“The Assassins
Across the luster of the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a dessicate blue valley travelers find an artificial oasis, a fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden garden.
As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone — those within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers & poisons.
Behind crenellations & slit-windowed towers scholars & fedayeen wake in narrow monolithic cells. Star-maps, astrolabes, alembics & retorts, piles of open books in a shaft of morning sunlight — an unsheathed scimitar.
Each of those who enter the realm of the Imam-of-one’s-own-being becomes a sultan of inverted revelation, a monarch of abrogation & apostasy. In a central chamber scalloped with light and hung with tapestried arabesques they lean on bolsters & smoke long chibouks of hashish scented with opium & amber.
For them the hierarchy of being has compacted to a dimensionless punctum of the real — for them the chains of Law have been broken — they end their fasting with wine. For them the outside of everything is its inside, its true face shines through direct. But the garden gates are camouflaged with terrorism, mirrors, rumors of assassination, trope l’oeil, legends.
Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns — a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes — a willow, a stream with watercress — a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry — the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage — ‘water, greenery, beautiful faces.’
By night Hassan-i Sabbah like a civilized wolf in a turban stretches out on a parapet above the garden & glares at the sky, conning the asterisms of heresy in the mindless cool desert air. True, in this myth some aspirant disciples may be ordered to fling themselves off the ramparts into the black — but also true that some of them will learn to fly like sorcerers.
The emblem of Alamut holds in the mind, a mandal or magic circle lost to history but embedded or imprinted in consciousness. The Old Man flits like a ghost into tents of kings & bedrooms of theologians, past all locks & guards with forgotten moslem/ninja techniques, leaves behind bad dreams, stilettos on pillows, puissant bribes.
The attar of his propaganda seeps into the criminal dreams of ontological anarchism, the heraldry of our obsessions displays the luminous black outlaw banners of the Assassins…all of them pretenders to the throne of an Imaginal Egypt, and occult space/light continuum consumed by still-unimagined liberties.”
Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2003 [1985]), 13-14.
February 3, 2011 at 3:29 pm |
“Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions — movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State — the turning of the wheel, the return of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever.
By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that “progress” which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle. Surgo — rise up, surge. Insurgo — rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan “Revolution!” has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every ‘heaven’ ruled by yet one more evil angel … As to the future — Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori — the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.”
The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
By Hakim Bey. Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. May be freely pirated & quoted.
NB: pardon the length (uprising and concision are seemingly incongruent); thanks for posting anything by Bey.
February 4, 2011 at 8:13 am |
Good quote. I have another one on the internet from the preface to the new edition of his book (2003):
“From this perspective I think perhaps the least useful part of the book is its section on the Internet. I envisioned the Net as an adjunct to the TAZ, a technology in service to the TAZ, a means of potentialing its emergence. I proposed the term ‘Web’ for this function of the Net. What a joke. Time magazine identified me as a cyber-guru and ‘explained’ that the TAZ exists in cyberspace. ‘Web’ became the official term for the commercial/surveillance function of the Net, and by 1995 it had succeeded in burying the anarchic potential of the Net (if any really existed) under a mass of advertizing and dot-com scams. What’s left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghost-world where a few thousand ‘hits’ pass for political action and ‘virtual community’ takes the place human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of Global Capital: borderless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthetically bankrupt, monocultural, violent — a force for atomization and isolation, for disappearance of knowledge, of sexuality, and of all the subtle senses.”
That was eight years ago. I wonder how much has changed. Twitter is touted as a tool for the revolutionaries in the Arab world, but we have yet to see the outcome and may not for some time.
February 4, 2011 at 5:13 pm |
Nasa, with its Web/Net origin, continues to take the “borderless, triumphalist, monocultural and aesthetically bankrupt” award with the “can we get more unimaginative in naming another captured community: Kepler 11?”
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/511895main_Kepler-11_IntroShot_full.jpg
NB: Colonization and expansionist problems aside…i love this and who knows, maybe they’ll get it right.
February 5, 2011 at 11:37 am |
Not sure how we got from Alamut to Egypt to a Plurality of Worlds, but that’s OK; This blog serves as ersatz TAZ at times…
February 16, 2011 at 12:42 pm |
“the erotic melancholy of cypresses” is a lovely phrase.
February 16, 2011 at 12:48 pm |
@nursemyra: Almost as good as “the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques” — There is a sumptuous descriptive richness to some of Hakim Bey, a lovely stylistic compliment to his radical and bold perspectives.