Feral Faun (1987)
Rants: Essays and Polemics
“This book is dedicated to all Pansexual Pirates, Anarchic Adventurers, Mischievous Magicians, Chaotic Creators, Heroic Hermaphrodites, Delirious Deities, Prophetic Perverts, Orgasmic Outlaws, Androgynous Avatars, Beautiful Bandits, Erotic Elves, Demented Dreamers, Mad Moorish Mystics, Devine Dilinquents and Revelling Ranters. May your health, love and pleasure be yours always, grand creators of paradise.”
Feral Faun
Introduction
Here I am, a free spirit, a divine wild being wishing to make love to all that lives in a mad, erotic paradise. And all around me that paradise is denied by fools who think it evil or dangerous. And I get mad, I rant, I rave. They’re going to know that paradise is here, now, for those who dare to create it. Or if they don’t know, it won’t be because I haven’t tried to tell them.
In these essays and polemics, I attack viewpoints that deny anarchic paradise, I praise the wonders and beauty of chaos, the Cosmic, erotic dance. I rant against authority, ideology, morality. I dare to be offensive because some people need to be offended. I dare all who read this to imagine the impossible, for possible and impossible are socially defined. We are told that paradise isn’t possible and that divinity could only exist somewhere far beyond us; so we mad ranters declare that we are even now wild, erotic gods living in a mad, chaotic paradise that we will defend against that we will defend against authority and its lies until all authority ceases to exist. And as long as it continues to exist, we will rant wildly to drown out its lies and to inspire the divine free spirit to awaken in everyone
Feral Faun
P.O. Box 48
Monte Rio, CA
95462
The Lament of an Armored Werewolf
I am full of intense sorrow, a need for ecstatic explosion. What really am I? Am I not an animal? For what else is a human being? I am called upon, even screamed at sometimes, to live for a purpose. But why? to what avail? Why can’t I follow my instincts, which know no cause or purpose, which say only: now I want to be held, now I want to make love? If everyone would give up all their righteous causes, all their high purposes, all their fucking power games (for isn’t that what all these things really are) and would just follow their desires, would not all government, all war, all prejudice, all economy, all religion cease? Yet if I pursue my desires rather than “the cause”, I am called apolitical, passive- even cynical and despairing. I take the quickest, surest road to the transformation of the world and I am accused of giving up. Well, I am goddamned tired of waiting for “the Revolution” to create what I want. Any demonstration or “radical” action that is not itself an immediate joy and pleasure is self-sacrifice and is a step away from, not toward, the world I want, a world in which all I desire can be fulfilled. Let me rather dance, play and make love. Let me live gratuitously, madly here and now. Let me transform myself…
…I have had desires to love numberless beings- all repressed. What good are demonstrations when my own most basic, deep desires remain inside with no expression or expressed only as thoughts or words? Some say I have a wild imagination- and compared to many it is strong- yet how wild can it be when I cannot make all the all the joy and beauty I imagine into reality? The walls are high and strong and I still cannot fly, because I still believe their lies when they say I have no wings. They’ve dug in deep, deeper in me than even I can see to bury lies which turn me into a cowing -retch, I would be a wild and howling werewolf, but the armor plate still hides my fur and keeps my limbs from moving freely. Yet beneath the armor, I know the fur is there. It breaks through in spots, for the armor is not real. It is a spell cast on me that I am beginning to see through. And I know it is not a change of armor that I need for my claws and fangs are all I need to rip through every chain and fetter of civilization and to free once more the animal I am. Sure, I am wild; we all must be. It is not reason or morality, purposes or causes which will free us. It is the free expression of our instincts, the ecstasy of desires fulfilled without regret or guilt. There is a magick in this which destroys all power, the magick which is the erotic pulse of our chaotic, joyful universe.
1983
Why Do I Write?
There are times when I wonder why I write so much about anarchy and chaos, about the dance of my life, and about the horrors of civilization. What is my purpose? What do I really want from this writing? I’m not out to convert anyone. It’s not a religion or ideology I hold to. It’s an intense passion for freedom, and one I fear will go unfulfilled.
It often seems to me that most anarchists just hold to another millenarian brand of Christianity. They await “the Revolution” after which there will be anarchy. As with most millenarian Christians, these anarchists are out to convert people to their gospel. But the freedom they speak of seems as distant as the second coming of Christ. In fact, many of them sacrifice what little freedom they now have to their cause or organization. I want my freedom NOW and I want it with a passion. I see so many chains to my freedom and I see them growing.
At times it seems that most people are passively accepting these chains. This hurts me, it makes me want to scream and shout. I need to rant. Not to convert them, but to make them stop hurting me. For as long as they keep putting up with the shit, I too seem to remain its victim.
But most of all I write because I feel my passions welling up, striving to be let out. They want to shout and rant, sing and dance, but how can this be? Madness- rebellion against a rationalized, artificial existence- needs release. But the quacks label it an illness and try to stifle it with drugs or hide it in mental hospitals. So release becomes almost impossible.
Only in writing can I freely release my madness and let my passions flow. And it’s a stunted way of doing so. It falsifies and abstracts them. I have ideas of how I can live much more freely even now, but I would do so more joyfully with others who want to try it. So I write, hoping I’ll find others who have similar visions. Yet at times, it seems futile and I wonder, why do I write.
1984
The Spell
I am mad.
I have had a spell cast on me, a spell to control my mind.
Yet it is not this which makes me mad, for this spell is cast on everyone. I am mad because I am aware of this spell. It is not acceptable in this rationalist society to be aware of this spell. Even those whose work it is to cast the spell are unaware of it. Advertisers, politicians, educators, ministers, entertainers and militants all believe that they only communicate reality or offer pleasure and so are doing good. They are not evil magicians- they are, themselves, victims of the spell they weave.
There cannot be any evil magicians for the very concept of evil is part of the spell. And the source of the spell does not lie in any living being; it lies in things, in commodities. Since commodities have never been and can never be consciously acting agents, even they cannot be called “evil magicians.” They do not maliciously seek to control us. Rather, by their nature, they radiate control much as a star radiates warmth and light (although a star, being alive, may consciously choose to radiate warmth and light for its own and other beings’ pleasure). The spell radiates from commodities through human agents to all beings trying to make everything into commodities.
But why does this matter to me? If there is really no such thing as evil, if this spell cannot be evil, then why do I so adamantly oppose it? Very simply because it takes away my freedom, it suppresses my desires. Where I can imagine an infinite, estatic beauty, this spell produces a banal, boring ugliness and tries to convince me that this is what I really want. Why should I settle for the non-life, the merely “undead” existence, this spell offers when I can imagine so much more? The best this spell can offer anyone is power and I don’t want power. I want life, joy, ecstasy, for this is the true magic, the magic that can make all the most beautiful things I imagine into reality.
Yes, I am aware of the spell and I reject it. Not because it is evil, but because it is banal, boring and ugly. It makes me, and every other being so much less than we could be. Why accept the limits of this spell? Why continue the Zombie existence? It may be all we know, but it isn’t all we can imagine. And what we can imagine, we can come to know; what we can imagine, we can create.
1984
Anarchy: No Rule
If the entire natural universe is vibrantly alive, then no being in it should be chained or fenced in. The realization of this is anarchy. It is the end of every attempt to order the world, and so opens up every possibility.
Anarchism is as much to do with anarchy as biology has to do with the joy of living. Anarchism is an attempt to create a new order, not to supersede order. Its goal is self-rule, not no rule.
So most anarchists seek to order the universe “without authority”, meaning that all humans equally exercise authority over the rest of the universe. Yet is not the ordering of human beings inherent in the ordering of the universe? The fences of order we build really just fence in our own imaginations, making us malleable to the order imposed by authority. Doesn’t it follow that the refusal to give and take orders must become the refusal to order or be ordered if it is not to become a new, more hidden form of giving and taking orders?
And a new form of giving and taking orders is exactly what most anarchists want. They describe their ideal as self-management or self-rule. But self-management and self-rule are still management and rule. We are still giving and taking orders even if only to and from ourselves. And no wonder, when the paltry visions of most anarchists would still see us in offices, on farms, in factories, playing the production and consumption games capital has taught us. And since every instinct in us, every unchained passion and unbridled desire, rebels against such a “life”, to fulfil this vision, we cannot free ourselves; we must manage and rule ourselves. But such a vision is not anarchy.
Anarchy means NO rule, NO management. Anarchy means not only the abolition of every god, government or boss, but also the abolition of every measuring stick and timepiece, every ideology and definition, for these too are rulers and anarchy wipes all rulers away.
When you hear this do you cringe with fear because you see chaos lurking in the shadows? Well, the universe is chaos. There is no inherent order in it. People try to order it, to rule it. But the infinity of vibrant, living beings that is the universe cannot be ruled And why should it be? Where did we get the idea that chaos was bad? Chaos is nothing other than wildness. Our fear of chaos is fear of our own wildness. And wildness is living just to live, not for a purpose or use. It is life lived for itself.
Order is the attempt to make things “live” for a purpose, for a use, for a goal. But life lived for any purpose ceases to be life. It demands giving up life today for some possible future. But since the only guarantee the future offers is death, such a life is no life at all; it is merely a march towards death. Better that we should all REALLY live for one moment and then die than that we exist for a billion years as ordered beings.
With the bloody vampire grin of order staring you in the face, do you still fear chaos more? Then beware. For we, the witches and werewolves, the mad ones and faeries, are unruly. We are the wild ones. We do bring chaos………Because chaos is where freedom lies. Chaos is where life lies.
1984
Paneroticism: The Dance of Life
Chaos is a dance, a flowing dance of life, and this dance is erotic. Civilization hates chaos and, therefore, also hates Eros. Even in supposedly sexually free times, civilization represses the erotic. It teaches that orgasms are events that happen only in a few small parts of our bodies and only through the correct manipulation of those parts. It squeezes Eros into the armor of Mars, making sex into a competitive, achievement-centered job rather than joyful, innocent play.
Yet even in the midst of such repression, Eros refuses to accept this mold. His joyful, dancing form breaks through Mars’ armor here and there. As blinded as we are by our civilized existence, the dance of life keeps seeping into our awareness in little ways. We look at a sunset, stand in the midst of the forest, climb on a mountain, hear a bird song, walk barefoot on a beach, and we start to feel a certain elation, a sense of awe and joy. It is the beginning of an orgasm of the entire body, one not limited to civilization’s so-called “erogenous zones”, but civilization never lets the feeling fulfill itself. Otherwise, we’d realize that everything that is not a product of civilization is alive and joyfully erotic.
But a few of us are slowly awakening from the anesthesia of civilization. We are becoming aware that every stone, every tree, every river, every animal, every being in the universe is not only just as alive, but at present is more alive than we who are civilized beings. This awareness is not just intellectual. It can’t be or civilization will just turn into another academic theory. We are feeling it. We have heard the love-songs of rivers and mountains and have seen the dances of trees. We no longer want to use them as dead things, since they are very much alive. We want to be their lovers, to join in their beautiful, erotic dance. It scares us. The death-dance of civilization freezes every cell, every muscle within us. We know we will be clumsy dancers and clumsy lovers. We will be fools. But our freedom lies in our foolishness. If we can be fools, we have begun to break civilizations chains, we have begun to lose our need to achieve. With no need to achieve, we have time to learn the dance of life; we have time to become lovers of trees and rocks and rivers. Or, more accurately, time cease to exist for us; the dance becomes our lives as we learn to love all that lives. And unless we learn to dance the dance of life, all our resistance to civilization will be useless. Since it will still govern within us, we will just re-create it.
So let’s dance the dance of life. Let’s dance clumsily without shame, for which of us civilized people isn’t clumsy? Let’s make love to rivers, to trees, to mountains with our eyes, our toes, our hands, our ears. Let every part of our bodies awaken to the erotic ecstasy of life’s dance. We’ll fly. We’ll dance. We’ll heal. We’ll find that our imaginations are strong, that they are part of the erotic dance that can create the world we desire.
1985
An Untitled Rant
Many of us know in the depth of our being that civilization is death. We know that if we are to fully live, we must be free of it. It is a dance of death and we crave a dance of life. And we can find a dance of life in forests, in meadows, on mountains, in oceans. The dance of life is there and it is strong, vibrant, erotic, ecstatic. And it is calling for us to join. If we are to destroy civilization without destroying ourselves, we will need to get in touch with our own wildness, we will need to join the dance of life. As long as we remain civilized death-dancers, we will only be able to bemoan our fate. If we learn to be wild dancers of life, we will come to know our strength, come to feel our magic, living as friends and lovers with trees, rocks, bears, squirrels, rivers, mountains and oceans, fighting with them against civilization. We may not see civilization destroyed, but by joining the dance of life, we will live as joyfully as is presently possible. Isn’t this really what anarchy is all about? If anarchy is what we want, let’s start to live it now and maybe the magic of our desires will bring down the death-dance of civilization.
1984
We Are Animals: An Anti-Humanist Rant
Humanism, with its roots in Judeo-Christian thought, has taught us to believe that we are somehow qualitatively better than other animals. Humanistic attitudes can be traced even further back than Judeo-Christan thought, but it took Christianity to hone humanism to a precise philosophy which could justify the rape of the earth, the destruction of species and the degradation of the human being. For all practical intents and purposes, Christianity is dead, but is child, humanism lives on.
Yet humanism is dying too. In the depths of our being, we know it is false. Every time we see an eagle flying overhead, a deer bounding through the forest, a wild horse running across a plain, whale out on the ocean, do we not feel a sense of awe, of wonder and of humility? Do we not feel that here are beings who have something we lack, something we have lost? We know that they are not less, but are more, than us. For unlike them, we have been domesticated, our freedom has been stolen slowly bit by bit from us. And this stealing of our freedom has been justified by the claim that we are more than animals. We are animals, nothing more or less. At present, we are tamed, domesticated animals, animals who act like machines. But our wild animal nature is still there within us. If we can let it out, we can begin to find our freedom. We can break out of civilization’s hold, and begin destroying it as wild animals. Thus we will find our freedom.
1985
On Madness and Anarchy
I am sure there are those who would label me mad for some of the desires I express. Fine, I gladly embrace such madness. When rational order has proven its absurdity, those who would be free must express themselves in terms of madness. A festival, a whirlwind, the screaming elation of dionysian rites are true revolution. Artaud and Julian Beck have both tried this, but in the theater. And theater is bullshit! It’s time to take this madness out of the theaters and to start living it. We are wild beings trapped in the cages of civilization. Rage, grief, joy, ecstasy, hysteria, all of our animal passions need release, public release, now! But how? How do we avoid incarceration? How can we be freely mad? How can we turn it from mere individual idiosyncrasy to anarchic revolution? I don’t know. All I know is that a mad cruelty must be aimed at civilization while erotic ecstasy is aimed at friends. We need to learn to scream, cry, laugh, howl, growl, roar, jump, roll, dance, caress, kiss, hug, fuck, somersault, sing, feast. We need to be bodies, to be animals, freely without restraint. This will be the greatest cruelty to civilization, for such action mocks it mercilessly. To those who love to be ordered, it will appear to be the greatest madness. But to our friends, whether human, plant, rock, river, or any wild being, it will be the gentlest love. For this madness is Eros unbound.
1985
The Last Judgement: A Condemnation of Condemnation
Criticism is essential for people involved in anarchic Social and spiritual endeavors. We need to be aware of the armors and masks we cling to and we need to learn why we think we need them and how we can throw them off. This requires that we talk to each other about our weaknesses, our attachments to that which oppresses us, and that we do so critically, freely, openly. If we cannot talk in this way how can we truly be friends? But we anti-authoritarians are often not very careful in our criticism. We have all been raised with a consciousness of sin, the internalized voice of authority. We have been loaded with guilt and fear. We have been taught to judge and to feel judged by others.
All too often our critic-ism of another anti-authoritarian will take the form of judgement, of condemnation. We will hurl epithets and curses without giving the person a chance. This sort of condemnatory name-calling seems to be the dominant form of criticism among anti-authoritarians. Is it any surprise that the usual response to criticism is an angry, defensive backlash? So we end up reinforcing each other’s guilt and fear. If we are to ever free ourselves of this internalized authority, we must make one last judgement, the condemnation of condemnation itself. After all we have enough to do to free ourselves of this civilization and its shitty baggage without wasting energy judging and condemning each other. Even our reaction to authority in all its forms should not so much he that of moralistic condemnation, which is only the internalized echo of authority’s voice, as a recognition that it strives to keep us from fulfilling our desires, from experiencing freedom. Thus, we need never fall into the stupid authoritarian role of judge and executioner. We can truly free ourselves from guilt and from our fear of each other and can share our criticisms freely and openly. With the end of judgement, we can throw off our armors and masks, free ourselves of authority and know the world of pleasure for which we long.
1986
The Free Market: An Impossible Ideal (And Besides Who Really Wants It?)
A free market has never existed. It does not now exist. It never will exist. Not above ground or under-ground. There are two reasons for this. The free market is impossible. And no one (most especially not those who most loudly proclaim it) really wants a free market.
What really is a free market? It is a market where absolutely NO restriction on the movement of goods exists. It would take the most absurdly entrenched ideologue of libertarianism to claim that only government places such restrictions. As any buyer knows, the greatest restriction on the free flow of goods is the so-called owner of the goods. S/he claims to have the right to decide what price the buyer should pay for a good. How absurd) That’s not a REAL free market!
Let me paint a picture of a truly free market. Certainly, any-one who possessed something would be an owner, a potential seller. They could put any price they wanted on what they owned, BUT they couldn’t expect anyone to pay it. For in a truly free market, the buyer would have as much freedom as the owner/seller. In other words, if one could get something for less than the owner intended, they would; and if they could steal it, they would. The only thing that could atop them is the brute physical force of the owner. In other words, the true free market would be a brawling free-for-all of theft, robbery, assault, murder, fraud, manipulation… And one that makes money, barter and trade into blatant absurdities.
Is this brawling free-for-all possible? Historically, the closest thing to a free market ever to exist were the protections rackets of the early middle ages (and these weren’t free for the victims). Groups of barbarians with no more Roman Empire to plunder found themselves with no land, and, for that matter, no real desire to be-come farmers again. But they had weapons, armor and fighting skills. Like good merchants, they came to the peasant villages with their skills offering to protect the peasants from marauding robbers in exchange for a place to live, food and a choice among the peasants’ daughters of wives and lovers. If the peasants refused, they would find themselves attacked by marauding robbers (who strangely resembled the warriors who’d offered them protection). The peasants then accepted the warriors’ protection and became serfs. Thus was born the feudal system which would eventually evolve into the modern state. In other words, the social darwinism of these enterprising warriors ultimately created the restrictions on the market.
You see, a free-for-all of the sort I’ve suggested conforms to the dictum, “Might makes right.” In this case, might consists not only of physical force, but also powers of deception, manipulation, and stealth. The mightiest in all of these things would ultimately end up owning everything of real value, would set absolute prices and would have the power to prevent all except the extremely daring and extremely stealthy from lowering the prices or stealing. The means they would use to do this would probably be paid thugs who would use physical force to detain and abuse those who displeased the mighty owners, who would spy on non-owners, who would openly rob non-owners, and who would do whatever other nestles would reinforce the power of the owners. Don’t these activities sound strangely like the functions of cops and tax collectors? A true, unprotected, unrestricted free market would in, at most, a few years reproduce every function pf the state, becoming a totally restricted market controlled by a few. So for all practical purposes, the free market is impossible.
I think most “free market” advocates are aware of the inevitable outcome of a true free market. Certainly, none of them advocate the real thing. Adam Cash for example, says, “…I am actually a law and order type…I think we need laws…” (1986 Loompanics Catalog, pg.5) And it’s not hard to guess which laws he thinks we need. Like most “free-marketists”, he doesn’t want any government restrictions on his selling, nor does he want to have to pay the government for doing what he wants, but he sure as bell wants the government to protect him from anyone who wants to make goods flow too freely- by just taking them. Sorry, Adam, you don’t get the protection without paying for it- that’s the way protections rackets work.
Basically, these half-assed “free market” advocates are cowards. They’re afraid that if a truly free market, a market free of every restriction including laws against theft, robbery, assault and murder, were to exist, they’d lose out, and when the new state arose, they’d be out of luck- enslaved buyers with no choice or freedom.
I’m not too fond of the idea of a free market either. As long as a market exists, I will certainly help goods flow more freely into my hands for my use, without cost when possible– but not in the name of the free market. Rather, I’ll do it to enhance my own life.
I think the very idea of economy sucks. I want to see the abolition of every conception of property (both private as in the “free world” and state-owned as in the “communist” nations), of exchange, of the market. Much more than the state ever could, the commodity rules us, restricts our freedom, destroys pleasure. It is the commodity that drives people to work, to shop, to die a little every day of boredom. It is the commodity that bombards people with images of pleasure it can never fulfil, leaving people to think they need to buy just one more product to fulfil their desires. But desires are never fulfilled by pining. What is bought can never give full pleasure, for one can have it only by losing something else. Where property, where ownership (even the “social ownership” advocated by socialists) exists, scarcity exists. Under the rule of economy, what-ever we do not own, we cannot enjoy. And me- I want to enjoy every-thing!
The way to enjoy everything (or at least everything that does not inherently destroy pleasure) is to cease thinking of things in terms of ownership. All of the natural world- rivers, stars, rocks and planets as well as plants and animals- is alive. Each being is a free being and claiming ownership of free beings is absurdly stupid. The natural world is an amazing super-abundance of free beings- all of which, for their own pleasure, offer themselves to each other sot to be owned, but to be loved and enjoyed. By creating a commodity civilisation- starting with animal husbandry aid agriculture-we have become separated from this super-abundance and have been trapped in the pseudo-abundance of the commodity which can never give us love or enjoyment, but can only offer us more things to buy.
But this isn’t inescapable. Even now we can begin to free our-selves from the commodity. Where we have to continue to deal with the market, we can subvert it by taking whatever we can for free. And we can begin to make ourselves independent of both the market and the market mentality by starting to wander in wild places taking part in nature’s dance of pleasure. We’ll own nothing, thus having a lightness that allows us to soar to the heights of freedom. And because we own nothing, we will have everything to love and enjoy.
Some will say that this dream is as impossible as that of the free market. They’ll say that the sort of “hunter-gatherer” existence implied in my description just will not support this over-populated world. I don’t know if they’re right, but, the truth is, I don’t give a fuck. I cannot conceive of the entire world, nor of 4 1/2 billion people. They are abstractions, ghosts, mere mists of no-thingness to me. What I can conceive of is my life, and I know I can begin to re-create my life in the way I want. If the rest of the world cannot do the same, if my vision is impossible, so what? It is still far more beautiful than either the free market ideal or commodity society, and it will make my life more beautiful sad more free.
1986
The Desire for Longevity and the Decline of Life
Life is in decline. The vast majority of people never really live at all, their present life being eclipsed by a millions negative feelings from the past and a million worries about the future. Instead of seeking pleasure, joy and ecstasy, people sell themselves, giving up the possibility of adventure and pleasure in the present, for security in some imagined future.
And of course, as life declines, along come the preachers of immortality. No, I’m not talking about the Christians with their immortality after death, but of those who preach immortality in this life or, at least its extension.
But why would anyone want to extend a miserable existence? It’s really no surprise. Deep inside we all long for ecstasy, and such a waging is evidence enough to convince us unconsciously that ecstatic joy could be our normal condition. Yet most people are not ecstatically joyful NOW, so that non-existent realm called the future a where they look for their pleasure. As they grow older living dull empty lives, death comes to stare them in the face saying, “Have you really lived yet? Have you even for a moment FULLY experienced sensual ecstasy or grand adventure?. Frightened, not so much by death itself as by the way it so clearly mirrors their emptiness, they run away, some into religion, others into acquisitiveness, others into obsessive activity; and now in the age of ultra-high technology, some run after dreams of immortality. Lest people just try to forget their emptiness. The life eaten-era hope that by prolonging their existence, in time, they may at last get beyond their emptiness.
Their hope is foolish. What is a full life? Those of us who’ve tasted ecstasy have some idea. In our most ecstatic moments, time has ceased to exist; the past has no significance and the future is not there. The ecstatic moment is all. As Nietzsche said, “joy does not want heirs…joy wants itself, wants eternity.” A life full of such ecstatic moments could be eternal life, not because it does not eventually end in death, but because its end is not present in every moment marring the joy. Rather every moment rings with life and ecstasy, pleasure and adventure; and death only comes at last “as in the heart of ancient trees…” flowing “from the unconcerned forgetfulness of existence.” But when life is empty, when full, ecstatic, eternal life is just a distant dream then it seems people are willing to settle for mere everlasting life.
But can the immortalists offer us paradise, or will it be unending existence in hell? The very quantitative nature of their vision indicates that they have no solution to the emptiness of life, And how could they? Is not their vision dependent on ultra-high technology? This technology did not develop in a vacuum or appear out of nowhere to save us from our emptiness. It is part and parcel of the monstrous social reality that is the source of our emptiness, a reality that is thousands of years old.
When the decline of life started is a matter I’ll leave to intellectual radicals. I am more interested in creating my own life. However, it is clear to me that life had begun declining well before animal husbandry and agriculture developed. These two techno-logical developments clearly manifest an attitude toward life that sees it as merely a means to an end. The decline of life coincides with the development of use value, the development of productivity.
The way of life inadequately described as “hunter/gatherer” was a basically non-productive existence. Though there were already signs of the beginning of the decline of life even in such societies (at least those of which I am aware), it was minimal. Play was still the predominant activity. Adventure and ecstasy were still frequent. Character armor was minimal. Hunting and gathering were not done as Jobs with hours and quotas, but as it gave one pleasure. There was no attempt to build up a surplus beyond that needed to get through a winter if the climate lived in called for this. These cultures aren’t my ideal, but they do represent a fuller way of living.
How or when the idea developed that non-human beings existed for human use rather than for themselves is beyond our knowledge. But once this idea, this conception of use value, came to be, it was no big step for some folk to decide that animals and plants could be used more efficiently if people controlled their growth. Is order to do this, people had to take time from play, adventure and ecstatic pursuits and give it to tending the flocks and gardens to guarantee that they’d produce. So work came into being, that activity that gives the doer no immediate pleasure and sacrifices the present for the future.
As productivity increased, so did hours of work. The possibility of play, adventure and ecstasy began to disappear as all of life was eaten up by work or the preparation for work. Since productivity had to grow to continue and since work could not utterly destroy the desire for play, the economy had to develop another activity for the producers– consumption. Before the development of production, all things were seen as living beings to play with, to adventure with, to enjoy. The commodities offered for consumption promise the same way of life- but can never give it. For every adventure, every play-thing has a price. To get one is to miss out on another. Besides, work so dulls the senses that one can never really enjoy anything fully. Always there is the underlying, nagging feeling that this bought “pleasure” is based on the hell of production.
And it is this hell of production/consumption that is the source of the technology that the life-extenders tell us could make us immortal. Can this technology be separated from its source? Can it exist without the entire productive/consumptive civilization that create it? Is it not dependent on the conception of use value which destroyed the ecstatic, adventure-filled lives we used to live? The visions of those immortalists whom I have read are filled with such massive amounts of ultra-high technology that life seems to be no-thing more than a biological interface in the massive, universal computer that is their god. This sounds like a vision of hell to me.
Paradise is what I want and paradise can’t be produced, it is fullness of life in THE PRESENT, play, adventure, ecstasy that make each moment full. Most of my interactions with technology indicate that it destroys life. So I will not dream of a high-tech utopia where I will be immortal. Rather I will free myself as much as possible from the production/consumption civilization in which I was born and will expand the […] of my freedom every […] I get. I will play and adventure no matter what stands in my way and will either escape from or destroy everything that tries to constrain my desires. In this way I can experience paradise now and laugh at the immortalists dreams of high-tech heaven.
1987
World Revolution vs Individual Liberation
I am tired of being told that I can’t be free until there’s a mass revolution that tears down civilization. It especially pisses me off because the people who tell me this are so often the same ones who say that the real revolution must liberate our passions, our desires, our subjectivity, and must make free play and unbridled pleasure real. I hear these revolutionaries constantly rail against self-sacrifice and dedication to the cause. Then they impale themselves on crosses of research to find the “real” source of alienation. They torture themselves over why most people don’t run to embrace their theory. And they reject anyone who does not at least express an interest in the “right” ideas about revolution. In other words, they sacrifice themselves for world revolution.
The reason that these theoretical revolutionaries of pleasure can preach pleasure and practise self-sacrifice is simple. For them, Pleasure and desire are mere abstractions. Our real desires, they say, are repressed and will remain so as long as this society exists. Pleasure can only be known in stunted fucked-up ways. Until the revolution, that is. So what is essential now is to analyze the world around us so as to understand the depths of our alienation, and to write theoretical tracts that will advance the cause of revolution… Even if we have no desire to, even if it gives us no pleasure. For this is “real” revolutionary activity.
And it is only because of the abstractness of their thinking that they are able to talk of world revolution. After all, let’s face it, the very concept of “the world” is an abstraction. Try to imagine the world. What do you picture in your head? If you picture anything, it is most likely a globe- no people, no animals of any sort, no plants- just a round imitation based on a model you’ve seen. If you try to expand this globe to actual size you lose it. Add to that 5 billion people, billions of animals and plants, forests, cities, mountains… and it’s way beyond human comprehension. The concept of the world is as much an airy abstraction as the concept of a god above, and these revolutionaries striving for world revolution are as foolish as the Christian martyrs they mock.
They have another thing in common with Christians. they practise evangelism. If world revolution is the only thing that can free our desires and remove all constraints on pleasure, then, obviously, people have to be convinced of their need for such a revolution and motivated to revolt. So using flyers and writings, the revolutionaries strive to educate masses of people they don’t know. (This is not meant to put down flyers and writings as such, but rather the evangelistic use thereof, for flyers and writings can also be means of contacting folk who share your vision.) But you can’t educate people about freedom- they have to discover it for themselves. Preach your revolutionary gospel at them all day and they’ll just laugh, shrug it off, argue or ignore it, unless they have already begun to feel the same way.
Don’t get me wrong. Even I have been drawn into thinking in terms of world revolution. Less than two years ago I wrote, “How can we be freely mad? How can we turn it from mere individual idiosyncrasy to anarchic revolution?” Since them I have come to realize that what I called “mere individual idiosyncrasy” IS anarchic revolution.
What the serious revolutionaries of (abstract) pleasure forget is that the desires that are repressed, the pleasures that are denied, the freedom that is in chains, the life that is kept down–are MY desires, MY pleasures, MY freedom, MY life. At least, these are the only ones that can matter to me since they are the only ones I can really experience. If I see civilization as an enemy of my desires, if I find technology repressing my freedom, if such basic realities as language and time seem to keep me from immediate joy and pleasure, it is from MY life that I will seek to eradicate these things. I will escape then or destroy them as they cross my path in my attempts to realize my desires. And yes, I said “escape them.” I see no shame in “dropping out”, if that will give me greater freedom, because the only real freedom is the freedom of the individual in the present.
If world revolution is ever to occur- and I mean a revolution that will truly liberate everyone’s desires and make unbound pleasure possible everywhere-, it will only be as the natural extension of individual liberation. As I pursue my desires grasp for pleasure without limits, freely play, re-create myself as a wild animal, I become more anarchic and more free, and so the world becomes more anarchic and more free. but as soon as soon as I turn anarchy, pleasure, wildness and freedom into causes for which I put off my own present pleasure, wildness and freedom, I make the world that much less anarchic and free. The only revolution worth pursuing is that which frees me NOW, that which takes me down the path of pleasure immediately. I’ll share my adventures if you’re interested; if the paths of our desires intersect for awhile, wonderful’ But what I do, I do for myself. No abstract revolution will ever keep me from creating my own freedom.
1986
The Fall of Civilisation: A Cause for Elation
Civilization is failing. Deep inside everybody knows lt. The fundamentalists tell us Jesus will come any day now to save them from this disaster. The prophets of gloom and doom see nuclear or ecological destruction on the horizon. Survivalists are making their stashes in order to be safe from. the marauding hordes of starving people they expect, Even the average person on the street thinks that life as they know it is about to collapse. And it seems every-one thinks it’s a disaster. Well, I think the fall of civilization is a cause for elation- I am overjoyed by it.
I don’t understand why so many people fear civilizations collapse. After all, as it has deteriorated, the robes with which it has tried to beautify itself have gone threadbare and its body has begun to show through. And it is not a pretty body. It is a rotting stinking corpse that putrifies all it touches.
Civilization had its birth many thousands of years ago. It began when people started to believe that things existed to be used and that they should be used as efficiently as possible. This efficiency created work. But to people still aware of a paradise free of work, one couldn’t just say they should work. Civilisation had to be given fancy robes. Religion said that god would reward good workers. Art showed that being civilised meant not only producing basic needs but also producing “beauty.” Philosophy explained how civilized life was significant, worthwhile, or could be made so. Politics gave people Great Leaders or Great Causes to make them feel proud. But none of these were really what civilisation was all about.
Stripped bare, civilization is nothing more nor less than productivity, A wild animal never works; it produces nothing. It just takes what is freely offered to fulfil its wants and needs. Its life is a life of play..and feasting, dancing and fun only interrupted by accidents. How anyone could have become discontented with such a life. I don’t know. But, apparently, it happened. It was not enough to be able to freely pick fruits and vegetables from plants or to hunt animals to eat. After all, was it not more efficient to control the growth of the plants and the animals? With the development of animal husbandry and agriculture began the deterioration of life and the growth of mono-culture, that is to say, Civilisation. For diversity of life, which gives wild nature its vibrancy makes for inefficient productivity. If animals and plants can be homogenized, they can be such better controlled and made to produce. And the most important domesticated animal – the working human being – also needed to be homogenized. At first, when work hours were short and people could still easily run off into the forest, civilization needed powerful lies: taboos, laws, morals. These standardized codes of social behavior were enforced by family and friends as well as religion, government and other institutions.
But civilisation advanced. It had to advance or it would die, for wherever it confronted wild nature, the super-abundant diversity of life threatened productivity by making overly clear how unnecessary it was. So civilisation homogenized everything in its path.
Today, civilization has advanced to the point where the trappings used to control people are absurdities. Religion is dead, a moribund farce more absurd than the Church of the SubGenius could ever be. Morality and traditional values are shown for the strident, hysterical idiocy they are when mouthed by Jerry Falwell, John Paul II, […]t Robertson and their like, and are flouted even by many who claim to support them. Art has become blatantly and openly just another commodity on the market which often places more emphasis on shock value than on beauty since the former sells better. Politics offers clowns like Reagan, Gorbachev, Khadaffi, Khomeini and Thatcher. Civilisation can let these robes go to tatters. It has more efficient nears of homogenizing people. It has created a situation in which time not spent working is spent consuming the products of work. For the only thing civilization has to offer the worker is the commodity. Nearly everyone lives the same life of boredom, working and consuming, buying and dying.
And now, when this monstrous, rotting ghoul is showing its flesh through tattered robes, I am elated that it is toppling under its own weight and dying of starvation. For there is nothing left for to consume. It has already gone too far for its own good. The super-abundant diversity of nature which it sought to homogenize out of existence is the only base it has to stand on. Since it has made itself larger than its base, it inevitably must collapse.
Unlike the survivalists, catastrophists and other visionaries of the apocalypse, I do not fear the end of civilization. For the end civilization is not the end of the world, but its beginning. And all rebels and heretics, all free spirits and feral children have known, the end of civilization and the beginning of the world have been with us as long as civilization has been around. Though raised the midst of civilization, taught to be dependent on it, we have seen that this is not where freedom lies. We have placed ourselves ways on the edge, freeing our lives from the chains of civilization, becoming renegades, outlaws, wild ones.
Daily I create the life I want. There is so blueprint for it. No own society has ever exemplified it. For the life I want is too free for what is known as “society.” I want to wander freely where will, finding everywhere only lovers, grand wild beings with whom can adventure and freely share all pleasures.
I do not fear the fall of civilization, for in my adventures I have already come to know, in little ways, the super-abundance of wild nature. The visions of the fear-mongers bore me, for they are not the visions of creators or seekers of pleasure, but rather of the moribund, the already dead. Like every heretic and renegade of every age, I choose to adventure even now in the realms of pleasure, in the super-abundance of wild nature. So when civilisation fails, I will already be a great wild being dancing through forests and fields without fear in a paradise that has always been with me.
1987
Intellectual Revolution, or How to Get Nowhere Fast
The intellectual radicals have accomplished all they possibly can toward the liberation of desire, and all they’ve accomplished is– nothing. All of their study and research, analysis and theory have not made anyone’s life (especially not their own) any more free or pleasurable. In terms of what they claim to want to do, their method has proven itself to be futile. Intellectual revolution is a failure. And it’s no wonder- after all, the method of intellectual revolution and the tools it uses are the very method and tools that have been used to repress the desires and passions, and imprison the imaginations of children in order to make them good, productive groan-ups; they are the methods and tools of the educational systems of civilization.
Intellectual revolution can probably be traced hack as far as the Renaissance, Before that, revolution usually issued from the actions of heretics and made no attempts to systematize itself. And it is interesting to note the change that occurred with the rise of intellectual revolutionary thought. The revolutionary heretics wanted everything and claimed it. Their revolution was the revolution of desire, and their language was visionary, not intellectual. True, they may have never known victory, but compared to the victories of the intellectual radicals, the defeats of the heretics were events of grand majesty, for they knew paradise even in their defeats.
Intellectual-revolution was as averse to the living passions and desires as christianity. Reason was its guiding force, and passions and desires are unreasonable. Reason demands the possible. It demands that social relations be made to coincide with production relations in the way that allows for the greatest efficiency in the flow of production. Intellectual revolution was not a revolution of desire, but the revolution of productivity. It could use propaganda quite well to inspire people to think it was the revolution that would free their desires, and so could guarantee its frequent successes. but it lied. And the big lie of intellectual revolution continued to be successful even after Marx so plainly revealed the wolf without the sheepskin, telling us clearly that the purpose of revolution is to liberate the forces of production.
In the 1920’s, intellectual revolution rediscovered the revolution of desire in the movement of the surrealists. The surrealists recognized that if humans were to be free, their passions and desires had to be liberated. But the surrealists were still too attached to intellectual revolution. Being unable to reconcile the contradictions, they turned their understanding of the revolution of desire into art and embraced Trotsky’s Stalinism-out-of-power as their revolutionary theory. The revolution of productivity won out.
It was the situationists who made the only apparently successful reconciliation of intellectual revolution and the revolution of desire. But the success of this reconciliation was only apparent. For while the situationists certainly made extensive use of the words “pleasure,” “desire,” and “passion,” and called for people to “demand everything”, they made it clear that the only reason they thought this was possible was that the means of production had at last developed to where it could happen. In other words, thousands of years of misery, oppression and repression of desires were justified by the situationists’ claim that at last productivity and our desires can advance together. But can their claims be believed any more than those of previous intellectual revolutionaries? I think not.
If intellectual revolutionaries could ever speak for the revolution of desire, it would have happened in the ’60’s. The revolution of desire then burgeoned forth in a way that it hadn’t since the days of the medieval heretics. Moral restrictions and values, work and family, authority in all forms was being rejected by millions all over the world. It was certainly not a coherent movement. There was much to which it seemed blind. But it was certainly claiming every-thing. And it did NOT embrace situationist theory. It refused to ‘Align itself with intellectual revolution. Rather it freely used what it liked of the situationist’s theoretical works and ignored the rest. The revolutionaries of desire saw the trap of intellectual revolution and rejected it.
The revolution of desire was once more forced underground, But, as always, it didn’t die. The realities of civilisation have made it clear that the revolution of productivity and the revolution of desire can always only oppose each other. And since the revolution of productivity and intellectual revolution are one and the same, it SHOULD BE obvious to those who want to liberate their desires, those who oppose productivity (which they now recognize as civilization minus its fancy robes), that the intellectual function can only be a hindrance to their desires. But apparently it isn’t obvious. I know a number of people who recognize civilization as the enemy of the passions, who seek to free their desires from the chains of productivity and the commodity, yet who spend large portions of their lives in libraries, reading the works of philosophers and intellectuals studying and researching anthropology, sociology, psychology, striving to systematise the processes of alienation and repression into a coherent theory to use as a tool of opposition to civilization. But all I see cooling of their activity is the coherence of reason that represses the imagination and binds the desires, and a rather miserable existence for themselves as bookworms trapped is civilization’s intellectual function. In the end all they have to offer are more dreams of reason to immiserate our lives.
I love some of these people. I’ve learned from some of them. But how can I take their talk of the repression of desires seriously, when they spend all of their time together discussing theory, being “serious” revolutionaries, rather than playing, bugging, dancing, massaging, making love? Their revolution is itself repressing their desires. Their intellectual opposition to productivity forces them to produce intellectually and so to pass pleasure by. Their very method of opposing what they hate recreates what they hate and opposes their desires.
When I point this out, I am usually asked to reveal my method. Well, I refuse to offer blueprints; I have no set method. The revolution of desire recognizes order as a symptom of civilization. It knows that the cosmos is chaotic and so rejects all coherence except the coherence of desire, the unity of pleasure.
What I want is the liberation of my desires, the freedom to pursue what gives me pleasure without constraint. And I know that this freedom only comes when I do what I desire. I do not need to study books by intellectuals and theoreticians to find out what represses my desires. I do not need to “inform” my subjectivity by filling my head with abstractions drawn from some complete stranger’s subjectivity (especially since that stranger is as often as not a rotting corpse). If I follow my desires, I will quickly discover what stands in their way. I will readily come to know which desires are false, for they will sever bring me pleasure, only emptiness. And I will learn what I must do to overcome all that opposes my desires.
The revolution of desire seeds no intellectual theorizing. Rather it needs to free itself of the intellectual function so it can embrace total sensuality, the instincts unchained. Unlike the revolution of productivity, it is not primarily a social revolution. It is more an individual revolution. For as individuals free their desires, they can begin to play together creating a situation in which pleasure is truly unbound and anarchy spreads its erotic dance to everyone.
1987
Who Am I (A Sort of Personals Ad)
I am a lumpen– which is to say, I have no class. I as a gentle lunatic- raving yet kindly underneath it all. I live on the edge, the lunatic fringe , of society. I live there by choice- not out of some sense of radical self-sacrifice (gag! puked!). but because in a repressive society it’s the most fun place to be. I am on the edge now; it is my desire to go over the, edge, to get outside of society, to become as outlaw in the fullest sense of the word- one who has freed her/himself totally from all laws/rules and morality. I am NOT a revolutionary-. because I REALLY want revolution. I am NOT an anarchist– because I REALLY want anarchy. I desire a world in which I can be a wild being wandering freely in the midst of other wild beings, sharing all the abundant pleasures of our bodies and the earth. I am not out to convince anyone of my vision. If you think I’m out of my mind, I’m sure your right. But if you think that means my vision is worthless I have nothing to say to you. If you’ve had a similar vision, if you also seek to make freedom and pleasure PRESENT realities in your life, if you want to be not so much an anarchist as an anarchic adventurer, a rebellious reveller, a playful pansexual pirate, then I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to play with you. Maybe together we can make our lives more like what we want, maybe together we can create the paradise that we know lies deep inside.
1987
We Can Be Heroes
We long for adventure, for life lived to the limits, all passions unbound. We know we are gods, beautiful wild, magical beings, the creators of paradise. All we want can be ours, it we just have the courage to live our lives to the full.
Courage– what a misused word, Cowards of the most snivelling sort are called heroes. When Rambo or Cobra are the symbols of heroism, when Ollie North and his ilk are called heroes, something is horribly twisted. For where is the courage in a Rambo or a Cobra? Where is the courage in ANY military or police personal? Mambos, Cobras, green berets, marines, none of them fight for themselves. Behind them stand god, country, law, order, morality, religion, all that is “right” (and besides that usually a shitload of weapons and hundreds of other people to help wield them). Without their righteous causes (and their weapons), they wouldn’t dare to stand so boldly. It is only for a cause (and usually a popular one) that they dare to act. If they had the courage to stand up for their own life, they wouldn’t put up with the humiliation of such things as basic training, police academy, military/police heirarchies, or blind acceptance of absurd, moribund values. Nor would they lock themselves in character armor so thick that they become incapable of showing any tenderness. Yet this is what we are given as the cultural ideal of a hero– a hard, macho asshole mouthing red-neck, patriotic, law-and-order cliches and busting asses, someone who hasn’t the courage to be a real, passionate, free-thinking individual, let alone a divine creator of paradise. That isn’t heroism, that’s cowardice.
But there are a small number of heretics, anarchists, chaos magicians and marginals. We are wild and strange, proudly androgynous, with no need to prove ourselves. We know we are gods and have no need to back ourselves up with something greater than us. We embrace our passion and our tenderness. We don’t sacrifice ourselves; we love ourselves and live as ourselves. At times, we hide ourselves, but we never lose ourselves to the conditioning of society. We live life on the edge and we love it! For on the edge is the place of real freedom. We are the cutting edge, the wild adventurers, the creators of paradise. We are living, dancing, wild, erotic beings, skipping madly at the cliff’s edge with joy and courage. We truly are heroes and heroines, confident in ourselves, making a paradise of our desires against all odds.
1987
Beyond Good and Evil: A Call to Morality
In a recent flyer put out by a Eugene anti-authoritarian, I read, “Life requires evil to burn bright.-and hard.” Knowing the writer of this flyer, I had to laugh, but my laughter was tinged with sorrow. This writer’s view seems to be gaining popularity among the fringe elements of anarchic thinking and so to be pulling us backwards.
The writer’s praise of evil is followed by the statement, “Nothing purifies the heart like extinguishing morality.” Herein lies the attraction evil” has for so many anarchic heretics; they have mistaken IMmorality for Amorality.
Morality is unquestionably one of the main sources of repression in this society. It is the source of the death of innocence and the birth of guilt. It produces the false dichotomy of good and evil, the acceptance of which destroys paradise, steals our divinity, drives us into the world of pained effort, failure, self-condemnation and fear of consequences. For how many people is it morality that keeps them working or tied to a miserable existence?
So I certainly support those who attempt to destroy the power of morality over their lives. But embracing evil does NO destroy that power. To be IMmoral, to consciously embrace evil, is still to be trapped in the framework of morality, for evil is merely the flip-side of the coin of morality. By embracing evil, you chain yourself to the same values as does the upstanding, moral person. Your actions are still determined by the same rules and mores- for to be evil, you MUST act against those rules and mores no matter what you desire. Morality still controls you.
Morality is extinguished only when we go beyond both good AND EVIL, when the values, rules and mores no longer have any significance for us, when we reclaim our innocence. The knowledge of evil the source of our fall from innocence, was a false knowledge, a lie. The guilt that this knowledge has filled us with is part of the lie, so let’s throw it off. There is no good or evil. There are only our desires, innocent and beautiful– yes and at times terrifying, for they’ve been repressed for so long. Within us are perfection, divinity and innocence which have nothing to do with morality. Let us em-brace this, know it fully, for it is the true knowledge, the gnosis that brings life. Then we shall live as the gods we are, the wondrous wild beings who create paradise here and now, the mad, erotic heroes of chaos who have no need to prove ourselves as either good enough or evil enough, for we will have gone beyond such stupidity and found the true and beautiful innocence that lies beyond all morality.
1987
Why I am Not a Pagan
I wanted an animistic, pan-theistic spirituality. I wanted a spirituality that was natural, sensual, magickal. I wanted a spirituality that offered me ec-stacy. Paganism claims to be all these things. So why as I not a pagan?
Because I DON’T WANT A MAMA!! And just as the central symbol of deity in orthodox christianity is the father, the central symbol of diety in paganism is the mother. In other words, the paradigm of deity as parent still holds for paganism.
I don’t like parents. I don’t like what parenthood does to children. I don’t like the hypocrisy of people who rightfully complained about how their parents screwed them up and now do exactly the same things to “their” kids. (Always saying, “If you were a parent, you’d understand…,” apparently forgetting that I’ve already experienced parenthood– as its victim, the child.) Let’s face it our parents are the first authority we confront, the ones who begin repressing our desires, our spontaneity, our play-fulness, our freedom. And for most of us, our mother was the parent we had to deal with most often. Having freed ourselves of this authority, why would we want to reinstitute it in our spiritual lives?
What I want of my divinities are not parents of either gender, but an infinity of magickal lovers. For divinity permeates all things and to crystallize it into a god or goddess separate from ourselves is to lose its full energy and to become its slave. You and I are divine. We are god and goddess, as is every tree, every flower, every rock, every planet, every star. And all divinity can be our lover. I don’t deny that the cosmos, and most especially the planet earth are the source of my being. But they did not birth me in sorrow and pain to resent me as a mother. They birthed me in ecstatic pleasure to enjoy me as a lover. They were gods birthing a god, and all gods are lovers.
So I don’t want the pagan crystallisation of divinity. I don’t want a cosmic mama. I love the beautiful poetry and imagery of pagan myth and I will use it freely. But I will not be a pagan, because I as myself a god avid I don’t want images of parent gods to worship. I want divinities that are my lovers to enjoy and share pleasure with. In this is the true cosmic ecstasy, the wild spirituality of chaos.
1987
Divine Promiscuity: The Erotic Manifestation of Unconditional Love
There is a promiscuity of conquest and there is a promiscuity of desperation. Both tend to leave you feeling empty and vacuous. But there is another promiscuity, a divine promiscuity that is the result of a fullness of joyous Eros that cannot hold itself back.
It seems that all religions and all spiritual perspectives (with the possible exception of some types of Satanism) see unconditional love as the most complete manifestation of divinity. Yet most also condemn all forms of promiscuity. What an absurdity; For promiscuity freed from desperation and the spirit of conquest is the erotic manifestation of unconditional love. In forbidding promiscuity, religion has denied the erotic nature of love. It has taken the passion out of love. And love without passion is no longer love. It becomes reverence, respect, family loyalty and duty, common interest, pity–none of which involve the free giving of yourself. All of these feelings are conditional; all of them require the receiver to be a certain way. Only erotic, passionate love can ever be truly unconditional.
We live in a wondrous chaotic, magickal infinity. Chaos is the source of all and chaos is Eros. Each and every one of us is a god, a wild, magickal, divine being. But most of us are unaware of this; we have been shut up in the armors of role and social conformity for so long that we can’t feel the divine spark within us and we aren’t open to drink in the joy of the chaotic, erotic cosmos.
Yet some of us have begun to open up and what pours into us is ins describably beautiful. It is Eros flowing, dancing, swirling in us, wildly spilling, flowing over, an infinity of mad erotic love.
With such wild excess, how could we not desire to share it with everyone we meet? so with no condition, we are in love. Our nature is to be in love. We expect nothing in return, no exchange, no commitment. For love for sale is no love at all. We offer our love freely. We are open vessels letting our love flow, sharing pleasure easily. And our openness lets love and pleasure flow back into us wherever it is offered.
Yes, we make love promiscuously, loving men and women, girls and boys, birds and chipmunks, trees and rivers, stars and oceans and mountains. And in our promiscuity, we know to love more than just genitals, breasts, mouths and asses. We make love to toes and navels, chins and kneecaps, leaves and rootlets, and beams of radiant light. Every cell and every atom of every living, vibrant being of the cosmos is a source of mad, orgasmic pleasure. And we, ourselves, are mad ones freely sharing this eternal pleasure with all who will accept it.
This is true unconditional love, divine promiscuity. I don’t care if you accept me. it really doesn’t matter. But if you do, it is a lover you accept. For I am mad, divine, Eros incarnate as are we all when we open ourselves to the wild and infinite dance of chaos that is our loving cosmos.
1987
I Am Not Human: Another Anti-Humanist Rant
Scientists try to convince me that I share enough in common with close to five billion of the living beings on this planet to be classified with then as homo sapiens that is as human. I say, bullshit, I am NOT human.
At one time I thought I was human– and because I thought so, was. But now I know better. What is “human” but a label, and what purpose does this label have? Every label is an attempt to define, that is to order, and I reject all order.
After all, if I am labelled a human being, does this not mean I am not a bird, a wolf, a deer, a tree, a river or a mountain? Yet there are times when I want to be all of these things. For what I want is to be a great, wild, magickal being, a mad, erotic creature of chaos, ever-changing, ever-dancing, beyond all definition.
And god, the stupidities done in the name of humanity’ An infinity of wild beings who would gladly have been our lovers have been subjugated, raped and murdered in that name. How can I, a being who wants their love, accept for myself that name of horror?
I refuse it. I am no human. I have no essential commonality with such armored beings as Ronald Reagan, David Rockefeller, General westmoreland. Let them have that name of rape and murder, of rationality which is death. Let them be the humans.
If you must name me, call me elf, faun, faerie, werewolf, lunatic; names of beings who defy conformity, who refuse all order, who capriciously make light even of their names. For these names symbolize free, wild beings, beings of chaotic grandeur, mad, impetuous lovers of all of life.
It is time for the human to end. Let the new beings rise up; the beings we are without armors, without classifications sad definit-ions; heroic beings, strong and gentle, complete in themselves and so free of the need to enslave, to murder to rape; beings beautiful and androgynous, open to the magick of the cosmos, sharing love and pleasure with all beings. For this is our true divine being, the being trapped in the armor of the label “human”, is the lie of humanism, Let us free ourselves and paradise will be here now.
1987
Progressive Evolution and the Refusal of Paradise
One of the moat insidiously hellish aspects of the underlying social ideology that is ingrained into us from birth is that we are taught to sacrifice the present for the future. The old versions of this idea become increasingly unappealing as both the capitalist promise of future wealth and the marxist promise of a communist society prove to be self-destructive pipedreams. But the new age movement is revitalizing this version of self-sacrifice in the name of progressive evolution.
Originally, the concept of evolution was nothing more than the recognition that the perfection of the cosmos manifested in an ever-changing dance, and this unending change was how what is comes to be. But the rape of the earth could only be justified if the perfection of the cosmos was denied.
For if the cosmos is not perfect, if everything is not divine, then we who can be made to see the imperfection must certainly improve upon it. Eventually, the idea was born that such attempts at improvement were, in fact, in line with the way the cosmos operated, for it was in a process of progressive evolution. On this planet, this process is said to have become conscious of itself in the human being, so that it is now our duty to take control of it.
The new age movement (with some important exceptions) has embraced this ideology as its own. And this is one of the sources of the authoritarianism found in so much new age activity as manifested by the reliance on behavior modification techniques and the mystique surrounding gurus, leaders, teachers and the special person-alities of the movement. Since we are supposed to be imperfect, we must be made slaves to the process of progressive evolution. As individuals, we do not count; our real desires and feelings are meaningless except as tools in the evolutionary process. In effect, our freedom is eradicated and our divinity is denied- and all in the name of new age spiritual liberation.
Progressive evolution is the denial of paradise. If the cosmos is imperfect now, then we cannot experience joy, freedom, love, ecstasy, any of the manifestations of our divinity now. But progressive evolution is a lie. Paradise is here now. It has been hidden by the denial of its existence, but it can still be experienced. The ever-changing dance of the living cosmos is perfect and divine. Only the lies we’ve been filled with from birth hide this from us. So let’s embrace paradise now; let’s stand as wild, free gods against the lies, the voices of authority within and without which seek to stifle paradise; with the courage born of unchained pleasure, let us manifest the erotic dance of chaos on earth now, creating paradise where it has been denied, enjoying the ever-changing cosmos to the full.
1987
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