Sans Nom du Père: On the Unrectified and the Unrectifiable
चितिः स्वतन्त्रा विश्वसिद्धिहेतुः
citiḥ svatantrā viśva-siddhi-hetuḥ
“Awareness, self-standing and free:
the all-manifesting cause of the All.”
—Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam 1
One cannot but be sympathetic to the agrarian type of social anarchism, rooted in the land and peasant solidarity, and its urban equivalent that involves a love of the free polis, fending off the intrusions of state and commercialism. Anarchism abloom in its vibrant and reverently irreverent youthful ardour—memory eternal!—was a vehicle for maintaining the autonomy of the local and the regional over against the nation-state, the corporation, and so on. That is worlds apart from atomized individuals with internet-assembled philosophies and vague animus towards authority aggregating for disintegral lifestyle activism. There were symbolic realist goods even in the truncated forms taken in the wake of the alter-globalization, anti-consumerist, and indirectly political—though more direct as direct action—DIY ethic that had its vogue, with an impetus to the building of small-scale face-to-face mutual aid networks, as in the erstwhile cooperative movement; but the steady advance of time leads one to eulogize what proved to be mere fads of generations and milieux, the knack for which could not but fade as the décor shifted on the stage.
For the implicate order, in which chaos too takes part, is not engineered by experts in white lab coats or the attire of never-ending Casual Fridays. She emerges of Herself as speech bodying forth the forms of things unknown. She dances before and upon Her Beloved, vibrantly alive in the uncontrived repose that spans the Naught, the All, and the Middle. Beauty is the first of Her Names in the order of Man’s knowing, drawing the eye backwards and inwards towards a source that forever exceeds possession. Grasp at the garments of this Lady, the Great Mother, and She must vanish between fingers clutching air; rest dynamically open and She alights, filling every place and raising it to levity. None could found Her. She was present at the foundations with the Lamb. Wisdom was, enfolded in the Creator’s bosom before the first dawn, and an old world remains young wherever Her laughter may still be heard. Her daughters spring up wherever they fall.
Anarchism is sound when it has goods to defend, like the tradition of the free commons, in a spirit of love and brotherhood. At its best, it embodies distributist subsidiarity. The problem is when it is ideologically rigidified into crude utopian abstractions or sheer neo-Dadaist meaning-devouring negativity rather than concrete practices that live almost unthought and unexamined in a populace’s muscle memory as the group soul of all humanity in microcosm. This is also the problem of the Church and, frankly, of every assembly in this region of dissimilarity. The modern temper seeks ever more intensely to possess what can only be received: identity, meaning, community, tradition, even God. It habitually mistakes experience for transformation and takes the memory of a thing for the thing itself. Thus the living spring is gradually replaced by a cold apparatus for the production of springs. The Name begins to imagine itself anterior to what it names. Even the Name of the Father hardens into guarantee, forgetting the nameless depth from which every true name first flowers. The anarch of the spirit withdraws from every principle but the Principle: Freedom itself, divine awareness self-luminous and self-moving, boundless and groundless, self-thrown in a great play of contraction and expanse, revelation and concealment, known now as ever by unknowing.
To paraphrase: once anarchism was a reality without a name; now it is a name without a reality. Yet neither has reality escaped from us nor we from it. Its life is hid with Christ in God, submerged and unthought in essence. It persists in the uncorrected, spontaneous care of each to each; in those signless loyalties and generosities unmeasured; inhering in the abode of tacit wisdom no programme could manufacture, no market commodify, and no bureaucracy reckon over or with. It lights up contracted expanses of knowingly reticent solidarity that flee our avidity as we recall the way to share them, every one a sole heir: a pilgrim of the infinite and sheepless shepherd of the great vow.
Without stirring, Love moves the All.
I am here to bury this form only that it may rise perennial. Sister, will you too shoulder a spade?
