crude Fundamentalist Cartesian Logic. ///// Two decades ago we began the project of becoming Rootless Cosmopolitans, determined to sift the detritus of all tribes, cultures & civilizations (including our own) for viable fragments — & to synthesize from this mess of potsherds a living system of our own — lest (as Blake warned) we become slaves to someone else’s. ///// If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own “medicine pouch,” should I sneer & quote Bakunin’s line about stringing up priests with bankers’ guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped — & help myself to anything not nailed down? ///// The earliest definitions of anarchy are found in the Chuang Tzu & other taoist texts; “mystical anarchism” boasts a hoarier pedigree than the Greco-Rationalist variety. When Nietzsche spoke of the “Hyperboreans” I think he foretold us, who have gone beyond the death of God — & the rebirth of the Goddess — to a realm where spirit & matter are one. Every manifestation of that hierogamy, every material thing & every life, becomes not only “sacred” in itself but also symbolic of its own “divine essence.” ///// Atheism is nothing but the opiate of The Masses (or rather, their self-chosen champions) — & not a very colorful or sexy drug. If we are to follow Baudelaire’s advice & “be always intoxicated,” the A.O.A. would prefer something more like mushrooms, thank you. Chaos is the oldest of the gods — & Chaos never died.

Communique #11: Special Holiday Season Food Issue Rant: Turn Off the Lite!

The Association for Ontological Anarchy calls for a boycott of all products marketed under the Shibboleth of LITE — beer, meat, lo-cal candy, cosmetics, music, pre-packaged “lifestyles,” whatever.

The concept of LITE (in Situ-jargon) unfolds a complex of symbolism by which the Spectacle hopes to recuperate all revulsion against its commodification of desire. “Natural,” “organic,” “healthy” produce is designed for a market sector of mildly dissatisfied consumers with mild cases of future-shock & mild yearnings for a tepid authenticity. A niche has been prepared for you, softly illumined with the illusions of simplicity, cleanliness, thinness, a dash of asceticism & self-denial. Of course, it costs a little more...after all, LITEness was not designed for poor hungry primitivos who still think of food as nourishment rather than decor. It has to cost more — otherwise you wouldn’t buy it.

The American Middle Class (don’t quibble; you know what I mean) falls naturally into opposite but complementary factions: the Armies of Anorexia & Bulimia. Clinical cases of these diseases represent only the psychosomatic froth on a wave of cultural pathology, deep, diffused & largely unconscious. The Bulimics are those yupped-out gentry who gorge on margharitas & VCRs, then purge on LITE food, jogging, or (an)aerobic jiggling. The Anorexics are the “lifestyle” rebels, ultra-food-faddists, eaters of algae, joyless, dispirited & wan — but smug in their puritanical zeal & their designer hair-shirts. Grotesque junk food simply represents the flip-side of ghoulish “health food”: — nothing tastes like anything but woodchips or additives — it’s all either boring or carcinogenic — or both — & it’s all incredibly stupid.

Food, cooked or raw, cannot escape from symbolism. It is, & also simultaneously represents that which it is. All food is soul food; to treat it otherwise is to court indigestion, both chronic & metaphysical.

But in the airless vault of our civilization, where nearly every experience is mediated, where reality is strained through the deadening mesh of consensus-perception, we lose touch with food as nourishment; we begin to construct for ourselves personae based on what we consume, treating products as projections of our yearning for the authentic.

The A.O.A. sometimes envisions CHAOS as a cornucopia of continual creation, as a sort of geyser of cosmic generosity; therefore we refrain from advocating any specific diet, lest we offend against the Sacred Multiplicity & the Divine Subjectivity. We’re not about to hawk you yet another New Age prescription for perfect health (only the dead are perfectly healthy); we interest ourselves in life, not “lifestyles.”

True lightness we adore, & rich heaviness delights us in its season. Excess suits us to perfection, moderation pleases us, & we have learned that hunger can be the finest of all spices. Everything is light, & the lushest flowers grow round the privy. We dream of phalanstery tables & bolo’bolo cafes where every festive collective of diners will share the individual genius of a Brillat-Savarin (that saint of taste).

Shaykh Abu Sa’id never saved money or even kept it overnight — therefore, whenever some patron donated a heavy purse to his hospice, the dervishes celebrated with a gourmet feast; & on other days, all went hungry. The point was to enjoy both states, full & empty...

LITE parodies spiritual emptiness & illumination, just as McDonald’s travesties the imagery of fullness & celebration. The human spirit (not to mention hunger) can overcome & transcend all this fetishism — joy can erupt even at Burger King, & even LITE beer may hide a dose of Dionysus. But why should we have to struggle against this garbagy tide of cheap rip-off ticky-tack, when we could be drinking the wine of paradise even now under our own vine & fig tree?

Food belongs to the realm of everyday life, the primary arena for all insurrectionary self-empowerment, all spiritual self-enhancement, all seizing-back of pleasure, all revolt against the Planetary Work Machine & its imitation desires. Far be it from us to dogmatize; the Native American hunter might fuel his happiness with fried squirrel, the anarcho-taoist with a handful of dried apricots. Milarepa the Tibetan, after ten years of nettle-soup, ate a butter cake & achieved enlightenment. The dullard sees no eros in fine champagne; the sorcerer can fall intoxicated on a glass of water.

Our culture, choking on its own pollutants, cries out (like the dying Goethe) for “More LITE!” — as if these polyunsaturated effluents could somehow assuage our misery, as if their bland weightless tasteless characterlessness could protect us from the gathering dark.

No! This last illusion finally strikes us as too cruel. We are forced against our own slothful inclinations to take a stand & protest. Boycott! Boycott! TURN OFF THE LITE!

Appendix: Menu For An Anarchist Black Banquet (veg & non-veg)

Caviar & blinis; Hundred year old eggs; Squid & rice cooked in ink; Eggplants cooked in their skins with black pickled garlic; Wild rice with black walnuts & black mushrooms; Truffles in black butter; Venison marinated in port, charcoal grilled, served on pumpernickel slices & garnished with roast chestnuts. Black Russians; Guiness-&-champagne; Chinese black tea. Dark chocolate mousse, Turkish coffee, black grapes, plums, cherries, etc.

Special Halloween Communique: Black Magic as Revolutionary Action

Prepare an ink of pure & genuine saffron mixed with rose-water, adding if possible some blood from a black rooster. In a quiet room furnish an altar with a bowl of the ink, a pen with an iron nib, 7 black candles, an incense burner, & some benzoin. The charm may be written on virgin paper or parchment. Draw the diagram at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, facing North. Copy the 7-headed diagram (see illustration) without lifting the pen from the paper, in one smooth operation, holding your breath & pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth. This is the Barisan Laksamana, or King of the Djinn. Then draw the Solomon’s Seal (a star representing a 5-headed djinn) & other parts of the diagram. Above Solomon’s Seal write the name of the individual or institution to be cursed. Now hold the paper in the benzoin fumes, & invoke the white & black djinn within yourself:

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

as-salaam alikum

O White Djinn, Radiance of Mohammad

king of all spirits within me

O Black Djinn, shadow of myself

AWAY, destroy my enemy

— and if you do not

then be considered a traitor to Allah

— by virtue of the charm

La illaha ill’Allah

Mohammad ar-Rasul Allah

If the curse is to be aimed at an individual oppressor, a wax doll may be prepared & the charm inserted (see illustration).

Seven needles are then driven downward into the top of the head, thru the left & right armpits, left & right hips, & thru the lips or nostrils. Wrap the doll in a white shroud & bury it in the ground where the enemy is sure to walk over it, meanwhile enlisting the aid of local earth spirits:

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

O Earth Djinn, Dirt-spirit

O Black Djinn living underground

listen, vampire of the soil

I order you to mark & destroy

the body & soul of _____________

Heed my orders

for I am the true & original sorcerer

by virtue of the charm

la illaha ill’Allah

Mohammad ar-Rasul Allah

If however the curse is intended for an institution or company, assemble the following items: a hard-boiled egg, an iron nail, & 3 iron pins (stick nail & needles into egg); dried scorpion, lizard &/or beetles; a small chamois bag containing graveyard dirt, magnetized iron fillings, asafoetida & sulphur, & tied with a red ribbon. Sew the charm into yellow silk & seal it with red wax. Place all these things in a wide-necked bottle, cork it, & seal it with wax.

The bottle may now be carefully packaged & sent by mail to the target institution — for example a Xtian televangelist show, the New York Post, the MUZAK company, a school or college — along with a copy of the following statement (extra copies may be mailed to individual employees, &/or posted surreptitiously around the premises):

Malay Black Djinn Curse

These premises have been cursed by black sorcery. The curse has been activated according to correct rituals. This institution is cursed because it has oppressed the Imagination & defiled the Intellect, degraded the arts toward stupefaction, spiritual slavery, propaganda for State & Capital, puritanical reaction, unjust profits, lies & aesthetic blight. The employees of this institution are now in danger. No ind ividual has been cursed, but the place itself has been infec ted with ill fortune & malignancy. Those who do not wake up & quit, or begin sabotaging the workplace, will gradually fa ll under the effect of this sorcery. Removing or destroying the implement of sorcery will do no good. It has been seen i n this place, & this place is cursed. Reclaim your humanity & revolt in the name of the Imagination — or else be judged (in the mirror of this charm) an enemy of the human race.

We suggest “taking credit” for this action in the name of some other offensive cultural institution, such as the American Poetry Society or the Women’s Anti-Porn Crusade (give full address).

We also suggest, in order to counter-balance the effect on yourself of calling up the personal black djinn, that you send a magical blessing to someone or some group you love &/or admire. Do this anonymously, & make the gift beautiful. No precise ritual need be followed, but the imagery should be allowed to spring from the well of consciousness in an intuitive/spontaneous meditational state. Use sweet incense, red & white candles, hard candy, wine, flowers, etc. If possible include real silver, gold, or jewels in the gift.

This how-to-do-it manual on the Malay Black Djinn Curse has been prepared according to authentic & complete ritual by the Cultural Terrorism Committee of the inner Adept Chamber of the HMOCA (“Third Paradise”). We are Nizari-Ismaili Esotericists; that is, Shiite heretics & fanatics who trace our spiritual line to Hassan-i Sabbah through Aladdin Mohammad III “the Madman,” seventh & last Pir of Alamut (& not through the line of the Aga Khans). We espouse radical monism & pure antinomianism, & oppose all forms of law & authority, in the name of Chaos.

At present, for tactical reasons, we do not advocate violence or sorcery against individuals. We call for actions against institutions & ideas — art-sabotage & clandestine propaganda (including ceremonial magic & “tantrik pornography”) — and especially against the poisonous media of the Empire of Lies. The Black Djinn Curse represents only a first step in the campaign of Poetic Terrorism which — we trust — will lead to other less subtle forms of insurrection.

Special communique: A.O.A. Announces Purges in Chaos Movement

Chaos theory must of course flow impurely. “Lazy yokel plows a crooked furrow.” Any attempt to precipitate a crystal of ideology would result in flawed rigidities, fossilizations, armorings & drynesses which we would like to renounce, along with all “purity.” Yes, Chaos revels in a certain abandoned formlessness not unlike the erotic messiness of those we love for their shattering of habit & their unveiling of mutability. Nevertheless this looseness does not imply that Chaos Theory must accept every leech that attempts to attach itself to our sacred membranes. Certain definitions or deformations of Chaos deserve denunciation, & our dedication to divine disorder need not deter us from trashing the traitors & rip-off artists & psychic vampires now buzzing around Chaos under the impression that it’s trendy. We propose not an Inquisition in the name of our definitions, but rather a duel, a brawl, an act of violence or emotional repugnance, an exorcism. First we’d like to define & even name our enemies. (1) All those death-heads & mutilation artists who associate Chaos exclusively with misery, negativity & a joyless pseudo-libertinism — those who think “beyond good & evil” means doing evil — the S/M intellectuals, crooners of the apocalypse — the new Gnostic Dualists, world-haters & ugly nihilists. (2) All those scientists selling Chaos either as a force for destruction (e.g. particle-beam weapons) or as a mechanism for enforcing order, as in the use of Cha