Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

To be against the archons — the rulers; to define yourself by what you aren’t, by what you oppose. At least in the ancient Greek. But the word we use comes also from anarchia , medieval Latin, and they used it to describe God’s being without a beginning. Something inductive, rather than oppositional. What would Anarchy look like if we simply started calling it Faith?

On Revelation

Why can’t we be pure, and alive like fire is, like the Holy Spirit who baptized in flame and was — IS— flame, pure spirit-fire, or like the living waters in Revelation are? Water and fire at once, together, inextricable: A sea as of glass on fire . Revelation 15:2. Revelation in whole an anarchist text, if read properly. Downfall of Babylon. Death of Empire.

Fuck Rome.

Good people fought hard at Nicea to see Revelation included, all that smoke and gold and blood, so that the Book would forever insist on the truth at the Heart of Paradox, or that Paradox is the heart itself of truth. It grieves me to dream of loss, but also there is the relish of anticipation. And Becoming. Everything is a way station. Let our lives be our politics and not our politics our lives. Till to love and live be one. This is what Christ achieved — embodied, was .

Is.

Call for Utopia Now!

All talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that Heaven lies in reach before us. And you should know that anything you’ve ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary. Revolution is simply the idea that we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely. You’re not the only one trying to find it. We’re out here, too, and if We could create a world in which everything that is possible is also desirable, then there would be no possibility of hypocrisy or conflict between desires. Total freedom, in that case, would mean full worldliness, and the pursuit of purity of heart would be indistinguishable from the embrace of every thing and person in the world.

Siste Viator

Thursday, made Toledo, half starved. Slept in a field the first night. Not too buggy. Saw Scorpio above. Feel like I’ve been fading in and out… There are these hidden things… Rain dances past the dim streetlights as I wander desolate suburb-blocks, scrounging — rows of houses with their curtains closed — dead silence and stillness, only me moving through the quiet drumming of the drops on the asphalt. I can hear the earth breathing beneath, lawns are such a massacred ideal, and the houses choked and the people inside them cowering in fear of the outside — frightened of Living, frightened of ME. People don’t dream here. They are built on assembly lines at cabinet factories. Or their parents were TV commercials for car tires and fraud diets. All diseased with the zombie virus. Anywhere could be here. I can tell this rain won’t stop for days.

One God, No Master

Faith is the power by which we leap over the unbridgeable chasm, burst through the wall of the asymptote, realize Heaven on Earth. Grace is us granted that power, the fuel injected into faith’s engine, the energy generated from its burning up.

We will live without rulers, without rules. We will prostrate ourselves before God almighty, and He will tell us, I love you, you are My equal, and the very Me of Me: stand tall.

A True Story

There used to be an anarchist collective in Gainesville that met at a greasy spoon on Twenty-third Street called Firpo’s. The collective was called the Re-Levelers and there were four people in it: two couples, boy-girl. So the four anarchists were sitting around their table, eating the food they had ordered and which they would pay for, and trying to draft a manifesto. They were discussing whether to identify the Re-Levelers as anarcho-communist or anarcho-communal, and the discussion had gotten fairly heated. The men were screaming at each other, starting to draw attention to themselves, and ignoring their girlfriends, who were each trying to get in edgewise some words of their own. Eventually the two women flipped over a place mat and scribbled out their own manifesto, declaring their secession from the Re-Levelers on account of its inherent sexism, and naming themselves the Anarcho-Feminist Solidarity Brigade. The men were still arguing with each other, and had not noticed that their collective had just been weakened by half. The women left their manifesto on the table for the men to find and rode their bicycles back to the house where they all lived together, where they would later tell their bewildered boyfriends, firmly, that this was no joke; there were indeed now two anarchist collectives in town, and any alliance between the two groups would have to be negotiated and earned.

The Moral

Politics are boring because they really are irrelevant. No more time should be wasted debating over “issues” that will be irrelevant when we must go to work again the next day. Lives cannot be theorized and theory cannot be lived. Theorists quibble. Thieves scheme. Be a thief — steal your own life back from the state, and the “anarchists,” too. All Freedom flows from devotion to God and to the Freedom of God and in God. Devotion to anything except God and God’s Freedom is heresy — but rest assured that Hell does not await you upon your death. You will have already lived through Hell, and it will then be too late to escape.

Wrestles with the Angel Kierkegaard

“I supposed that the very beginning of the test of becoming and being a Christian was for one to be so introverted that it is as if all the others do not exist for one, so introverted that one is quite literally alone in the whole world, alone before God, alone with the Holy Scripture as guide, alone with the Pattern before one’s eyes.”

— Training in Christianity

K in perpetual rebellion against the established church. Idea that the idea of Christendom is heresy. Church militant is salvation; church triumphant is sloth and disgrace. How do you keep the church militant? How can you plan a permanent revolt, unless you plan never to win?

K as anarchist, monarch of the freed self — a king in rebellion against the whole system of kingdoms. He is drawn to Christ because he is drawn to the absolute and transcendent sovereignty of the individual. The Kierkegaardian self, even — especially — in the aspect of its infinite suffering, is God-vast. The dimensions of the human, the individual, are extended to encompass the universe. God-in-Christ, Christ-as-God, each another way of describing K’s own conception of what it means to be a complete self. Of course for him this conclusion is unthinkable, and so he doesn’t allow himself to state it. Amazing to think that the zealous sufferer, who can look on unblinking and call Abraham a murderer, ultimately blinks at the prospect of the obvious: naming himself a God, understanding that God’s constant act of drawing-toward, His calling of K and of everyone, is not merely a drawing-toward, but a Becoming.

Virtues of Disappearance

Hakim Bey writes of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, secret utopias that spring up and then disappear with no trace. In this age of empire — full spectrum dominance, New World Order, collapse of the Real into Simulation — ephemerality is no longer a mere characteristic, but is become a value. Affinity groups, squats, Rainbow Gatherings, Burning Man; whole minor civilizations appearing like mushrooms after rain, disappearing like sun-burnt mist, untraceable, a vision, a dream. The holes in the cybernet, the dead spot in the panopticon’s eye. We must know our friends when we see them, like Christians of old Rome wearing the sign of the fish.