Heaven Is A Temporary Autonomous Zone
Heaven Is A Temporary Autonomous Zone.
For Peter Lamborn Wilson RIP. (1945-2022). Long Live Hakim Bey.
What will heaven or paradise or the afterlife look like for you, for you the monastic crackpot genius, you are our Whitman, our Blake, so much more even, what will the paradise be for you but an autonomous zone of autonomous zones with flowers & love & drugs. What will heaven be for you, actually we don’t know, but we have these endless pages, all these many books & zines, yes countless YouTube videos & mp3 streams & even a few professionally produced albums/CDs with Bill Laswell.
Heaven is Croatan, is the Dismal Swamp, is a Sufi Christian Islamic Pagan Green Magick Orthodox Heresy, with snacks & cigarettes & obscure rites performed outside Airstream trailers in some abandoned no-go zone.
Heaven is taking the Amtrak to Denver, catching a ride to Boulder, to meet you & Allen & Anne & Richard & Lee Ann & John & Stefan & Steven & Chris & everyone else, everything Kerouac embodied as disembodied poetics.
Heaven was driving from Colorado to California to Washington then finally Wisconsin, to find that Autonomous Zone that you told me about in the Driftless Dreamtime, where many more disembodied bodies would collide in the glorious chaos of the hypermedia permaculture mail-art something or other.
Heaven was going back to places like Chicago & Detroit to start our own Autonomous Zones, from Willis Avenue storefronts to sprawling Trumbullplexes, with a handful of us eventually heading to some wild land in the hills & hollers of Tennessee, where some faery zones already existed, where more delicious hovels would be created in delightful domes or dilapidated shacks on undisclosed backroads, & so much correspondence would take place with you & other anti-authoritarian authors, from various computers wired to the sprawling Barn & connected to the nascent interwebs by devious dial-up, at that place that was suddenly a destination for traveling tramps, a chaos clubhouse, a neopagan temple, a feral hippypunk venue at the Bolo Bonobo.
Heaven is an endless bibliography of books about religious heresy, as you confessed you could never buy enough books about religious heresy, you also could not write enough about the same. I am ever so grateful for those few moments last summer in your Saugerties apartment, where you admitted that you didn’t know how many books you had actually written or how many of your own were on those shelves, including ones you signed & sold to me. It was way too short, but I am grateful we talked & even when we trash-talked about everything & everyone. You were cranky as ever, wanted to make sure that I read Abdullah Öcalan & appreciated Rojava, which I do.
Heaven is marijuana & meat, wine & sex, & I could go on, but I won’t. You once wrote that the 12-steps were just pious renunciation, whereas the 13th step was the gallows. I prefer the 13th step as the album by A Perfect Circle & hooking up with my sweet spouse who I met in an AA meeting. But in all seriousness, last summer, as I celebrated your False Messiah book as just-in-time for me leaving the church, you seemed especially concerned that I was still going to AA, like the elder brother mentor friend you will always be to me. (For the record, AA founder Bill W was an anarchist, inspired by Kropotkin in penning the 12 traditions of our mutual aid voluntary society, friend of spiritualists who hung out & tripped balls on acid with Aldous Huxley, without changing his sobriety date.)
Heaven really is an autonomous zone. They won’t believe me but all of this is true: when I left the institutional church for the anarchist scene around 1988, my Dad bought me a book by Jacques Ellul about Christian Anarchy. Dad didn’t mind that I was anarchist, he just wanted me to keep my Christian roots. When we re-ignited our pen-pal friendship after an approximate ten-year lapse, & it was around 2019, I had to tell you that I was Christian preacher at a rural church in the Bible belt. You wrote back that you were simply concerned that I stayed connected to all the anarchist streams within & on-the-margins of the Jesus tradition. You didn’t mind that I was a Christian, you just wanted me to keep my anarchist roots.
Heaven may be a house with many rooms, that means many more autonomous zones within autonomous zones, an endless spiral that spirals in every direction & dimension.
Enter UK author Kester Brewin, who was writing around the edges of the so-called “emergent church” movement around 2010. Brewin incorporated the Temporary Autonomous Zone into his vision of the church. Not long after, prolific author of the Christian left, Brian McLaren riffed hard on the TAZ in his book Naked Spirituality: “Could it be the kingdom of God is the ultimate TAZ, the ultimate liberation from the normal oppressive patterns of hegemony & homogeneity.” It’s not often in this theocratic Christofascist mess of America, that we recall what McLaren described as the “wonder, thrill, ecstasy” or “holy play, godly partying, sacred merriment.”
See: this is a weird convergence but one that PLW would have appreciated, one of his last books published before his passing being about Jesus. I honestly never wrote about the Hakim Bey > Kester Brewin > Brain McLaren church-as-autonomous zone connection, because it would probably be significantly uncomfortable for my anarchist heathen comrades as for the devout Jesus-following siblings-in-Christ, no matter how (in)appropriately deviant they might be in their faithful practices.
But what was even more wild to discover was the seeds of this anarcho-religious heresy in the American church counterculture of the late 1960s & into the early 1970s, where the church/kingdom was fashioned as a “liberated zone” by the Free Church, Underground Church, & Submarine Church movements.
See: When the Reformation was but 451 years old (that was 1968), a gaggle of hippy Christians took to the streets in California’s East Bay for a provocative All Saints and Reformation Day parade, including all: “fairies, minstrels, priests, prophets, exorcists, angels, archangels, wizards, soothsayers, nymphs, elves, hobbits, priestesses, and saints, as well as all other people of goodwill.” This celebration had a direct proclamation, still available in the “Berkeley Free Church Collection” online archive, with exclamation points indicative of their gospel enthusiasm: “Out Demons, Out! The Demons are Exorcised! The Saints go Marching in! The Radical Jesus is Winning! The Submarine Church is Surfacing! Hallelujah! The Liberated Zone is at Hand!”
Of course, your interests in radical religions were always on the edges, always ranting renegades & antinomian excesses as comfortable with Aleister Crowley as with the Apostle Paul. You were always on the outside, the far fringe of forever, inventing a new inside of psychedelic insurrection & psychic intoxication. The last two springs I got ever-so-close to the Croatan Forest & Dismal Swamp in eastern North Carolina. On the moment of your passing, we were driving home from Atlantic Beach, with my heart deep in the woods, my head deep in one of the many new scholarly books about the living, long-lasting rebellions & autonomous zones of the Dismal Maroons.
These last days, I had been daydreaming about you, planning another summer visit to be with you, was thinking about all these things yet to tell you, that I might get around to saying when we meet again in the ultimate post-everything paradise culture-jamming mind-blowing upside-down heaven-as-autonomous-zone. Temporary? Who knows? I always wondered if heaven would get boring after a few thousand years, but I imagine you would still be buying books & writing books & inventing new heresies to inject into beautiful orthodoxies. Until then, my teacher.
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