from:

The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchy
by Hakim Bey


"CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the
blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age--shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of _lux_et_voluptas_. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror--everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs. The last possible _deed_ is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they'd call it an act of terrorism--so let's take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with
a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.

You forgot all the other quotation marks..

I actually got past all the superfluous rhetoric and concluded that this is just one big advertisement to recruit followers. If you must worship something, worship Balance. It's more fundamental than Chaos, and practical, too. Chaos is a natural part of life, but without the balance of Order, it wouldn't exist.

Balance=rules,sanity,science (bordom)

Chaos=Freedom,madness,art (joy)

I am RedMeat I over-simplify and spell badly

phlogistons?

way to employ the fifty cent word incorrectly.

Now you've gotten me started. Balance isn't about rules, or sanity, or science, not MY balance, anyhow. Why do you suppose there's all this pain in the world? Because it needs to BALANCE out pleasure and happiness. Why are people starving? To BALANCE out the rich and their goddamn caviar. Why are there deaths by the multitude in explosions, and gunfights, and all that shit? To BALANCE out something else that probably stems from human greed and nature. Do we want all this fucking pain, and starving children, and tombstones of our loved ones? Do you, Red? Is it sane that another man dies for another man's pleasure, even if these men have never met and were never connected in any way? Chaos... freedom? Not really... just something to follow on your own path... Order is the same thing... they are tools, like good and evil, that make us human, but without one, the other would not exist... thus BALANCE... which is pretty much using everything within our sphere of knowledge, and within our reach to understand and live our lives... for the search for what we are IS what we are... that is humanity in a nutshell...

Chaos is on the one hand, freedom, and on the other hand, suffering, pain, violence and war. Order is on the one hand, peace, and on the other slavery, repression, monotomy, and stagnation. So a balance of the two is necessary. Frankly, as far as theological, disturbingly-new-agish opinions on elements go, elements exist on their own independently, but for a human being to choose one over the other is dangerous and unproductive. Remember, it's left-foot, right-foot, not right-foot right-foot right-foot.

But anyway, I need sleep so ignore me. Look, there's a dancing panda. **points**

Tao is all.

Heh, what did you expect? I might have grown up in Western civilization, but I was born as a, and am inherently, part of the Eastern.

I like both Eastern and Western civilizations. Balance is good.

i like that left foot, right foot thing.
that's macroprosopal, as the cabalists call it, seeing the body as a reflection of the face, which gets dibs on the impulses and their means of expression.
left eye, right eye,
left brain, right brain,
balance is inescapable.

i don't know, though, dark messiah, that chaos doesn't create all the things you blame order for.
we are ordered beings, and we laugh, though we produce chaos, as all life does.
order makes us laugh at and enjoy all the truth that hurts us when it seems too chaotic for us to seize it by the yarbles and make it beg. and yet, while it's enough for us to maintain the balance, all the laughter ever could never fill the abyss, despite what some magicians would say.
did you ever read the hellraiser comics? they had a really cool take on order and chaos. i can't say more, i'm drunk.
apologies.

Yes, I'm quite sure Order is responsible for those things rather than Chaos. Order is, as an absolute, by definition, slavery and total stagnation. An example of absolute Order in art would be the Matrix. Absolute Chaos is more like Lord of the Flies. One offers a great degree of freedom but little safety, and one offers a great amount of security but no freedom. Neither is really desirable.

i agree that neither extreme is really desirable.

i was drunk last night when i mentioned hellraiser, but what i think i was trying to get out was that in hell, which is a perfectly ordered world maintained by the god leviathan, the cenobites/demons as well as the damned are totally chaotic entities, whereas in the world of nature/life, the prime force is an eris callisti type goddess who inspires a unity of purpose among her followers.
so i see two dualities that must be balanced: order ruling chaos, and chaos ruling order. as merlin said in excalibur, "good and evil, there never is one without the other."

Anyone here ever read the Michael Moorecock Books about the Eternal Champion??? hehe he has a good outtake on the whole Chaos-Order-Balance thing...

is that the elrich series? if so, it's been recommended to me, though i haven't started it yet.

since chaos wouldnt exist unless there were rules to break (order) and balance wouldnt be necessary unless there were two opposing forces (order vs chaos) how can you support one and not the other? theyre all one and the same. like light and darkness. you need both.

The Elric Series is part of the ongoing tale of the Eternal Champion
Elric is just one of the Eternal Champions Incarnations...
Good series to start with though....

I've read the first three Elric novels. Didn't realize they were part of a larger series. What were some of the titles?

Kat

will look into the series.
that elrich was one of many versions of this hero reminds me of conan, who was reincarnated as cormac mac art, just as his arch foe the sorceror thulsa doom was reincarnated constantly to meet him.
thanks for the rec.

order and chaos, meeting eachother constantly...

Chaos isn't the breaking of Order, that's anarchy. Chaos is randomness and possibility. I don't believe good and evil are an essential balance, however. I think life would be better off without evil period. Of course I have a different definition of evil than some people.