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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Experiments and Truth4/24/2006 00:19:16Yesterday with some friends I got the chance to go to an anarchist book fair in Boston. Now as far as I have known I am not an anarchist. (Though sometimes partisans of this and other kinds tell you that you have been one of them all along without knowing it.) One thing about it that struck me was the ritual value of publication in this culture - it was after all a book fair that was the excuse to congregate. Book stores and lending libraries appear to be the anarchist ward houses or synagogues, where people wait for the eschaton to arrive. And from some conversations, yes, there is an eschaton, just as there is a cosmic history and a method, a community, a boundary, and a dress code. All of the religious that is missing is the explicit foundational assertion (a la Michael Bakunin) that religion is against anarchy. How do I walk away from that experience, from that bit of life-tourism? Recognizing that if it had happened to hit me right I too could be an anarchist (I will believe anything) but it did not. I enjoyed the beauty of the visions they describe and I am awed by the commitment to active building-work that these folks feel empowered to do. Truly they are working for a better society and that is an incredible thing. It is important to remember amidst all this agnosticism: WE NEED TO BUILD A BETTER SOCIETY. A statement like this is contingent precisely on the theological virtues, in some form or another. So what are we left with? We talked about this on the drive home. We don't accept exactly the histories we were offered or all the justifications. Yet this seems beside the point. Today the gospel reading was Jesus to Thomas: "You believe because you can see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe." The community, the identity of anarchy is a fact beyond reason, some mix between faith and circumstance, which has not locked us in its sights. Gandhi's autobiography is titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and this title has long moved me. In a very meaningful way, there is nothing else we can expect to do with our lives than experiment with truth, to tinker against it. Truth, in this sense, is the fact of the world, that which reacts against what we do. What we do are experiments. I think of this a lot in run-ins with others, communities and identities that I am not. I cannot be them but I am desperately thankful for what they are because it adds to my knowledge of the truth. Every experiment offers gifts, very often through the arts. Art is a secret language through which bounded communities slip the truth of their experience out of the borders. (I was thinking about that at my a-religious university today as I heard applause for old sacred music being sung.) For the anarchists, for instance, one of the great gifts is feminist thinking, feminist ritual space in feminist theory. Also zines, DIY knowledge, and a great deal of labor organizing. The Argentine colectivista movement now is an even more tangible outgrowth. No thing or experiment that touches the world does so without leaving gifts. This notion, furthermore, is a cardinal criterion of the idea of a world community. Undoubtedly our race will continue to be made of many different fragmented factions at different scales, sometimes opposed, sometimes not, sometimes indifferent. But the difference between the world that has gotten smaller and one that has not is the open society, the sharing of knowledge, the capability of using one another's experience mutually as experiments. You have given everything into your experience as only you have. My assertion is that though I cannot be you I can learn from you and be fuller through that. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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