WILD CHILDREN

  
                       
... No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in images -- prose is for them a code not yet fully digested and 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 and EMBLEM a process of seduction into your own pateolithic memories, a barbaric enticement to liberty (chaos as CHAOS understands it).

For this otherworld species or "third sex," les enfants sauvages, fancy and Imagination are still undifferentiated. Unbridled PLAY: at one and the same time the source of our Art and of all race's rarest eros.

To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style and voluptuous storehouse, a fundamental of our alien and occult civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic, our lunatic espionage-this is the action (let's face it) either of an artist of some sort, or of a ten or thirteen-year- old.

Children whose clarified senses betray them into a brilliant sorcery of beautiful pleasure reflect something feral and smutty in the nature of reality itself: natural ontological anarchists, angels of chaos -- their gestures and body odors broadcast around them a jungle of presence, a forest of prescience complete with snakes, ninja weapons, turtles, futuristic shamanism, incredible mess, piss, ghosts, jerking off, birds' nests and eggs -- gleeful aggression against the grown-ups of those Lower Planes so powerless to englobe either destructive epiphanies or creation in the form of antics fragile but sharp enough to slice moonlight.

And yet the denizens of these inferior jerkwater dimensions truly believe they control the destinies of Wild Children -- and down here, such vicious beliefs actually sculpt most of the substance of happenstance.

The only ones who actually wish to share this mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerrillas 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 band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinner table while adults gibber from behind their masks.

Too young for Harley choppers -- flunk-outs, break-dancers, scarcely pubescent poets of flat lost railroad towns -- a million sparks falling from the skyrockets of Rimbaud & Mowgti -- slender terrorists 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 the pewter 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 -- we sense them everywhere -- we publish this offer to trade the corruption of our own lux et gaudium for 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 to sink beneath the even-horizon of a tedious "usefulness" -- no -- but because we & they, the wild ones, are images of each other, linked & bordered by that silver chain which defends the pate of sensuality, transgression & vision.

We share the same enemies & our means of triumphant escape are also the same: a delirious & obsessive play, powered by spectral brilliance of the wolves & their children.

-- Hakim Bey, Chaos