Wild Children
Wild Children by Hakim Bey T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
Wild Children
The full moon’s unfathomable light-path — mid-May midnight in some State that starts with“I,” so two-dimensional it can scarcely be said to possess any geography at all — the beams so urgent & tangible you must draw the shades in order to think in words.
No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in images — prose is for them a code not yet fully digested & ossified, just as for us never fully trusted.
You may write about them, so that others who have lost the silver chain may follow.
Or write for them, making of STORY & EMBLEM a process of seduction into your own paleolithicmemories, a barbaric enticement to liberty (chaos as CHAOS understands it).
For this otherworld species or “third sex,” les enfants sauvages, fancy & Imagination are stillundifferentiated. Unbridled PLAY: at one & the same time the source of our Art & of all the race’s rarest eros.
To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style & voluptuous storehouse, a fundamental ofour alien & occult civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic, our lunatic espionage — this is theaction (let’s face it) either of an artist of some sort, or of a tenor thirteen-year-old.
Children whose clarified senses betray them into a brilliant sorcery of beautiful pleasure reflect something feral & smutty in the nature of reality itself: natural ontological anarchists, angelsof chaos — their gestures & body odors broadcast around them a jungle of presence, a forest ofprescience complete with snakes, ninja weapons, turtles, futuristic shamanism, incredible mess,piss, ghosts, sunlight, jerking off, birds’ nests & eggs — gleeful aggression against the groan-upsof those Lower Planes so powerless to englobe either destructive epiphanies or creation in theform of antics fragile but sharp enough to slice moonlight.
And yet the denizens of these inferior jerkwater dimensions truly believe they control the des-tinies of Wild Children — & down here, such vicious beliefs actually sculpt most of the substanceof happenstance.
The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runawaysor minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing &unleashing are the same act — these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a bandapart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might,locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.
Too young for Harley choppers — flunk-outs, break-dancers, scarcely pubescent poets of flatlost railroad towns — a million sparks falling from the skyrockets of Rimbaud & Mowgli — slenderterrorists whose gaudy bombs are compacted of polymorphous love & the precious shards of popular culture — punk gunslingers dreaming of piercing their ears, animist bicyclists gliding in thepewter dusk through Welfare streets of accidental flowers — out-of-season gypsy skinny-dippers,smiling sideways-glancing thieves of power-totems, small change & panther-bladed knives — wesense them everywhere — we publish this offer to trade the corruption of our own lux et gaudiumfor their perfect gentle filth.
So get this: our realization, our liberation depends on theirs — not because we ape the Family,those “misers of love” who hold hostages for a banal future, nor the State which schools us all tosink beneath the event-horizon of a tedious “usefulness” — no — but because we & they, the wildones, are images of each other, linked & bordered by that silver chain which defines the pale ofsensuality, transgression & vision.
We share the same enemies & our means of triumphant escape are also the same: a delirious& obsessive play, powered by the spectral brilliance of the wolves & their children.
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