Nomad Codes

He points out that what he calls “fortuitous mistranslations” of one culture often mobilize “new insurrectionary modes of cultural thought” in another. A casebook example of “heresy as cultural transfer” is Beat Zen, one of the primal inspirations for the white drop-outs who inspired the countercultural tradition that Wilson himself still very much carries on.
    The first incursions of Zen into America were from Japanese of dubious orthodoxy—and I would even include D.T. Suzuki in that category. Then you had a lot of Americans who “didn’t understand it,” and they made their own thing out of their fortuitous mistranslation. Something about Zen filled the bill. In terms of Japanese scholarship, they were wrong. But in terms of the spirit, it seems they were right.
    What was happening was precisely what Zen itself calls “beginner’s mind.” After centuries, something radically new was happening to Zen, and unfortunately Zen was not able to appreciate it, because Zen soon moved in the Roshis. “Fine, fine, you’re into Zen? Here’s the real Zen.” And the real Zen turned out to be just another fucking despotism. Even giving orthodoxy its due, they shouldn’t have stamped out those embers. Because it had that benefit of beginner’s mind, that sweetheart situation, Beat Zen made Buddhism what it is today: the biggest Oriental religion in America. That’s how you get things like the TV show Kung Fu . A lot of Oriental stuff seeped into that stupid show, and created a whole generation of people for whom it was part of their universe of discourse.

    For Wilson, a more important instance of “heresy as cultural transfer” occurred in the early 1900s in the work of Noble Drew Ali, the African-American whose imaginative mixture of Masonry, esoteric Christianity, and his own visionary dreams of Egypt led to everything from Elijah Mohammad to hip hop’s Five Percent Nation. As Wilson says, “Drew Ali’s a real American prophet, the black man with a Cherokee feather stuck in his fez—the perfect image of everything I wish America were and isn’t.” In Sacred Drift , Wilson seeks the poetic fact of Noble Drew Ali, drawing not only from historical materials but from conversations with old-timers and pamphlets bought from incense-sellers in Times Square. “This is in fact the real opening of Islam in America. It’s only long after that you find middle-class white people becoming interested in Sufism.”
    One of the those middle-class white persons was, as you might suspect, Peter Lamborn Wilson. He discovered the curious legacy of Drew Ali in 1964, when he met the hipsters who founded the Moorish Orthodox Church, an offshoot of Nobel Drew Ali’s original Moorish Science Temple. In 1968, reacting to “the collapse of the political into spectacle,” Wilson left America. Like many “feckless teenage hippies,” he headed for India, but eventually got booted out for overstaying his visa. Rather aimlessly, he went to the Persian consulate in Quetta, Baluchistan, where he scored a year’s visa for Iran. There he discovered not only that mysticism was alive and well in Persia but that he could earn a living in Tehran just by knowing English. “It’s really still the only talent I have.” As the cultural reporter for a little English-speaking newspaper, he had the freedom to explore fringe Islam as well as to meet the various avant-garde Westerners who passed through. Peter Brook gave him a job, and he almost slugged Stockhausen.
    In 1974, a number of great Sufi scholars like Toshihiko Izutsu, Henry Corbin, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, backed with money from the Shah’s wife, founded the Iranian Academy of Philosophy, an institute devoted to Sufi research. Wilson’s studies and translations continued there until the revolution.
    I went to a conference in Italy with an overnight bag and never went back. It wasn’t really my fight exactly, and it tore my little world apart. Clearly, in retrospect, the Shah was a violent son of a bitch who didn’t deserve to survive. But I would make an exception for Mrs. Shah. She’s a very sweet lady and I owe her a lot of fun in my life so it would be churlish to make any remarks about her.

    “I advise everybody to travel,” says Wilson:
    And that in a somewhat Sufistic sense. As the Persians say, “A jewel that never leaves the mine never acquires polish.” Of course, there’s many ways to travel. There’s tourism, there’s traveling for business,