IN SLEEP WE DREAM
of only two forms of government – anarchy & monarchy.
Primordial root consciousness understands no politics
& never plays fair.
A democratic dream? A socialists dream?
Impossible.

Only kings & wild people populate my night.
Monads & nomads.
But in a dream we are never ruled
except by love or sorcery,
which are the skills of chaotes & sultans.

Among a people
who cannot create or play, but can only work,
artists also know no choice
but anarchy & monarchy.
Like the dreamer they must possess &
and do possess their own perceptions,
& for this they must sacrifice the merely social
to a “tyrannical Muse.”

Art dies when treated “fairly.”

It must enjoy a caveman’s wildness
or else
have its mouth filled with gold by some prince.

Bureaucrats & sales personnel poison it,
professors chew it up, and philosophers spit it out.
Art is a kind of byzantine barbarity fit only for nobles & heathens.

Can genuine life occur without some folly,
some excess, some bouts of Heraclitan “strife”?

We do not rule
–but we cannot & will not be ruled.

T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey, Black Crown & Black Mirror – Anarcho-Monarchism & Anarcho-Mysticism

Mistake? Like any label which I might choose, it is a point-of-view and only that. The last thing I did before turning the lights out last night was to read a bit from Bey’s T.A.Z. book. No matter that I intended to write more this morning on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tale. Waking today, I knew that I must feature a few lines from Bey, what I read last night before turning in. Is this the whisper of my “tyrannical muse?’ Perhaps.

Sometimes I dream, one night then another. The dreams my be surreal. The mind has subterranean levels, basements that ‘wide-awake’ consciousness never enters. In darkness though, monsters, demons, angels, rise up and seem over time to shape-shift, one becomes the other. It’s possible to understand, to become acquainted with your monster…

These lines state that notably absent from dreams is the negotiation, the splitting-of-the-difference, that hallmark of polite society, a tepid everyone-is-equal democracy… In the dream one is subject to chaos or subject to some absolute authority. A dance-vision of wildness or majesty…

And what has art to do with this? The artist is at the mercy of inspiration. Full stop. One must paint, must write, must create what flows into oneself. Byzantine barbarity!

The dream: we cannot & will not be ruled.

In waking life? What if we allowed ourselves that wild-autonomy, what is ours, and majestic?

This tune will illumine our way, today’s segment of the journey, Bob Seger’s Night Moves.