Friday Tyrant - The Gospel of Anarchy

Besides drawing a circle around the letter "A" on a few lockers at my junior high school (some circles contained the "A," some circles the "A" broke through), the amount of serious thought I've given to anarchism or anything at all political is at a bare minimum. My life is not a punk song. I'm not an authority. Ask Crass or somebody else who thinks they are. Where I grew up, the idea of anarchy as a way of life had almost as much impact as a sticker of its signifier. It peeled off pretty easy, if it ever stuck at all. The punk politics of 1987's West Virginia (the time and place where I was exposed to anything slightly resembling The Gospel of Anarchy) was less of a forum for ideas and more of an alliance of glue-huffing teenagers who all happened to listen to Th' Inbred. I was there for the music and the skating, not to learn shit. And when I quit skating, a lot of what came along with that went away with it.

I recently attended a reading and discussion of Justin Taylor's new novel The Gospel of Anarchy (HarperPerennial), a fictional history (historical fiction?) of a movement that I must confess to have missed moving with entirely. I can't say I graduated college without ever learning anything about politics (though I wish I could), I think I just never cared. But the talk tonight brought some old aspiring academic thoughts back into my head and it made me start to wonder if I really, truly never cared. I must have cared, at some point. Maybe I even cared a lot.

After Taylor's reading and some discussion with his editor, a member of the audience asked Taylor what, after all this, did anarchy mean to him. Hard question. Taylor replied by first saying, "What does anarchy not mean to me?" and then gave his best play to what is a splintered and slippery game to define. I was thinking how the words freedom and anarchy had never been pleasant or celebratory words for me like they were for some people. I always imagined freedom and anarchy in the hands of others who would use theirs to take mine away. Or wait, did you mean freedom for me and an anarchic playground to run through for me and me only and, oh yeah, the people who I think could handle it without regressing and eating cows like maenads or something? Before even killing the fucking things first? If that's the case, then I say, "Yes. Anarchy. Let's do this." But to give that same lawless freedom to the millions of belligerent assholes who inhabit the rest of the world? I'm sorry, but I don't trust those guys. And while you're at it can you please thrash that one there in the face and put him in a cage if during an anarchic burst of his freewill he so freely and anarchically rapes and murders my brother? I know, I'm taking this too far and I'm being absurd. I think I heard somewhere that anarchy does not always imply nihilism and the total absence of rules, or at least some version of it does not. I'm just riffing (and I hate when people say, "I'm just riffing").

This book got me thinking politically. And I never do that. The book itself, how it's composed, could be considered an anarchy-of-sorts. Structurally, it's a free book. Not structure-free, but Taylor is fucking with traditional narrative and he can write to keep your nose in its pages, to be sure. At times, I must admit, I don't know what just happened. But at other times Taylor gets going so good that it starts to piss me off. Some of the prose in this book will drop you.

The Gospel of Anarchy takes place in a squatter punk scene of Gainesville, Florida in the summer of 1999. A prior squatter wrote a journal and then disappeared, leaving his Word behind. The squatters left in his wake take the journal as gospel, tag the gone punk a messiah, and try to recruit others while waiting for his return. Taylor weaves the Christian myth through this novel in ways that both revere and expose all he's set out to cover or uncover. As serious as any of it may get, he never loses his sense of humor (punk is supposed to be a little bit funny, right?). Taylor builds greatly but also laughs at the greatness he's built. It's brave because it is honest.

At one point, the group of squatters decide to turn the punk prophet's gospel-journal into a 'zine. There are only a few excerpts given and, goddammit, I wish there had been more because the writing blazes. Like when you imagine a prophet at his desk writing, and his pen is only a thin flame? Taylor should use his "prophet voice" more often. He could start his own cult with this kind of talk.

Here are two sections from the gospel within The Gospel of Anarchy:

A DIFFERENT TRIP ANOTHER TIME ANOTHER RAIN

Got sick in the Bad Lands so we set up camp early amongst 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—a county fair grounds, 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 onto, 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.

The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor. Out now.