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Title: Introducing the Otherworlds Review Author: The Otherworlds Review Date: September 15, 2017 Language: en Topics: Occult, spirituality, magic Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/otherworlds-review-1/
September 2017 · Sun in Virgo · Full moon in Pisces
And it seems to me the struggle has to be waged
on a number of different levels:
they have computers to cast the I Ching for them
but we have yarrow stalks
and the stars
it is a battle of energies, of force-fields,
what the newspapers
call a battle of ideas
– Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letter #45
Blow up the sun
– Feral Pines
Welcome to the first issue of The Otherworlds Review, a monthly
newsletter by and for those who walk the threshold, who attend to the
openings between the worlds, who wear the mask and who look beyond the
veil. In the varied lineage of the underground and anarchist press, we
receive and transmit communications from places unknown to readers anon.
In the tradition of the various Ranters, Chronaca Sovversiva, Os
Cangaceiros, Black Mask, and Walter Benjamin we hold that
the chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the
great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has
ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would
fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a
resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable.
Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour – whose
day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.
• • •
On the 186^(th) anniversary of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, itself incited by
a solar eclipse that the visionary Turner saw as a black man’s hand
seizing the sun, an unmistakeable omen appeared above the so-called
united states. The Earth has seen many eclipses before, but this one
traced a path above the territory claimed by the u.s.a., and no other
country. Every eclipse is the convergence of multiple cosmic cycles: of
the sun, the moon, and the earth. As above, so below.
Just as flowers turn their heads toward the sun, so too does that which
has been turn, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the
sun which is dawning in the sky of history.
A frenzy of iconoclasm possesses the nation: confederate and colonialist
statues toppled and beheaded, monuments defaced in many different
creative-destructive ways, crowds with axes and guns defending their
victory. The president of the dying empire whines about a slippery slope
leading even to george washington. Let them fall. The past is ever
present; the recent proliferation of attacks against the shrines of
whiteness merely the latest enactment of an ancestral vengeance,
simmering and periodically boiling over for centuries; the latest
explosion of the unrelenting wrath of the black and brown and queer dead
whose bones are embedded within this land.
The more america’s metaphysical foundations weaken, the more the spirits
of anarchy and insurrection are fed and strengthened. As James Baldwin
prophecied back in 1972, “there will be bloody holding actions all over
the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the
white man’s sun has set.” Even sociologists agree: the united states are
doomed. Unlike “some” people [1], we feel only joy at america’s death,
we have never believed in the racist delusion of human progress. We
would see the craft breweries and yuppie bars burn. We agree
wholeheartedly with the anarchists who co-ordinated simultaneous actions
in six cities and then declared: “We won’t water down our ideas for
mainstream media consumption – we really do want to destroy america”
[2].
The two weeks since the eclipse have been marked by a series of fascist
defeats at the hands of anti-fascists of all stripes, paired with an
escalating and unmoored media frenzy around the spectacle of antifa. The
amnesiac machine shifts effortlessly from shedding crocodile tears for
Heather Heyer one week to feigned indignation for anti-fascists the
next. Condemnation for those taking action to stop-at-all-costs those
who would kill her a hundred times over. “Antifa” doesn’t exist, and yet
the struggle continues. “The spectacle wished to make us appear
dreadful. We intend to be much worse.” In San Francisco and Berkeley we
saw that widespread intention bears fruit; hundreds of writers answered
a call to cover the Bay Area in anti-fascist and anti-racist graffiti,
medic and fight training and legal support were organized, conspiracy
and hexes were laid, proud boys and boneheads were jumped at bars, a
drone was knocked to the earth, weapons torn from hands and set to sky.
In a moment which recalls the theft of Roman eagles and fasces by slave
rebels, Joey Gibson’s stupid “Join or Die” hat was stolen before he was
ushered to safety behind police lines. As put in the most recent
anti-fascist spellbook by the yerbamala collective:
WE DID NOT ASK FOR THIS WAR BUT WE BEEN PREPARING.
The dream of abolition [3] continues today. America is waking up to the
reality of the civil war, one which never ended, one which traces the
contours of the faultlines that this country was built upon, one which
resonates through the bones which build the earth upon which this
country rests. This is not the civil war fantasied by europhile
intellectual fraternities by way of ancient Athens and continental
philosophy. We are told by the poster children of the above fanboys that
“every power in our sense has three dimensions – spirit, force, and
richness. Its growth depends on keeping the three of them together. As a
historical power, a revolutionary movement is that deployment of a
spiritual expression […] of war-making capacity – which may be oriented
towards attack or towards self-defense – and of an abundance of material
means and places.” They warn of the dangers of separating one of these
dimensions from the other and then immediately proceed, by slight of
hand, in debasing spirit into to a mere intellectualism. They speak of
other lives while maintaining separation. They chant in french and carry
the sickle and hammer in college towns in California.
To be truly connected to spirit, especially to the war-making capacity
of spirit, in the so-called United States of America, means to be
enmeshed in the inescapable reality of this country’s haunting. This
nation is cursed, doomed, bound by a million atrocities for which the
phrases “chattel slavery” and “genocide” are paltry stand-ins. The dead
remain, and only those who fight alongside them have a hope for victory.
It is not enough to “mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
We fight for the dead too, we fight as their continuation on this earth,
as their embodied accomplices in an alliance piercing the veil between
this world and the next. For a moment, in the scorching heat, a hundred
masked fighters drummed on the soft earth to call up their dead. Heather
Heyer, John Brown, Kayla Moore, Oscar Grant, Lovelle Mixon; over and
over the names intoned and the spirits called to presence. All under the
flags, affixed to bats, dyed black (we remember) to recall the blood of
the communards.
• • •
The elements themselves express the unfolding of the cosmic and
sociopolitical situation. The global water revenge plan is in full
effect in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Texas last week, appearing as
floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. One year since the first lockdowns at
Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the lifegiving and
lifetaking power of water is clear as crystal. Across the Himalayan
foothills floods affected forty million, killed twelve hundred and made
aimless 1.8 million children after 1,800 school closures. In Texas, we
saw forty inches of rainfall in four days and more storms approaching
shore (the newest hurricane making landfall in Florida at the time of
this writing, one day after the 8.1 earthquake in the states of southern
mexico).
The world ended in 2012 and we are living in its aftermath. The past
year of ecological disasters, crises of civilization and resistance
responses to power are the swelling wake. The earth is consuming the
cancers she has been cursed with at an accelerated pace now. She’s
excavating civilization as we know it.
The third coast of Turtle Island is the site of so much colonial and
spiritual trauma. The Port of Galveston, in the middle of the Gulf of
Mexico, where all of the water from all of so-called america ultimately
flows, has been forced into a wasteland ecology for five hundred years.
The Port of Galveston, where all the water on this Turtle Island drains
to create the unsayably energetic south coast, has been violently
managed into becoming the site of the highest rate of sex trafficking in
america. The Port of Galveston, in the tremendous subtropic gulf of the
atlantic ocean, where the humid bayous hold every spirit in their lungs,
was a slave port. Now the earth has stepped in with pipeline decimation,
petrochemical complex meltdowns, and ecological succession on an
increasingly catastrophic scale.
These are gifts as anger is a gift. Anger we didn’t ask for; anger which
we didn’t begin; anger which is ours regardless. Tragedy is opportunity,
devastation is growth, death is renewal. “Voidness denotes the relative,
flowing, undefinable, and ungraspable nature of all things.
Philosophically it represents the illusory and dream-like phenomena;
psychologically it represents liberation from all bondage.”
Sandwiched between the dirt and the clouds, we are the dwindling members
of the end of this world. Everything is ours to take now as the earth
opens its skies and its mantle for us, what we want wants us. Compared
to the visible, tangible, and psychically palpable power of elements and
ancestors: money is weak, so-called american magic is frail, this
reality is bankrupt. The apocalypse is happening in real time and we are
nothing more or less than the most recent incarnation of resistance,
taking advantage of every chance to bridge the gap between this world
and the next. Where we fail to bring chaos much less justice by using
mortal tactics, the earth succeeds instantly. What we struggle against
for centuries in the material realm, water realizes with destruction in
minutes. We told you – Water is life.
Water is also death. To the culture that seeks to steal and poison it.
We are feeling the reciprocal relationship of water within and without.
And here our promise comes true, since how or whether we sublunary ones
can manage to bring about the end of abuse to life, earth, sky, and
water is irrelevant. Our time here is up. We and the wild are the source
of each other and create each other. Our dreams are fated to be ours,
for better or worse. There is nowhere to go but on. We breathe with a
prayer, we breathe with gratitude to be granted a reprieve from the
clutching misery of oil, of gas, of capitalism and of the cosmically
bankrupt temporality of white supremacy.
Already solar flares interrupt the reporting on the next storm, which
will be bigger. And so on and so on.
Reverence to water,
we invite cleansing,
we honor the earth as she takes measures to heal herself.
Fire too,
ash rains from the sky and the full moon is red tonight.
Respect to those before and those beyond, pulling us sometimes quickly
sometimes slowly through these ruptures into our heaven.
Strength to the brave, the undocumented, the looters and rioters the
world over.
To those with nothing who were born into nothing and who will die with
nothing, the stars see you and grant your wishes.
Your ghosts are welcome here.
• • •
Fields of yarrow bloom; a strong ally for healing wounds sustained in
the fighting to come. Get organized while the sun remains in Virgo.
Remember to take the armor off. Be kind and sweet to yourself and your
friends.
Acknowledge the heat, fall is still far. Lights and shadows make
diversions and amusements. Lay low as a cold-blooded creature if that
stillness keeps you collected. Emerge as needed, be blown by the wind,
savor the dreamy briefness between moon-set and sun-rise.
[1] See, for example, the half-hearted populism of
thenexteclipse.wordpress.com
[2] Communique at
itsgoingdown.org/multi-city-coordinated-banner-drops-against-white-supremacy/
[3] See “To Our Comrades” by the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement.