Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

In the kitchen, I filled a tall glass of water from the sink, drank it all, then poured another. With this second glass in hand, I meant to return to the living room. I was almost sure that nobody besides Katy had seen me crying, or had any inkling at all of what had gone on. Only she had witnessed my disturbance, and so it was not surprising that when I turned around she was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and without speaking gestured toward our room. The child was back in the care of its wasted mother. I followed my lover down the short length of our hall. Both guest rooms had their doors cracked; light and noise spilled from one, darkness and quiet abided in the other. Whatever anyone wants or desires. Everything, anything, all the time. Our room was dark. No candles were lit. The bed was empty. I sat down, facing myself in our broken mirror. Katy stepped between me and it.

“Where’s Anchor?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“She should be here. Why did she help us make the Zine if she wasn’t going to ever be here?”

“I don’t know.”

“She wrote a poem but she won’t show it to me because she can’t accept what it says.”

“Did you ask to see it?”

“How could I? She hasn’t been here.”

“Then how do you know she wrote it?”

“I saw her.”

“David, what are you talking about? You can tell me.”

But I couldn’t. Parker was behind her, looking out at me from within the mirror, his visage sharded and off-angled by the forking cracks. His wings were folded up but I could see them trembling. He was giving me a meaningful look. So I just said, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m pretty fucked-up. Like, stoned, I mean, but Anchor is supposed to be one of us. We need her. That’s all.”

“Well, you know I’d like that, too, but it’s really up to Anchor.”

“The truth moves through her but she denies it.”

“I still don’t know what you mean, but if so, that’s her own choice. I think you should sleep, David.”

“I want to take a walk, I think.”

“I wish you’d stay here.”

“No, it’ll be good for me. It’ll clear my head. Please .”

“You don’t need my permission, David, for this or for anything.”

“I know that, but I still want it. Will you just say it for me?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Just this once.”

Her lips twisted into a grimace, her eyes cast down, me waiting as she weighed the absolute force of my need against the equal and opposite force of her beliefs, our shared faith, which stated that no one had power over any other, so how could permission ever be given, if authority was not held? I had no right to ask this thing of her, but her love for me was without limits, was the constitutive fact of the world even as the founding gesture of law always must lie outside the system of law that it establishes, which is why there is no such thing as legitimate law of any kind.

“Okay,” she said, her voice slivered and raw. For the sake of my love she sinned. I kissed her lips, which did not open for me or move at all; she was a figure of infinite resignation, and received my sin into herself. I brushed past her and out of the bedroom, the kitchen door, the backyard, the house. I left. It was easy, really. I just disappeared into the dark.

Where was our prophet, and why did he not come?

He could not, I reasoned, have been waylaid or detained. And so I began to wonder if it was us ourselves, somehow, who delayed him. Wherever he was, and even as by his Grace I saw visions and into hearts, so he saw us, into our hearts, and there was something that displeased him, or anyway, gave him pause. He would return when we were worthy — I mean ready, I guess; it’s hard to keep the language straight so you are really saying what you mean. Worthiness of course is tied to hierarchy, standards, ratings, merit, and so could not have possibly been what I meant.

Where was Parker right now? Like, where was he actually in the world ? Was he still in the state of Florida? In Alachua County? Had he left us (them) to return to the Prairie — was he a pile of swamp bones? Or was he truly Elsewhere? Squatting in Alphabet City with some new crew of wild boys, or a Krishna now, or a Trappist monk. Or had his spirit finally blown like an old tire or an eardrum, so that the voice of God was as silence to him? Did he work a straight job — the night shift at some gas station in southeast Texas? A father-to-be in Carson City? Was he headed to Seattle himself, and would he march in the Black Bloc with Thomas, brave through clouds of tear gas, and would their streaming red eyes peek out from the thin smiles in their balaclavas, and would those gazes catch in the midst of the crush, amid bodies and swung batons and concussion grenades, and would they see one another face to face, as if in Heaven, and if they did then so what?

How old was Parker?

Had he turned thirty yet?

Was his hair grown thin?

Was he with Terry?

Terry and Terry and Terry. He or she and who. Who was this person with whom Parker had traveled through the Badlands — and who knew where they had been before that, or where they had gone after. Who was Terry? Male or female? Lover of Parker’s, or friend? The entry was undated, and even Katy didn’t know who Terry was. Parker had never mentioned any Terry; so far as she knew he had had no friends but her and Thomas — even Liz had had to admit that she’d barely known him. There was more to Parker’s life than the Book recorded. That much was to be expected. But the idea of this Terry — of Terry’s tremendous effect on our Parker — arrested my attention and disturbed my mind. I had argued against including the Terry section in the Good Zine, but Katy had insisted. In fact, on the point of this particular passage, Katy’s and my respective positions had been inverted — we switched sides.

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.

“This is the heart of it, right?” I had said to Katy, hoping that if I threw her own words back at her she would have to accede. But Katy wanted to include the whole entry; that Parker was capable of receiving and giving love, that he was willing to open himself to — that he was even capable of — intimacy on strictly human terms (“That’s it”) seemed to fully realize him for her. He was all too human as much as he was all too holy, and this vision of double excess was for her the highest manifestation of Parker’s own notion of the joyful paradox, the conscious dwelling in the mystery of the heart and the heart of mystery. She saw in the Terry episode a validation of our (or was it really just her?) particular interpretation of Parker’s teachings. This text was the essence of the Book, she said, essential to include, and she had been willing to trade me any passage I wanted in exchange for my backing down. And so she got to include Terry, and I got to include the meditation on the Kierkegaard quote, which she had been pushing to cut.

The Book is in the world to be read by the world.

When you read the Book the Book reads you back.

The Book multiplies the Book.

What is there to do in the world but read the Book?

And be read by the Book in turn.

Anarchism allows for the notion of Legitimate Authority. After the Revolution, even though everything will be different and more honest and better, we won’t make the Soviet mistake of pulling jobs out of hats so that electricians are doing surgery and chefs are fitting pipe. Parker was a Legitimate Authority, which was why we spread his ideals and followed his model, antimodel though it was. But being against all authority, even his own, he would necessarily wish to redistribute that knowledge — this is what we were doing for him with the Good Zine — so that his own Legitimate Authority would no longer be required, or else would be indistinguishable from the equally legitimate authority of everyone else. Was it possible then that it was our yearning itself that delayed him? Was the force of our longing acting as a barrier instead of a draw? Perhaps he would only return to us when he himself was no longer necessary, when he could stand in the Fishgut dooryard and declare, “Behold, I am your prophet!” and have us answer him in one voice, “We are all prophets here!”