The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Finally, they have a manuscript to give to Anchor. It’s a strange little chapbook, this Good Zine, uneven, a bizarre commingling of their counterpoised editorial philosophies, alternately wooing and repulsing its reader, here clear as a fortune cookie and there dense as stone, all the words Parker’s own as she wanted, save for the section headings, which he insisted upon including, and which they wrote together. The Zine is something that the whole house can take joy and delight in, and which they feel certain is destined to do its appointed Work.

  ONLY EVER TO BE GIVEN AWAY FREELY:

  THESE FRAGMENTS OF

  THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY

  DELIVERED UNTO THE HOUSE OF FISHGUT

  BY THE GRACE OF OUR LORD

  AND HIS PROPHET PARKER WHO WROTE

  THESE LINES AND MANY OTHERS

  IN HIS OWN HAND

  IN THE SUNSET OF THE MILLENNIUM

  AND REVEALED THEM TO US

  IN THE SUMMER OF ’99

  Seven Theses of Anarchristianity

  The Pattern is the breaking of the Pattern.

  God frees and saves through the twin and inextricable gifts of Anarchy and Grace. We demonstrate our worthiness to receive these gifts by asserting that they are rightly ours.

  When Christ spoke of the fulfillment of the Law, he spoke of the obliteration of the Law, because perfection means Stasis, which is Death. As the Christian triumphs over Death so the Anarchist over the Law—there is no difference or distinction between the obstacles, less still among those who triumph over them.

  The body is the site of all experience in this world. It is through it that we know anything, everything, and certainly God. Why would God wish for us to hate that of which we are shaped, and through which we know the world He made?

  Chaos is older than Creation. The Anarchist walks with God today, even as she hastens the Death of Empire, that all might walk with God tomorrow.

  Joy is a better form of prayer than prayer, but prayer is also a better form of joy than joy.

  Desire is a strange attractor. Your longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth.

  A Grammar Lesson

  What if instead of “no place,” utopia could be understood to mean “no place in particular”? As in, could be anywhere. As in, be here now. Beautiful, absurd things, possible only with God and through God, Who is the ultimate positive value, the universal affirmation that fills the freed space abandoned by the driven-out rulers of the fallen world, the demiurge and all his archons, their dead systems junk-heaped; their long shadows drowned in a lake of everlasting sun. Any place can be no place if you will it. You drive out everything that is not God, and what’s left is pure God, here and now. The eternal manifests in the temporal as a rupture, a revolutionary break. It is in this way that our faith makes us crazy in the world.

  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.

  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.

  Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

  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 a
nd 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.