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Title: Tong Aesthetics Author: Hakim Bey Language: en Topics: aesthetic, immediatism Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/tong
“The lodge was symbolically named ‘The City of Willows’ (mu-yang
ch’eng). (It) contained an inner sanctum called ‘The Red Flower
Pavilion’ (Hung Hua T’ing), in which the essential part of the
initiation took place, and where the secrets of the society were
revealed to the recruit ... ”
“In a full-scale ceremony, the ritual appears to be divided into three
main stages. The first stage consisted of the recitation and
dramatization of the Myth of Origin in the main hall of the lodge. This
was called ‘performing the play (tso-hsi) and ‘watching the play’
(k’an-hsi) depending on whether one was an active or passive
participant; or ‘releasing the horses’ (fang-ma), (‘Horses” = recruits,
or new recruits; hsin-ting, ‘new tops’, was another name for new
recruits.) The second part of the ritual consisted of the oath-taking
ceremony in the Red Flower Pavilion, the issuing of the certificates of
membership, and the exhibition of secret documents, furniture and
objects of the lodge to the members. The feast and theatricals of
celebration which followed after a few days formed the third and final
part of the initiation.“
“All brethren who are brought hither are faithful and loyal: they all
are iron-galled and copper-livered. From the inexhaustible metamorphoses
are born millions of men, who are all of one mind and one will. All
these of one affection in the two capitals and thirteen provinces have
now come together to petition Father Heaven and Mother Earth; the three
lights, sun, moon (and stars); all the Gods, Saints, Spirits and
Buddhas, and all the Star Princes, to help all present to enlightenment.
This night we pledge ourselves, and vow this before Heaven, that the
brethren in the whole universe shall be as from one womb; as if born of
one father, as if nourished by one mother; as if of one root and origin;
that we will obey heaven and act according to its ways; that our loyal
hearts shall not change, and never alter. If the august Heaven will
protect and assist in the restoration of the Ming, then happiness will
have a place to which to return.”[1]
The City of Willows is the imaginal space of the traditional Chinese
Tong or secret society, (especially the Hung Triads), its “Temple of
Initiation”.[2]
The space itself, visionary or oneiric, contains within it (like a
hermetic “memory palace”) the details of the political myth of the
Triads, based on conspiracy to overthrow the Manchu dynasty and achieve
the “restoration of the Ming”, i.e., of Chinese rule. G. Sorel would
have understood this mythopoesis, this passionate reading of a set of
symbols which is like a place but not a place, like a text but not a
text; which prescribes a “general strike” or uprising in the language of
legend; which points to the future by pointing to the past, and to the
“Sea of Images.”[3]
Elsewhere we have proposed the Tong as a possible model of organization
for realizing immediatist goals, including the TAZ itself; now belatedly
we should consider the importance of style or aesthetics in the
emergence of a successful contemporary occidental Tong. In building a
Tong, style may not be “everything”, but it certainly cannot be
considered merely secondary or inessential. The Tong must be “a work of
art” in itself, like all Immediatist game-structures. A legend such as
the City of Willows provides this essential aesthetic shape.
We might think of the “Bee” as a temporary immediatist group organized
for one project (like a quilt). But even the Bee must both be and
produce a “work of art”. The Tong by comparison can be defined as a more
long-lasting group, theoretically “permanent”, devoted not to one
project but to an on-going “cause”. But what makes a Tong different from
an open group, like a sect or political party? The members of an
Immediatist Tong or TAZ core-group may not be held together by strong
class, ethnic, geographical, or economic motives; moreover, the
collaborative production of non-commodifiable art cannot be considered
by itself a sufficient cause for the formation of a secret society.
“Illegalism” per se may add cohesiveness to the group structure, but
still cannot serve as the only raison d’etre of a real Tong.
Insurrectionary action or “social sabotage” provide even stronger
motivation for a clandestine “order” – but not yet enough, perhaps, for
a full-scale “invisible collage”. Without “Tong aesthetics” – no Tong.
The two essential aesthetic elements of a Tong are: – (1) a cause; and
(2) a legend. Both cause and legend can be classed as aesthetic or
“mythic” systems, rather than as ideologies – since they are based on
symbols, which are real but ambiguous, rather than on “ideals”, which
are much more clear, but relatively un-real. When Sorel proposed a
“social myth” (specifically the syndicat and the General Strike) he did
not mean “myth” in the modern sense of the word – as an empty story, a
palliative and illusory narration. “Myth” in the Sorelian sense can be
called a story which is not only about “real life” but also wants to
manifest as real life. A cause, one may argue, is not a “real thing”
because it has not yet appeared. It is an aesthetic construct – but it
is also an Image-complex which intends to impose its pattern on
“reality”, like the hermetic spells of Renaissance magi or the
ceremonies of tribal shamans. It expresses this intention in the the
form of a legend about a cause, a symbolic narrative of highly-charged
images arranged to augment a dynamic potential (“conversion”,
“initiation”, “enlightenment”, “action”), in the group which adopts and
adapts it. The cause, therefore, is the public Sorelian myth, the
legend, its private propaganda within the Tong.
The “poesis” of the City of Willows, for example, reveals its workings
in the imagery of the visionary journey of the “Vanguard”, who sees: –
The Tong initiates like taoist sages or spiritual nomads, “far off at
the horizon (yet) near before my eyes. They roam about the world without
a fixed residence “white herons flying past a fan, a pear-shaped censer,
a sword, a flute, two jade castanets, a scepter, a floating bridge the
daughter of the Dragon King “gathering mulberry flowers” (a password)
caves of drizzle, summer showers, hoarfrost a volcano and so on (Davis,
op. cit., 132–134). These images may seem merely decorative or arbitrary
to us, but they were charged with cultural memes for the Hung adepts,
and were built into a system which cohered not only as a “poem” but also
as a multiplexed evocation of their cause. This poem of potential action
becomes even more vital in our immediatist Tong, since the text must
serve to provide some of the cohesion lacking in such a variegated group
as ours may be. A mere political program will not suffice, nor will a
mere poem. Cause and legend must point beyond (or even away from)
ideology and abstraction; the “Utopian Imagination” and “Utopian
Poetics” must be used to construct something more than a mere
daydream.[4]
“Poetic language” here serves as a guarantee of the genuineness of the
experience which is evoked, for in matters concerning desire only the
“language of the birds” can attain some degree of accuracy. “Revolution”
has certainly served as a poetic image strong enough to provide the
cause for numerous secret societies, from Marx’s flirtation with the
Carbonari to Proudhon’s anarchist “Holy Vehm”, Bakunin’s “Brotherhood”,
Durutti’s “Wanderers”, etc. “Insurrection” is a term which might be
better suited to the post-existentialist requirements of an Immediatist
Tong, however. The uprising possesses the spiritual prestige of both
apocalypse and millennium, and yet remains a genuine historical
possibility – remote but verifiable.[5]
The TAZ, however, presents itself as an immediate possibility: – both as
a tactic on behalf of the Cause, and as a taste or foretaste of the
cause itself. We cannot say that the TAZ “is” the Cause, because the TAZ
remains spontaneous, evanescent, impossible to pin down. The
Insurrection is the Cause; the TAZ is a tactic for the cause, but also
an “inner” raison d’etre of the Tong. Thus when the Hung triad repeated
the ritual of the City of Willows it not only validated its eternal
attachment to the cause (the anti-Manchu uprising), but also virtually
created the “paradisal space” of the anti-Manchu world within the Temple
of the society. This ritual Time/Space might be experienced and valued
as a TAZ; and when combined with a banquet (the necessary “material
bodily principle” of the TAZ) no doubt the adepts did experience and
value it as such. The immediatist Tong therefore would not be “founded”
in order to create TAZ’s but rather to potentiate their manifestations
as prefigurations or evocations of the Uprising and the “anti-Consensus”
reality it envisions. Ritual and conviviality do not necessarily combine
to produce the TAZ – spontaneous orderings of fractal complexities must
fall into place to produce such a “magic Moment”. One can maximize the
conditions for such “luck”, but one cannot force the Muses. As in
archery, one shoots at a point above the target in order to hit it. Here
that lofty point at which we aim must be the Insurrection, but by
shooting at its distance we may yet strike the proximity of the TAZ –
(like those adepts who are seen both far on the horizon and yet near to
the gaze).
The legend is the story the secret society tells itself about the cause.
In some cases, such as Freemasonry, the legend is remembered even when
the cause is forgotten, so that the legend can be re-interpreted or
re-deciphered or re-read – and the Cause re-invented – again and again.
The legend, in effect, becomes the Cause: the two texts are conflated
into an illegible but powerful palimpsest. A good legend may come to act
more potently even than a good cause, since it taps the archetypes more
directly, and owes less to time than to Eternity.
Therefore the poesis of a legend for our Tong is no petty business. It
concerns the surface but is far from being “superficial”. Taste here
assumes a “life-or-death” seriousness, as when one speaks of the “style”
of a martial artist. Our legend cannot simply consist of a text about
the cause; rather, it must arise from our passionate reading of the
cause, our psychic experience of its inner structure. It must have an
“objective” aspect, in other words, like that possessed by “scripture”
or “spirit writing” in the eyes of religious believers.
Moreover, while the cause of the uprising is one which can be served in
many ways, our legend must be specific to our Tong; it must contain a
special message in a special language meant to form a cognitive bond
amongst precisely our own group. In other words the legend serves as the
exact act of poesis without which our Tong simply will not come into
focus. Where are we rootless cosmopolitans to find a language in which
such a text could be composed, much less the text itself? The
Surrealists experimented with automatic writing, a technique also used
by Taoists and other spirit mediums. In fact, “religion” provides a
possible language for the Tong legend – provided that one speaks the
tongue in heretical sentences. The City of Willows combines millenarian
Buddhism and the imaginal aesthetics of Taoism with its revolutionary
politics. In our occidental world the image-complexes of many religious
phenomena retain great power – and are thus susceptible to refiguration,
or “subversion”, as heretical revolutionary texts. Imagine, for example,
a secret society devoted to the “sabotage” of reactionary Christian
dogma and policy, based on an “Anabaptist” legend espousing the cause of
radical millennialism, or even inspired by some syncretive brand of
neo-paganism. Does this sound serious and risky enough, in today’s
climate of shit-kicking moralism and recrudescent “religious
conservatism”, to justify both the passion and the clandestinity of our
hypothetical secret society?
A viable legend might be manifested by one person, or it might arise, so
to speak, out of “group-dreaming” – but in any case it will not be
produced by the rational lineal process of fictional narrative. One does
not write scripture; scripture is written. Or better: the legend
pre-exists its realization as text, so that the “writer” acts rather as
a “treasure finder” than an “author” – oneiric and visionary texts
partake in their extreme subjectivity of the “objectivity” of that
“subconscious” wherein (according to Taoism) the Gods reside, and which
hypostatizes in the most gripping and inspiring ritual art. Such art may
not meet the aesthetic criteria of the academic critic, for whom it will
appear either as mumbojumbo or as agitprop. But it will light fire in
the minds of certain hearers, precisely those for whom the legend
crystallized out of the noosphere in the first place. The Tong will be
nothing without the actions which it will carry out. But before the
actions come the intentions. The link between the intentions and the
actions is the text, the legend and the cause it represents. The text
draws out the actions from the sea of potential energy and gives them
their specific shape, their “style” – just as the Moon was once thought
to shape, color, and draw up pearls from the ocean by its attractive
rays.
These legends will be the greatest poems of the most unknown poets of
our age. Like magic incantations they will sing new realities into
being, as the shaman sings rain, or health, or abundant game from
potentiality to actuality. These poems will be meaningless without the
actions they invoke, and will therefore achieve either the highest goal
of poetry, or else nothing at all. The City of Willows is not merely an
“imaginary city” but an Imaginal City, a dream-space which will be
manifested more and more clearly until finally the Ming is restored –
and yet the City of Willows is also a poem. The legend of our Tong is
nothing but a text, true – but it will call a world into being – even if
only for a few moments – in which our desires are not only articulated
but satisfied.
[1] Fei-Ling Davis, Primitive Revolutionaries of China: A Study of
Secret Societies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Honolulu 1971), pp.,
129, 135. see index under “City of Willows”
[2] see Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation (London 1986)
[3] The myth is made in a language of symbols – a word which originally
meant the two halves of a token which must be fitted together in order
to provide identification or meaning – like two spies with halves of a
dollar bill, recognizing each other by the exact fit of the torn edges.
Every myth, we might say, has at least two symbols, which are in effect
halves or opposites of each other. Hence the total ambiguity of myth: –
depending on which half is “up”, so to speak, a myth’s meaning can be
seen to “turn into” its opposite. Sorel’s myth is no exception (indeed
it seems odd that no one appears to have thought of analyzing it
according to the techniques of the history of spirituality) – it
appealed as much to fascism as to anarchism. Consider for example the
Myth of Progress, propagated by all the major ideologies of the 19^(th)
century, from monarchism to anarchism: all idolized Progress, a myth
which would make the 20^(th) century hell for millions. And the Sorelian
Myths of the General Strike, and of Social Violence, were appropriated
by Marinetti (the ambiguous pivot between anarchism and fascism) and
eventually by Mussolini. Myth-mongering has its dangers. Unfortunately,
myth remains one of the few effective ways of talking about “reality”,
which is itself far more ambiguous than any myth.
[4] Not that I share the usual disdain for “reverie” as opposed to
“imagination”. Like Guston Bachelard I believe that poesis begins with
daydreaming, and that “idle fancy” is as sacred as “genuine vision”.
Nevertheless, in order to inspire action, the daydream must first become
a “poem”, then a “legend”, finally a cause”.
[5] Consider, for example, Dublin 1916, Munich 1919, Tijuana 1911, Paris
1871 and 1968, the Ukraine 1920’s Barcelona 1930’s. None of these gave
rise to “the Revolution”, but all were noble and well worth the risk –
at least in retrospect!