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John Moore: Anarchy and Ecstasy
The essays in this collection were envisioned and written beneath a sprig of mistletoe. The latter provides permission, a licence for pleasure unconstrained by law and limited only by the desires of the mutual participants. This Yuletide custom remains an attenuated token, a relic of the saturnalia, the solstice celebrations during which everything was temporarily everted: laws fell into abeyance, labour ceased, sexual liberty prevailed, gender roles became blurred and alterable, class differences receded, and control ceased. In turn, the saturnalia - a safety valve for repressed energies in antiquity - was itself a remnant from an era of primal freedom, the earthly paradise of global mythology, characterized by a total absence of control. The following essays hope to facilitate a regeneration of humanity through a renewal of this earthly paradise. Formally, the present collection is intended to constitute a preliminary body of visionary insights. If, as Debord maintains, "revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology and knows it", then visionary insight in turn transcends revolutionary ideology because the latter remains insufficiently radical. Total revolution must go beyond ideology to recover its roots through ecstatic visions. Hence, illuminated by an antinomian Inner Light, these essays examine vital issues on the interface between "fact" and "fiction," history and myth, and draw materials from disparate orders of discourse. Maybe life can once again become an exhilirating experience, a perpetuity of those intense feelings we recall from childhood anticipations of a seaside holiday, kiss chase, and falling in love. Perhaps, our hair entwined with holly and ivy, we can wassail every day. Next section: Toward a Cultural Ecology of Anarchy Back to contents |