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Title: Otherworlds Review #2: Ghosts Author: The Otherworlds Review Date: October 6, 2017 Language: en Topics: spirituality, magic, Occult Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/otherworlds-review-2-ghosts/
October 2017 · Sun in Libra · Full moon in Aries
Hurl me into the next existence, the descent into hell won’t turn me.
I’ll crawl back to dog his trail forever. They won’t defeat my revenge,
never, never. I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly, but rage
undammed. We’ll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of
our feet will make the earth tremble. – George Jackson
Say, “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But I descend from Heaven alone. This ye know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”
The sun in justice is perfectly balanced by its mirror in the sign of
insurrectionary attack. The feather is weighed against the heart by the
jackal, and the devourer waits to see the results. Is your heart light?
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a
dancing star.”
• • •
In Ancient Greece, the word “hero” referred to a person who had done
extraordinary deeds in life or died in unusually violent circumstances,
and therefore possessed an exceptionally great amount of power after
death. Heroes were worshiped with nocturnal libations and annual
chthonic sacrifices at the site of their tombs, and if properly
propitiated in this way, served as protectors of the town in which they
were buried. If neglected, an angry ghost could make their posthumous
power known by terrorizing the city until acknowledged as a hero and
appeased with offerings.
In Greece today, hero cultus is still practiced. Four years after the
murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas (Killah P) by a neo-nazi
Golden Dawn follower, two thousand people marched in Athens in his
memory, explicitly honoring Heather Heyer as well. Dozens of hooded
warriors attacked the police protecting Golden Dawn’s offices with
Molotov cocktails, chanting “Pavlos is alive! Crush the Nazis!” Their
incantation reveals the unique nature of the antifascist and anarchist
hero: the offering is the attack, the attack is the offering. The attack
is the posthumous demonstration of power, the posthumous demonstration
of power is the attack. The anarchist martyr negates the transitional
period between suffering as a haunting ghost and thriving as an honored
hero. For the rest of society, our dead are eternally vengeful ghosts,
their worst nightmares realized. For us, our fallen comrades are
venerated through immediate action and attack.
The ancients sacrificed pigs to Demeter and Persephone, Goddesses of
Earth and Underearth, by burning them whole. Demeter who single-handedly
held all life on earth ransom and forced Zeus to accede to Her demands,
Persephone who sends the souls of heroes back to the surface of the
earth. The swine is still the most appropriate victim for the Powers
Below, all-consuming fire the best method, nightfall the most auspicious
time. The golden dawn is no match for the black dusk, and the annual
firestorms for Pavlos, a self-described “spawn of Achilles” [1], in the
nights leading to the autumnal equinox are proof. “Pavlos is alive!
Crush the Nazis!” The affirmation of glorious life after death and the
statement of implacable hostility towards the fascists.
Simultaneous to Pavlos’s hero-festival in Athens, Saint Louis avenges
the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith at the hands of a cop, taking the war
to the very homes of the enemy. A thousand people surrounded the mayor’s
house and smashed her windows. In the glass shards, we scry both past
and future, the all-too-timely words of Lucy Parsons, anarchist of Black
and Mexican and indigenous descent, widow of the Haymarket Martyr Albert
Parsons: “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or
knife on the steps of the palace of the rich and stab or shoot their
owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a
war of extermination and without pity.” Or, as 2Pac Shakur said, “The
ground is gonna open up and swallow the evil … the poor people is gonna
open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people.” At the time of
writing, the demonstrations have continued every day for a fortnight,
specifically targeting rich white neighborhoods and malls, making the
name of Anthony Lamar Smith unforgettable even in the palaces of the
rich.
With trash can lids and bricks thrown through shop windows and at cops,
a promising beginning was made towards spiritually cleansing the
deep-set miasma of Delmar Boulevard, the dividing line between the Black
and white neighborhoods of Saint Louis. Every border, however well
fortified and guarded, is a crossroads, a liminal place, where the Man
in Black or some other way-opening spirit might appear to offer
sorcerous power. The inside and the outside are not static places, but
exist only in relationship with one another. The shattered windows at
the mayor’s house and on Delmar Boulevard demonstrate what happens when
this ancient relationship is subordinated to the egregores of class and
race, the false hopes of white men who fear death and would stop at
nothing to cling to their paltry and fleeting secular power. Neither
their homes nor their borders are impermeable. Through every broken
window, a portal to the Otherworlds is opened, through which the Dead
return to the earth, through which wild and inhuman spirits enter,
through which the Gods make manifest Their blessings.
• • •
The night of September 16^(th), police officers on the Georgia Tech
campus murdered 21-year-old Scout Schultz, a queer anarchist loved by
many. Following a mourning rite two nights later, some who loved them
struck back against the forces responsible for Scout’s death:
hospitalizing a couple police officers and setting one of their vehicles
ablaze. The days to follow saw the predictable response from the powers
that be – calls for order, criminal charges, intimidations,
interrogations, expulsions – so many efforts to erase Scout’s memory and
the fire lit in their honor. In a subtle response, a poster circulated
reprising the infamous image of a burning police cruiser with the text
“no apologies,” with the date altered to read Sept 18^(th), 2017 –
Georgia Tech. This poster originally emerged after the largest queer
uprising in US history, San Francisco’s White Night Riot of 1979, and
depicted one of several SFPD cruisers burnt that night.
The queer struggle remains, as always, the struggle to respond when one
of us dies. The history books remember the White Night as a stepping
stone in the progressive path toward gay political careerism. We
understand it instead as a collective moment of response to another
faggot death; a death – this time – affecting more than just a small
circle of friends and lovers. And yet visible or not, we continue
responding: another bashing, another dead on the streets, another
shooting, another mass shooting, four dozen in a night club, three dozen
in an underground venue, millions of AIDS deaths, countless suicides –
by cop or not, privately or not, planned or not, always because of this
society, always because of its enforced isolation, its scarcity and its
industrialization of care.
Whatever story the cybernetic media says about Scout, we see through to
the center of the matter: another queer death. We are aware of our own
mortality – yes, we will die, just as all that draws breath must someday
cease – but more, we hold a certain proximity to death. Especially the
transfemme among us, the dark-skinned among us, the indigenous among us,
the hustlers among us, the houseless among us, the mad ones among us, We
walk with a closeness and a certainty toward death. We walk with an
ambiguity too: who will remember, who will know, who survives us? We
aren’t guaranteed the unbroken line of heternormative transmission
afforded our cousins. And so we find other ways, build other kinship
structures, weave other webs of affinities and promiscuities, carnivals
and households, love and hate, friendship and enmity in such complex and
crystalline formations so that we can’t tell the dichotomy and we are
left, vast and varied, subterranean, broken yet ever-necessary, extended
family.
Queers, anarchists, extended, through time and space yet
hyper-specifically etched into places: bars, alleyways, apartment
complexes, relational memory. The great paradoxical queer ancestral
current – straddling on the one hand the desire of each generation for
the betterment of the next, and on the other our traditional proximity
and orientation toward death – transmits to each of us an inheritance,
affirming and negating all at once. And so to honor the ancestors of the
tradition, while staying alive long enough to do so, we devise novel
strategies of survival, techniques to walk the tightrope across the
abyss of lost generations. We weave those ropes into tapestries and
quilts telling stories which enable us to keep fighting. We hold to the
possibility that we may choose, all of us together, to give up neither
our lives nor our different-ways-of-life. We can choose to continue,
because we fight for continuance and so do the dead.
Our deaths are not the end. We die, but the web remains. By means of
collective grief the web is woven and rewoven, never the same but
possibly fiercer, possibly more resilient, all wrapped up in the spirits
of ones we loved and ones we never met. The rituals of mourning – the
candles, the songs, the teary ecstasy, the storytelling, the art of
memorial, the healing work, the offerings – these strengthen the web and
strengthen our ghosts. (Milo dead-named our friend and then the storm
swallowed his home.) And so we grieve, together and alone, all
dancewoven up together, the dead like paper skeletons above us
fluttering on our breath as we exhale their stories.
• • •
In September 1923, during the Showa period of violent Imperial Japan, a
7.9 magnitude earthquake broke off the coast of Tokyo. The imperial
government and vigilantes used the pretext of civil unrest to murder
tens of thousands of Ethnic Koreans, with the help of the city’s police.
The imperial army took the same opportunity to repress political
dissidents.
Kaneko Fumiko, a Japanese nihilist, and her anarchist friends were
locked up, accused of precipitating the earthquake, intending to use the
confusion to start a rebellion against imperial fascism. These
now-ancestors were convicted of high treason for an assassination
attempt on the emperor. Whether their plans truly had that aim, whether
they were rounded up in the postquake chaos in the same style as we have
seen after J20 and now after Scout Schultz’s murder, whether these
treasonous types had merely dreamed of freedom in their meager beds and
burning hearts is irrelevant. The rebellious spirit is enough of a
threat to any emperor, colonial force, or police force. Kaneko Fumiko’s
words from jail before she refused the emperor’s pardon: “It does not
matter whether our activities produce meaningful results or not … [they]
enable us to bring our lives immediately into harmony with our
existence.”
There is something to be said for tradition, though, unsurprisingly, our
enemies say it wrong. “One important aspect of tradition is the
consciousness of possessing the tradition – a grasp of revolutionary
methods, a knowledge of what to do in a revolutionary situation.”
Likewise we the living possess the voices and imaginations of those
before, of Kaneko Fumiko, of Scout Schultz, of the entire heavenly
island of Puerto Rico.
The Ojibwa story of the constellation commonly called the Big Dipper
tells of a mink who ascends to the heavens escaping greedy villagers.
The selfish cousin of the mink was keeping the birds of summer locked in
tiny cages to steal the warmth of spring for himself and his faithful
people. The mink, along with his animal friends, determined to set
summer free for all, fought his cousin and released the birds. The last
of the cages of hummingbirds was smashed, but the mink came up against
the angry villagers as he escaped. The stars whispered to him “Brave
mink! You are one of us!” He climbed into the heavens, joining the
stars. His earthly form now gratefully immortalized in clear winter
skies.
This ancestor of some is an ancestor to all when the stories are told.
We descend from the stars themselves. When we yell “Pavlos is alive!
Crush the Nazis!” and when we’re on the steps of the mayor’s house
without mercy, we are giving life to our own rebellious spirits by
blessing our attacks with the sacred spirits of those new and old
constellations we greet in our skies. Tradition is not power over
another.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation”
in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history
which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task
before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our
position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.
Those who seek to subdue and cage – the seekers of supremacy and the
makers of solitude as torture – will meet the bright mink, emptying the
cages. They’ll see Scout again, and Pavlos, in us on their doorstep.
Those lost and taken return to us, and return to the descendants of
fascists, cops, to the thieves who take life by taking away the sky. Our
enemy’s failure of vision will in turn fail them spectacularly when they
meet the returning, strengthened ghosts of our beloved dead. The jailers
didn’t account for solitude being a type of freedom, even when applied
with force. They didn’t account for George Jackson. Or Michael Kimble.
Or Assata. The Saint Louis PD didn’t account for the will of the
mourning to approach the mayor’s house. The fascists will reckon with
the curses heaped upon them by the living and the dead they helped kill,
the heroes they helped make, the hummingbirds from whom they stole
flight.
In the exposed cracks we’ve always seen the light; in the paths our
friends journeyed bravely and stubbornly, we see how their dedication to
freedom brightly colored all their living moments until their last. They
live now everywhere, but can be called to for guidance, for validation,
for power in moments where winning comes on the wings of our ancestors
in resistance. The hearts of those dead are ours to keep richly lit and
dressed with fresh flowers and tokens of memory in the form of attack.
The spirit of rebellion meets the spirit of tradition. Revenge makes
friends with joy.
Some spirits need light, some need vengeance; Scout got both from a
burning SUV and in the voice of our ancestors we say again: “No
Apologies!” To this society we offer and accept none. This is an old war
and we – queers, anarchic, anti-fascistic, uncontrollable, other – have
been fighting for lifetimes. This conflict has many sides. Over the same
weekend, cowards from Identity Evropa tweeted cellphone pictures of a
lackluster ‘vigil’ for the “victims of anarcho-terrorism.” Let
McKinley’s bloated corpse have Twitter posts and tealights and his name
over dreadful middle schools. Our dead have May Day and plazas and
entire uprisings. We can laugh at their sad attempt at ancestor
veneration, but we would do well to keep an eye attending to the
spiritual techniques of our enemies; attending specifically toward how
we might undercut their relations and embolden ours.
For every president honored by the cynical fascists, may the millions
genocided and imprisoned and enslaved under his regime rise up to
swallow his memory in waves of judgement and fury.
For every anarchist executed, may new festivals of fire be born. For all
of our dead may new rituals slowly impose a new shape to time, a new
history.
Long life to Heather Heyer and Killah P, as long as there are walls we
will write your names upon them.
Long life to Scout Schultz, may the fires give you warmth.
Long life to Anthony Lamar Smith, for whom the streets still writhe.
Long life to Leon Czolgosz, who fought for love.
Long life to Kaneko Fumiko, and all the treacherous women.
All power to the gay and anarchist ghosts.
Strength to those fighting, those imprisoned and those on the run.
Let us bring our lives immediately into harmony with our existence.
under a moonless sky
dig a pit
and set in it a fire
and with a stick
tap a rhythm upon the ground
to wake the dead
circumambulate the pit
pouring in libations
of water and wine
burn offerings to
your beloved departed
say their names
over and over
until you’re screaming
singing their songs
dancing alongside them
tell them about your struggles
name your enemies
ask for their help
they’re all waiting
to play their part
[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/greece-mourns-slain-antifascist-rapper-pavlos-fyssas-170911080142110.html