Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

On Hypocrisy

But how can we live without being hypocrites when the entire system in which we are ensnared — from which we aspire to disappear completely, but haven’t yet — is a thicket of obfuscation, denial, contradiction, and lies? All the terms of our existence and every fact and facet of our culture — America, Western civilization, modernity, whatever — is hypocritical, infinite sin compounded infinitely over an infinite duration. And hypocrisy is not the same as Paradox. If Paradox is the generative friction of two truths simultaneously occupying the same point in space, then hypocrisy is the double black hole of two lies. They will say that we are hypocrites because we take from — in many senses, rely on —a system whose existence we oppose. This is a fair and accurate critique—

Kierkegaard: it is the eleventh hour! confess your sin! — but if it is the worst thing we can be accused of, then our hearts are more pure than they have ever been, and we, knights of faith, are on the proper path, having reduced our participation in the system to a fine point, a knife edge, a leech mouth. If the organism dies, the parasite moves on, or else dies with it. We should be so lucky as to have this problem!

A Different Trip Another Time Another Rain

Got sick in the Badlands so we set up camp early among wild sage and roaming buffalo. Felt like my guts would rip apart but the sky was so beautiful it hurt. Felt closer to everything, like I was all of it and it was me. Terry worried I was sweating too much, dehydration, but I said, If I die in my footsteps, so be it. Got a ride to Fargo the next day and wanted to get a train but there was a derailment that caused a great ruckus and stopped all the trains up in the yard so we started hitching again or tried to but this time it didn’t work. You’d think with all the so-called Christians in this town… But maybe we looked too dirty by this point. Something. A trial. Ended up sleeping in another field, not wild like before — the county fairgrounds, muddy, where mosquitoes feasted on our blood until we finally gave up on sleep (“for the weak,” Terry cries! as we approach the all-night gas station trying to figure out how we’ll make off with the coffee unnoticed, being the only customers in the place and all — suffice to say that we got it done) and finally the sun came out and we got a ride from Fargo all the way to Minneapolis last night, and today made it the rest of the way to Bloomington. Found some punx hanging around a quad at the university and they took us in. Every college town is heaven, each one different but the same, like hoboing from Gainesville to Gainesville to Gainesville, a hundred Gainesvilles flung across the country, like stars in the sky. Fed and warm now; feeling we are truly blessed on this trip — not that we aren’t always, all the time, but it can be so hard to keep in mind. I keep waiting for words that are waiting for me and disappearing into undefinable moments but I know that they are there as love is there, is here, looking at the same stars that are looking down on me and into me, moments perfect without words or they could or should be. I know everything is a way station — me and Terry, only passing through here, only passing through each other’s lives — but there’s a storm gathering in the gray sky and the rain is also holy — it keeps the leaving kind from disappearing too soon. Holding Terry close, under cover while the storm beats down. That’s it.

Olam Ha-Ba

Faith grows in slip-spaces, rough spots, cracks. Give it something to grasp on to, a niche in rock face, a trellis — something to cover or climb. It thrives in the soil of lack, and in its upward-striving breaks the concrete beneath which the buried soul slumbers, dormant, but is yet alive. Only airtight systems are airless. They self-asphyxiate, as the global capitalists will discover soon enough. The diamond necklace becomes the diamond garrote. A beautiful corpse, but ravaged. Anarchism is mold thriving on a carcass. Sola fide, sola gratia . Belief is weeds.

And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!

— Numbers 11:29

But I did end up back at the hated apartment complex, despite my declaration to Liz on the day of the raid. I went back, one last visit, a postscript, to retrieve something from my old life that actually had use value apart from what it could be sold for: my bicycle.

It was astonishing, really, that I had forgotten to take it before. I felt stupid, careless, and prayed the whole walk over that I wouldn’t find it stolen or stripped. Parker, please grant me this bicycle, that I may use it to bring glory to Your Name and spread Your Word.

It was right where I had left it — a silver road bike with wide-tread tires. Hallelujah! It didn’t even need to be taken in for air.

Back home — it was September — I stood before the broken bedroom mirror and stared at my face. I had a hole in my beard. It was a small spot, say half a dime’s width, where nothing grew but a few stunted, forked-end hairs. In all my years as a daily shaver, I had never known nor so much as suspected that there was this barren, blasted region in the landscape of my face. Now my beard flowed wild, black, curly, and thick, grown out and growing still. I loved to play with it, as did my lovers. It felt especially good to be patted, an upward motion from below that made the beard coil like mattress springs. A welcome pressure. Hair grew high up on my cheeks, my sideburns bushed out, wisps curling back around napeward. My mustache spilled over my lip. And actually, you couldn’t see the beard bald spot, which was on the underside of my chin, a secret tunnel. Sometimes I would take a finger and slide it into the hole, where it was humid, somehow cavernous and close at once, the way the tongue perceives a gap between two teeth. Fascinated by this, I restlessly touched and touched, worried those stunted hairs until they fell loose and the hidden skin grew irritated and flaked. This is who you are, I thought, and my eyes were wet with love for myself and my lovers and for the world.

How wonderful and strange it is to be alive! How uneven we are, and how lucky, in our delirious specificity and holy broken forms. Since moving into Fishgut I had made self-discovery into a full-fledged occupation, into a perpetual act of devotion. I understood my body, and the bodies around me, not merely as “bodies” in the abstract but as the bodies that they, individually, actually were. And the souls that those bodies housed, and how soul and body worked in concert, happily bound. I pressed down on Katy’s clitoris like ringing the doorbell of her spirit, and when it answered the door I gave it a sloppy wet kiss. We were all in love with each other all the time, world without end in its endless perfecting and eternal imperfection, God never grant us permanence, for perfection equals stasis equals death, only ever revolution forever, amen.

I fletched, loaded, fired the arrow that pierces the cloud of unknowing. I rode my bicycle all over campus, up crowded walking paths and across green quads, through parking lots, skirting shrubbery and fountains, jumping curbs, a celebrant, thinking, Every moment of freedom is glory unto God’s name ; thinking, I can go even faster than this if I want to ; thinking, You sad sheep, how unlike you I am; I, the rider of the silver bike, I the holy goat.

Around Lake Alice, where turtle heads peep from murkwater and tame gators laze on the shore. Past the nondenominational meditation center (a lakeview pavilion with stained glass; available for weddings, etc.; inquire for rates). Past the acres of student garden plots by the plant science buildings, where I had encouraged Anchor to make at least some use of the fact she was still a student and take an elective that might teach her organic gardening which would be essential after the country’s infrastructure collapsed — when the good times came — but she, selfishly, had chosen a creative writing course instead. A small softball diamond and bleachers, side by side with a soccer field. A water purification plant that stank like eggs. The Harn Museum of Art. Still more outbuildings and open spaces of indeterminate university function. Eventually, depending which way I went, I exited the campus to find myself either on Archer Road or on Thirty-fourth Street — each a miserable strip of fast-food chains and big-box stores, Blockbusters and Office Depots, Ruby Tuesdays and Olive Gardens. Ah, glory of the free market! Ah, surfeit of choice!