Nomad Codes

absence, to habit, to money, to the dealer, to the down. They did nothing for my teen angst or my memory; for others, they were less forgiving. High school friends of great wit, intelligence, and spirit are now junkies, alkies, hopeless flakes, burn-outs, and, in more than one instance, a corpse. They were no more taken by drugs back then than I was. Today, I rave it up now and then, keep periodic appointments with the gibbering, serpentine, science-fiction All Being who resides in the hyper-dimensions of psychedelic space, and drink beer. I did not reject drugs; I cordially withdrew, making sure to leave the door ajar for whatever intriguing substances remain unchecked on my curriculum vitae.
    But I take great satisfaction in the fact that many people, acquainted with either my writing or my person, assume that I’m a total stoner. For when I began to pull away from regular drug use, I realized that I didn’t want to do drugs as much as to think drugs, to simulate their hyperconnections, magical causality, and semiotic drift as much as possible within my own mind. The French post-structuralists (and Castaneda fans) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose works produce the immanent patterning of psychedelic cognition, write that drugs can be understood at the level where “desire directly invests perception ... and the imperceptible is perceived”—a liberatory goal indeed. But Deleuze and Guattari are fairly down on drugs themselves. To quote them quoting Henry Miller, the point is to get drunk on a glass of water.
    In other words, sobriety alone does not have the tools to build sense and meaning from these vertiginous, data-dense End times. Levelheaded thinking is no option when the ship is pitching to and fro—you either resist and puke, or ride with the galloping serenity of the mounted nomad. Perhaps Walter Benjamin was right: civilization is perpetual crisis, and my point of view is only an indication of that irreparable deviation my reason took over a decade ago. But for those of us who get stoned off dusk, who tinker with the simulacra of consciousness, who turn our minds into heads, the question is moot. Like that giddy flash of anxiety that hits the moment the blotter melts on your tongue, it’s too late now. Here it comes.
    1993

ORIENTALISMO

THE WANDERING SUFI

    Peter Lamborn Wilson

    Setting out in the late 1960s, the underground anarcho-Sufi scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson traveled abroad for over a decade, wandering from North Africa to India to Java. But he spent the bulk of his time in Iran, where he explored the heterodox nooks and crannies of Islam, a religion the West caricatures as fanatically monolithic but which Wilson’s voluminous reading, Sufi practices, and face-to-face encounters with sorcerers, Satanists, and hash-smoking dervishes proved possesses one of the world’s richest and most diverse living mysticisms. Wilson’s expatriate days are over, but he remains a cultural and intellectual nomad—a true free-thinker.
    Though the bulk of his work explores the historical and mystical dimensions of Sufism and Islamic heresy, Wilson has also translated books of Persian poetry, written on angels and early American spiritual anarchism, and penned science fiction and a few pseudonymous manifestos. Every other Tuesday, his free-ranging Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade broadcasts on WBAI, and he lectures regularly at the New York Open Center and other local venues on topics ranging from hermeticism to Dada anthropology to “chaos linguistics” in the writings of Chuang Tzu. He’s published high and low, from sci-fi zines to Studies in Mystical Literature to Semiotext(e) , which, as a member of the Autonomedia collective, he helps publish. And they still won’t let him into a university library in New York.
    As an underground intellectual, Wilson is particularly suited to tapping the underground streams of religious history—both the truths that canonical authorities keep hidden, and the shadows of truth that haunt history like phantasms. As Wilson demonstrates, heresies most often occur far from the legislating center, and his own heretical studies have put him knee-deep in apocrypha, secret histories, occult symbols, magic pamphlets, and popular art. These explorations not only move him from history into exoticism, but introduce a magical mode of writing: recombinant, luminous, fragmentary. As he writes in Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam :
    In the world of apocrypha the