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Title: Escapism
Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson
Date: March 2008
Language: en
Topics: fiction, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #377
Source: Retrieved on 7th October 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/377-march-2008/escapism/
Notes: Published in Fifth Estate #377, March 2008.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Escapism

What if every perversion were legalized except yours? every drug

decriminalized except the very one you need to attain enlightenment? all

politics permitted saving only the perfidious & universally despised

credo you happen to adhere to?

Escapism flies under the radar of the consumerist panopticon with a

critique of reality honed by decades of serious drug use & evasive

shillyshallying.

Obsessions are veritable Galapagoses of Mutuality & elegant boredom.

Renounce the emptiness of vacations for the pleroma of permanent

unemployment — the vaguely impenetrable isles of the blest.

Even short thunder showers threaten power authority with free

electricity that swells up the head like a grape & makes it blush.

Rain is a coast & briefly we’re degenerate wreckers eager to pilfer

whatever flotsam washes up on our distant shore.

Those who huff these alien spores drift back in time & temporarily

indwell the bodies of long gone smokers who in turn have wafted off to

even earlier dates & remoter climes ad perhaps infinitum. In 1911 these

devotees of extraterrestrial mycofumation are disguised as opium addicts

in Fu Manchu’s Limehouse den beneath the Thames. Off I go for one gilded

soporific transmigratory augenblik & while I’m vacant who knows what

nostalgist from the 23^(rd) century passes thru my empty brain.

Revolutionary Escapist will prevail thru sheer inertia when millions too

bored & sluggish to sustain the vibratory level of incessant Progress

slump toward the portholes like so many rats, clamber down the ropes &

scuttle off into the conceptual hinterlands on a sauve-qui-peut basis in

search of some consolatory obsession.

What we love must be incomplete. We must ruin ourselves for it

financially & morally like the sunken wreck of a Spanish treasure

galleon even tho it’s always free in every sense of the word including

loose unattached lost errant careless unformed & lewd.

Our Militia utilize aimless wandering or random walk to neutralize

surveillance & stymie all statistical analyses of strategic supply, each

dressed in the military motley of some different & unheard-of hopeless

lost cause.

If I remember correctly it was during Shay’s Rebellion certain backwoods

sages propounded the doctrine that parts of Massachusetts & Vermont had

reverted to the primordial condition of Nature, therefore free to

construct their sovereignty ex nihilo or perhaps even remain in that

Hyperborean moment of perfect liberty forever or until someone finally

dragged them back.

If smells have color this one’s tinged with back to school melancholia

like a vast field of superannuated sunflowers down to a riverbank where

no one is swimming. I’d call it nostalgic but any smell is nostalgic,

wallpaper in a room where you once recovered from some disease.

We want to quit our lousy jobs in autumn even if we’re self employed

& camp out in apple orchards amongst the windfalls like drunken cows

Eccentrics are successful escapists. They have diamond bodies. I knew

one who lived in 1911, including wingtip collars & a player piano, but

suddenly he lost his adamantine purity of intention, realized he was

crazy & rejoined the modern world. A dervish once told me “They call us

escapists–but if you’re being chased by a tiger & have no gun Escapism

makes perfect sense.”

Fuckin’ John Muir & John Burroughs ‘ld be doing 7-to-40 in Club Fed as

ecoterrorists if they were above room temperature, as Tuli says, & still

with us. “Protected wilderness” may be an Orwellian oxymoron but where

else is there left to escape to but state parks?

A post post colonialism in which rare & delicate languages fail to go

extinct but instead proliferate with the mutability of Darwin’s Finches.

Survival of the Happiest. Doctrine of continual creation according to

the hieromathematology of the otherwise inexplicable beauty of physical

things.

Time itself is lunar. Itswells. It diminishes. Space is solar.

Electricity doesn’t conquer darkness — it erases stars.: We’ve had

socialist plus electricity, now let’s try, it with endarkenment.

Anarcho-noctambulism. Black reaction back to prelapsarian hyperboreanism

& nutritive chaos. Night equals right. Crushed velvet. Pre-industrial

musk. Only slaves could conceive of heaven as unrelieved daylight.

Escapism’s paradise lies in the shadows of the moon.

Neo-Exoticism decides not to apologize for its gaze of yearning toward

alterity because ultimately uniformity however progressive numbs the

Imagination & other erogenous zones with the neo Brutalitarian novocaine

of pseudo choice — any color so long as it’s black said Ford the

Fordist, Hitler’s guru — because all the colors of the spectrum are

secretly black: the universal mourning of the 19^(th) century for the

Future it had allowed itself to picture in the technopathocratic

subconscious seizure of its greed for universal empire — the Empire of

the Same in 600 attractive designer shades.

Water is an undinic realm akin to sleep; it cuts us off from adult

supervision. Buried treasure symbolizes the fact that we’re alone

together — an alchemical situation — a game with rules as strict as love

or necromancy.