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@@ -1,3 +1,84 @@ + +This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything. + +This is not the political anarchy of historical figures like Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt or other names your probably white, probably bearded professor put on a syllabus. Most of them said *fuck what's wrong*[^1]. + +The shirt feels closer the anarchy you find in writers like Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey or Leo Tolstoy, anarchists more interested in the sum of our existence than individual parts of it. + +Despite the shirt, I've never really thought of myself an anarchist. When I was younger I had a lot of what I think is best called rage about the fucked nature of our society. Every young person capable of thinking for themselves has felt something similar. Seeking to understand or perhaps validate this unidentifiable sense of rage at the perceived injustice of the world is what led me to Thoreau and Tolstoy and then later Goldman, Focker and the rest. + +Even now I'm not sure why anarchist thinking appealed to me more than any other. I suppose it was an anecdote to the hierarchical, highly stratified society I grew up in. The idea of creating institutions that worked so well people actually wanted to be part of them was so novel it grabbed me. + +There was also the "fuck our society" aspect of anarchy. The aspect that just wanted to, as P.O.S sings, "break glass/Not hold a damn sign." If you really believe you can change a system from inside it you fail to understand the meaning of the word "system." And anarchy offers a very direct release from that ridiculous idea. Books like the Monkey Wrench Gang or a slim black volume named the Anarchists Cookbook that I discovered on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island, Newport Beach[^2], didn't ramble on about lawsuits and elections, they drank beer and blew things up. + +It would be impossible to explain to anyone who never experienced the pre-internet age how revelatory The Anarchists Cookbook especially was for me. It had real plans for brewing bombs, bathtub napalm and dozens of other ideas that struck even my testosterone addled, rage-filled teenage brain as incredibly bad ideas. But it was there. Actually really existed. + +Between those thin black, almost self-published covers, were not words about protesting or campaigning, but something much rawer, something driven by emotion rather than logic, the anarchy of pure destruction. This is the anarchy no one in our fucked society wants to talk about, the anarchy of nature, of the anarchy of gods like Shiva, tk or tk. + +Protest is the safe game. It might rock the boat, but it isn't going to sink it. Destructive anarchy is out to sink the boat, often for no other reason than to see what happens. It has no agenda and that makes it terrifying to anyone in power. Because in the world of power things without aims become terrifying because they are incomprehensible. They do not play by the rules of the power game. + +I never made a single thing from the recipes in the Anarchists Cookbook. +I wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. + +I've found that most of the time destruction is not the precursor to rebirth in our society, but anther tool to wield in the same boring old quest for personal personal power. We want to wield destruction not yield to it. We seek destruction because it gives us power over others. And that's the opposite of anarchy. + +Destruction is only one part of the story anyway. Destruction is a single point on a continuously turning wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel of karma in some religions, the alchemy wheel of creation in others. Even Shiva, tk and tk understand that they are but a part of the cycle. + +And we don't even have Shiva or tk or tk in our fucked society. We don't have a wheel of karma or creation. We don't even have a female god. And there is no rebirth without a female god. In our fucked society all you get is destruction, the rebirth never happens. Even the rage against that loss, the inability to have rebirth gets trapped and cycles back on itself until it explodes in violence. + +I was clearing out my closet in preparation for our trip and ran across the shirt again. I put it on for a bit. At first it felt starchy, a bit too tight in the shoulders. But I kept it on for a while and eventually it seemed to soften up a bit. One of us had to relax into the other. Perhaps both. + + + +Without the rebirth, destruction is nothing more than an ineffectual gesture. This, I think, is near the core of why the shirt wants to fuck our society. Or at least this became the core for me -- when nothing can grow out of destruction but more destruction, destruction ceases to serve any healthy purpose. + + +It's not that I have any more respect for laws, nor is it that I have any less desire to stop rampant destruction of the environment, it's that I no longer want to wield destruction as a kind of power over anything. To me anarchism is finally a rejection of power, a rejection of any attempt to wield power over others. + +Curiously the original author of the anarchists Cookbook seems to have gone a similar journey. In one of his many pleas for publishers to let the book go out of print, he says: + +>The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in ... The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this. + + +It works something like this: rage propels you to action, action turns out to be ineffectual, which leads to more rage, which leads to more action, which turns out to be ineffectual, which lead to more rage and so on until the larger society steps in to deal with the problem.The only way to stop this cycle is to realize that you're trapped in a whirlpool of your own making, missing the larger ocean entirely. + +Somewhere in the midst of writing this piece I started thinking about anarchism again though. + + + + +Magical anarchy is to anarchy what magical realism is to realism. It's anarchy of the senses; anarchy that defies logic in pursuit of something more. It's the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, sex and psychotropic chemicals. The anarchy of finding yourself alive, existing for a time on the most beautiful planet in the known universe. + +The default mode of being in magical anarchy is empathy. Everything is unknowable as a direct experience, but you have your own history and the remarkable power to listen. These two tools allow you to construct a limited and very poor imitation of the experience of others and can help form tiny bridges between their soul and yours. It's an incomplete and sometimes nearly impossible thing, but it's what we have and we do what we can with what we have. + + +Magical anarchy if founded on the belief that our individual experience of the world is profoundly narrow and the full dimensions of what's permissible and possible are unknowable. Given this limitation, when in doubt the safest assumption is the positive assumption. Which to say nothing is ever an "or", but an "and". + +For example, what any other creature on earth is thinking is unknowable, but they are thinking. All of them. The animals may not have thoughts we would understand or even recognize as thoughts, but they are thinking. It's taken 200 years, but science can even prove that they're thinking. Given that, it's probably safe to extend the same idea to the plants. Perhaps even the rocks. Perhaps the planet itself. The safe assumption would be to assume that your inability to experience the planet as a whole as "thinking" is a limitation of your observational systems, rather than proof that the planet is not thinking. + + + +This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and how you can too. But I don't know. I know the psychotropic compounds found in some plants helped. I believe that those compounds are here for exactly that purpose, but I don't know that they will help everyone. + +[^1]: The one exception is Goldman, who did seem to believe that almost everything was indeed wrong, and needed to be burned to the ground. But there was ultimately something tamed about most of the political anarchists of the early twentieth century -- like they were trying to tone things down to gain a seat at the table rather than acting on what they often wrote. + +[^2]: Fascist Island as we called it. + +[^3]: Even this is one level removed from the world though, the only reason we even see destruction and rebirth as negative and positive is because we're very attached to our current reality. + +--- + + +But of course the Anarchist's Cookbook is ultimately only half of the story. It's about destruction (for the most part). That wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that in our fucked society we don't seek destruction. Destruction is the first stage of regrowth. We never seek that. We give it lip service, but that's not what we like about destruction. + + +An often overlooked part of the Anarchists Cookbook is that it's not just bomb recipes and bathtub napalm. + +The book's take on destruction is more general that that and includes recipes for brewing LSD and tk for more personal, though potentially no less violent, destruction of the ego. This would end up being the far more personally useful form of destruction, breaking down the ego to discover the fragile and temporary nature of that construct and how to escape it for longer and longer periods of time. + + +--- + Beauty is subjective though. Maybe you don't see the beauty in the Travco, maybe you see a petroleum guzzling ecological disaster on wheels, air conditioning or no. Fair enough, though I would strongly suggest looking into one's own energy before passing judgment on another[^2]. [^2]: You can calculate your rough carbon footprint over at tk, though do consider the backstory -- the average house [weighs 500,000 pounds](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/asktheexpert/2002122968_homehay19.html), much of it wood that had to be clear cut and hauled around. I don't know the footprint of building a Travco, but I do know it only weighs about 5000 pounds. Then there's a coal we don't have to burn to generate electricity... Check out Bob's rather lengthy post on this topic over at [CheapRVLiving.com](http://www.cheaprvliving.com/blog/proof-that-off-grid-vandwelling-is-greener-than-housedwelling/). |