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<A HREF="http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/lword.htm">Steamshovel Press: The
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The Latest Word
Sacred Drift
by Len Bracken
Len Bracken's new book from Adventures Unlimited, The Arch Conspirator,
takes a deeper look at conspiracy in history than few other books ever
have. It includes essays and commentaries new insights on global
politics and their conspiratorial underpinnings. Bracken follows a maze
through interwoven tales from the Russian Conspiracy, through his
interview with Costa Rican novelist Joaquin Gutierrez, and follows his
Psychogeographic Map into the Third Millenium. The Arch Conspirator also
contains Bracken's General Theory of Civil War; A False Report Exposing
the Dirty Truth About South African Intelligence Services; the
Neo-Catiline Conspiracy for the Cancellation of Debt; Anti-Labor Day,
1997, with selected Aphorisms Against Work; Solar Economics; and much
more. It makes a remarkable addition to the library of the thinking
conspiracy theorist.
Bracken authored Guy Debord - Revolutionary(Feral House), documenting
the biography of the great Situationist thinker DeBord, who helped
expose the conspiracy culture as the society of the Spectacle. Bracken
also served as the translator of another great Situationist, Gianfranco
Sanguinetti, with the first English translation of a Situ classic, The
Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (Flatland).
Bracken is also well-known as the editor of Extraphile, an underground
newsletter of the Extranational movement, and has contributed to
Anarchy, Steamshovel Press and many other magazines and alternative
peri585 Arlington, VA
22205; tel. 703-715-6816) . It does not appear in The Arch Conspirator,
but reflects some of the book's examination of the dark corridor of
conspiracy.
Members of the Baltimore-Washington Psychogeography Association made a
pre-Mother's Day (1999) expedition to the Basilica glorifying the
Christian Mother of God.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception stands
near the backbone of Washington, DC (WDC), the great divide called North
Capitol Street that separates city's northwest and northeast quadrants
like a pair of human lungs or the hemispheres of a brain.(l) The
drifters approach from Harewood Road, NE, and quickly spot an omen: a
dead squirrel on the sidewalk with what T-S knows are indications of rat
poison on its carcass. The drift continues, and suddenly a mockingbird
lands on the driveway hedge and mocks the blare of a car alarm. A second
omen, but of what, they don't know. They consider the meaning of this
omen for a moment, and suddenly a woman approaches from the direction of
the Shrine.
"Excuse me miss," L-A begins, in Spanish, "If may I speak with you for a
moment."
"Of course," she says with a sense of inner serenity and strength.
"Can you tell me the difference between the Assumption and the
Ascension?"
"Yes, well, the Assumption is when the angels absorbed the dead body of
Mary into heaven to be crowned Mother of God by the Father. We celebrate
this on August fifteenth every year with a Feast of the Assumption."
She looks at L-A.
"You know what the Ascension is, don't you?"
L-A shakes his head.
"The Ascension is when Christ rose into heaven and we celebrate it forty
days after Easter."
"You've been so helpful. I didn't know that, and none of my friends knew
it either. Where are you from?"
"Guatemala."
L-A imagines her prayers for peace. "Thank you very much."
"What was that all about?" T-S asks.
"Never mind."
T-S grumbles something about "the presumption of the Assumption," but
L-A doesn't want anyone to know that he has the slightest interest in
religion, which is why he asked the woman in Spanish and won't translate
the answer for T-S. You see, these drifters approach the largest
Catholic church in the Western Hemisphere from rival perspectives.
T-S, a fifty-year-old musician, subscribes to spiritist
psychogeography--the wine of life trickles out a bag-obscured bottle in
Malcom X park while he talks to Dante's statue as if he, T-S, were
Virgil taking the exiled poet on a drift through the world of gods,
myths, and spirits; as if, in an ideal sense, the series of cascading
pools lined by a narrow granite rim were the River Styx.
L-A finds reality in materialist psychogeography; the omens of human
ecology disclose themselves in Georgetown shop windows, in the
juxtaposition, for example, of a watch boutique featuring futuristic
designs and the gargantuan, backwards-spinning clock in F.A.0. Swartz.
In an instant of Protagorean perception (2), festive scenes of rag-tag
Rabelasian jubilees clash with the sleek, digital conception of time
embodied in space-age watches. The wine of life no longer flows the way
it did in Medieval Spain during the five months everyone took for
holidays and festivals. Time, like the watches and virtually everything
else in Washington, is a commodity. All that's left in the bottom of the
bottle are a few seeds to sow in a new civilization.
The drifters enter the Shrine through the west entrance. They
inadvertently raid the bookstore by mistaking pamphlets for free
brochures, then wander down an empty corridor. A door opens and light
from an office floods the low-lit hall. A radiant black woman steps out.
"Can you tell us the way to the Crypt Church?" L-A asks.
"My pleasure."
"You have an accent. Are you from Africa?"
"Yes," she says with something of the same serene sense of inner peace
as the Guatemalan woman. "I'm from Nigeria."
She leads the drifters around a corner and points down a long hall.
"When you get to the end of this hall, just wind your way around to the
Crypt Church."
T-S in turn points to a chapel at the end of the hall.
"Is that a black crucifix?"
"Yes, that's Our Mother of Africa Chapel, the newest chapel here at the
Shrine. A Tanzanian carved the figure of Christ out of ebony and the
cross was hewn in cherry by a New Yorker. It's a beautiful
collaboration."
"What's your favorite chapel here in the shrine?" L-A asks.
"I love all of them."
"Come on," L-A says, "if you had to pick a favorite, my guess is that it
would be the Mother of Africa Chapel."
She smiles and nods. After bidding farewell, the drifters begin their
journey through Memorial Hall, but soon drift apart. T-S follows the
impulse to absorb the light from racks of prayer candles. L-A passes the
display of an aluminum tiara donated by Pope Paul VI, then shuffles by
the Hall of American Saints--saints such as St. Frances Cabrini,
benefactor of Chicago's orphans. L-A then crosses the threshold--over
the design of a slave-ship cargo-hold in the floor--to Our Mother of
Africa Chapel. His heart races at the sight of her and then keeps time
to the drums echoed in the inscription, "Mary, Our Mother of Africa,
hear the drumbeat of our prayers."
As the Nigerian woman said, the ebony and cherry crucifix is indeed
admirable. And in the gleaming atmosphere of the chapel L-A feels
charitable toward art, somehow no longer his sub-dada self. His inner
speech is momentarily devoid of slurs against religious kitsch, and he
allows himself to be drawn into what a passing tour guide tells a group
of kids is a sacred conversation: a sacred conversation after the sacra
conversazione painting technique popular in Italy in the fifteenth
century. Here the conversation is between a strong and beautiful Mother
of Africa holding the Jesus as a child, a slim dark figure of Jesus on
the cross, and a right-to-left-reading narrative relief, in bronze,
depicting the African-American journey toward emancipation.
Rocking to the beat of the drum, L-A brings his cosmopolitan ethics(3)
to the sacred conversation, ethics that entice him to identify with the
other, in this instance an idealized African woman not far in appearance
from women L-A knows. His soul enters into this conversation with Mother
of Africa, her son, and all her children in the heroic African-American
race and elsewhere. L-A's mind floods with memories of this other's
faces, games, and music that are his too, and he catches a glimpse of
his spirit and the human spirit that went into all of the creations
dearest to him.
At least the Pope is with me on the cancellation of debt in his Third
Millennium Proclamation. The least we can do is cancel debt incurred by
dictatorial regimes now owed by countries like the new South Africa. The
most we can do begins with cancelling all debt, everywhere....
T-S appears between the columns that flank the chapel entrance, the
Pillars of African-American Society. L-A nods and the drifters silently
wander into the golden glow of the Crypt Church. The light dissipates
ominously into the sacristy. As a priest holds service for a handful of
churchgoers, the atmosphere takes foreboding hues. Without warning L-A
or anyone else, T-S slyly dons a ghoulish rubber mask, a patch-eyed
scull with long black hair and lips growing over its teeth. This
gesture, uncharacteristic for a self-described neo-Victorian, quickly
turns L-A's sacred drift into a superstition-mocking tale from the
crypt. The spiritist and materialist psychogeograher is himself and his
opposite just as L-A is white and non-white.
Notes
1. For the French origins and early history of psychogeography see Len
Bracken's Guy Debord-- Revolutionary (Feral House, 1997).
For spiritist psychogeography see the attempt by the London
Psychogeographical Association to revive Druid councils. Write for
pamphlets to BM Senior London WCLN 3XX England.
For a contemporary interpretation of WDC-based materialist
psychogeography, see the chapter "A Psychogeographic Map into the Third
Millennium" from Len Bracken's The Arch Conspirator (Adventures
Unlimited, 1999), particularly pages 71-73 for definitions.
For a humorous, if erroneous, interpretation of the Washington
Psychogeoqraphy Association, see the American Standard edition of Pat
Tracey's 1998 City Paper article "The Drifters."
2. Protagoras of Abdera (circa 490 B.C.-circa 421 B.C.) was the first
professional sophist. He contributed to grammatical and rhetorical
theory, and advised Pericles on the theory of democracy. Protagoras was
exiled from Athens for his atheist views. Unfortunately his treatise "On
the Gods" was burned. His "man is the measure of all things" argument
has been interpreted variously as the exaltation of human subjectivity
and, by Marxists, as early materialist anthropologism. Also of interest
here is Protagoras' two logoi theory that is both the first expression,
according to Diogenes Laertius, of the idea behind the proverb "there
are two sides to every story," and more. Plato tells us that in
Protagoras' "Antilogic" treatise, Protagoras propounds his two-logoi c
oncept that holds, for example, that the wind is warm and not-warm.
According to Aristotle, Protagoras' two-logoi principle also entails
making the weaker argument stronger.
3. Cosmopolitan ethics refers to Strangers to Ourselves by Julia
Kristeva (Columbia, 1991); for definitions see pages 140 and 143. The
spirit-soul dictomy used in this paragraph is adapted from Kristeva's
interpretation of M.M. Bakhtin, the theoretician of dialogism.
Len Bracken is the author of Guy Debord - Revolutionary, the translator
of Gianfranco Sanguinetti's The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save
Capitalism in Italy and the editor of the newsletter Extraphile. His new
book, The Arch Conspirator, is available from AUP. Bracken can be
contacted at POB 5585 Arlington, VA 22205.
Previous Latest Word Column
Steamshovel!
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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