Postscript to the Postscript

We are on a sinking ship.
Why don’t people see it?
Going about their cabins,
they forget the dark waters all around.
The secret is,
we’re dolphins!

Postscript to “For Those With Visions of the Apocalypse”: Eschatology, Organic Memory, and Anarchism

Hello good people!  Summer is here.  I hope your gardens are doing better than mine.  I’m sure the government is thwarting my efforts.  Even if it isn’t spies peaking over the wall to spray pesticides, the strange and unwholesome climate is doing the system’s dirty work on a large scale.  Bad juju is in the air!  Anyway, I want to write a post-script on the recent zine For Those With Visions of the Apocalypse: Hopi Prophecy and Revolution.  I imagine not too many who have read it understand what it’s all about.  First and foremost, it wasn’t about any hoity-toity 2012 crap—although the time is very ripe for this subject, considering.  Secondly, it didn’t have anything to do with trying to create any kind of sensationalist, pseudo-spiritual fear about the end times.  Rather, it was a call to recognize the nature of our universal captivity so that we might work to transcend it.

Two New Zines

I just posted two new zines on the Chapbooks & Lit page, ready to roll off the presses.  They are–

For Those With Visions of the Apocolypse: Hopi Prophecy and Revolution

This zine is addressed to all the people who have already seen the ruins, whether in devastating visions, longing daydreams, or right before their eyes.  It’s 2012, the year of prophecy, and more than ever we are not only afraid that we will see the world we know come to ruins, we desperately hope it will.  This may be a promising sign.  We are faced with a monumental choice: either abide by the laws of creation and live peace-fully, or continue to live as abberations to the spiritual laws which govern all life on earth and suffer the apocolyptic consiquences.  The Hopi (whose name means People of Peace) have been trying desperately to spread this message since the arrival of empire onto their land, and they have steadfastly defended their traditional way of life in order to preserve the balance of nature for the benefit of all life.  This zine is written to further their cause, to dispel fear, and to assure all that not only is a drastically different way of life possible, it is beautiful, universally healing, and necessary to remain on this earth.  For our ancestors, our unborn grandchildren, the wilderness, and the spirit.

aaaaand…

Xin Xin Ming: Song of the Faithful Mind

Written by Sengchan, the third Zen patriarch of China, this is a classic treatise on returning to primal consciousness.  It dovetails well with John Zerzan’s “Langauge: Origin and Meaning”, “Running on Emptiness”, and “Silence”.  In case you were wondering what unreified, unmediated consciousness looks like, the Xin Xin Ming is a way to find out for yourself.  I recomment carrying it around as a daily meditation, to keep you sane.

Both are available in reading and print formats on the Chapbooks & Lit page.  Please print and distribute them if you have the ability.  I think it is a good time to focus some discourse on the inevitability of natural law taking hold–whether or not we are part of that transition.  Best wishes to you all, and send all your good thoughts to the Shoshone who are on their annual Walk and Run.  They started today from Tonopah and will end with a protest at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site on the 13th, celebrating Mother’s Day by asserting their right to the land and their intolerance of the United States to bomb and poison it.  Take good care.

Bureauccupy Ashland: A Parable

The Occupy movement has done a lot of good.  It has helped thousands break the spell of hopelessness and everyday desolation that accompanies life in modern mass society, and opened many eyes to the plight faced by life here on our beloved but tortured planet.  A great deal of radical consciousness, bountiful laughter, and essential humanity has been resurrected in Occupy communities—accompanied by heaps of joyously broken glass piled in the arteries of the wasteland-state. I am unspeakably grateful for all these things. But in the proud tradition of all radicals, I have my gripes.  My own disillusionment from the Occupy movement began in the town of Ashland, Oregon, population 21,000.  My experiences there display the many layers of occupation blanketing landscapes both physical and mental like so many strata of geology, and I believe they make a case against the models of leftist structuralization which the movement has widely adopted.

Occupy the universe: a few poems

I wrote these poems to submit to an anarchist journal whose theme for their next issue was “Occupy”.  They were rejected.  Wah.  Maybe because they don’t really seem to have anything to do with the Occupy movement.  Well, exactly.  Neither does the occupy movement have much to do with any kind of meaningful movement towards liberation (except where anarchists took hold of the opportunity to make a public and sometimes riotous appearance, piggybacking as usual).  Especially now, when the remaining groups of Occupiers have mostly given up on taking public space as a spontaneous communal living experiment and decided instead to focus on things that won’t bother the authorities quite so much, it’s achingly clear that no amount of consensus is going to turn this failed, reformist movement into anything remotely fun or liberating.

In ye old early days of Occupy, when it seemed to have some promise (apart from being an outdoor movement with winter on the way), I started saying, “Occupy the universe.”  Why?  Because in order to go somewhere you have to get to where you are.  Trying to begin a revolution in autumn is probably the first indication that the Occupiers were still living in the realm of phantoms that is modern politics, where the spectacle of a revolution is nothing more than that–an image among images whose unreality begs negation in a revolution of sensibility.  Anyone occupying their own two eyes can see that everything’s got to go if we want out of the nightmare, and yet the slogan “Occupy Everything” doesn’t seem to inhabit the same planet that is ruthlessly occupied by empire, civilization, and consensus oppression.

Here are the poems.  They aren’t very good.  Good bye.

New Literature Posted

The Chapbooks & Lit page has recieved some new entries, including some new anarchist zines filed under Primitivism and two whole new sub-sections.

The first is titled Books of Mayhem! which includes selections on cacheing, getaway driving, and lock picking, as well as a complete collection of the Poor Man’s James Bond (which includes guides to weapons making, martial arts, diy espionage, etc.).  Of special note are three titles from the one and only George Hayduke (aka. Edward Abbey).  These books include delightful methods of trickstering, monkeywrenching, and making homemade silencers, among other dirty tricks.  All these texts contain information that may be dangerous to your safety and others, so you should only use them if you are decidedly up to no good and/or bent on reckless gung-hoery.

The second new section is an extensive library of primitive skills, wilderness survival, and camping techniques.  I’ll expand on this by and by, hopefully with some flintknapping tutorials if I can rumage them up.

Now go out there and free the earth already!  And eat some crickets!  And set some booby traps!  For cryin out loud!

Hasta luego folks.

Bearers of Light, Masters of Death: a poetical summary of the ancient philosophy of industry and civilization

What is the light that lights the lights?  What is the power which turns on our machines, which hums through our power lines?  What is it which we call energy in this modern landscape, where does it come from?

Fire.  Wood.  The life of the tree, its energy, the sunlight which gave it strength released in flame.  The tree’s life is sunlight, wood is grown by sunlight, fire is sunlight.  The earth, the earth is the ashes of the wood.  The seasons are the cycles of the earth, the seasons are the growth rings of the wood.  The breath of the wind are its leaves, the air that gives life to the smallest mouse and the greatest buffalo.  The rains are its sap reaching skyward.  The flowers, fruits, and seeds are promises that life goes on, that the seasons go on, that the heavens and earth endure forever.  The flame is sunlight.

They say that man invented fire, but fire was always there.  Man simply unlocked the key to fire, and ever since the obsession with mastering the forces of nature has driven the conquest of the earth.  This urge is considered holy, sacrosanct, and innate.  It is called our intelligence, our destiny, our responsibility and our right.  To control.  To carry the flame.

“Lucifer” means “Light Bearer.”  He tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge.  That got us kicked out of paradise.  Prometheus stole fire from the gods.  He was a thief.  He came bearing light to humanity, and was punished by having his liver eaten eternally by birds of prey.