"Our watchwords will be real freedom and post-pilgrimage.
Stuff the country, we want our souls back.
Together and separately, we’re going to make empathy great again. So great.
Let us explore this world made alien and conspiracy-theoretical, seek spaces where the gaps
and voids and contradictions and cosmopolitan canopies afford a variegated individual an
escape from malevolent gazes. Seek out these spaces and share their presence with other postpilgrims; try to expand those spaces where freedom is possible; where personal preference
(harming no one) can be expressed without algorithmic exploitation, where spiritual identity
(that is exclusive of no one else’s) can be explored without dogma, and where we are free of that
fake ‘freedom’ (of the Brexit, miserablist, resentful kind) which ‘frees’ us from our responsibility
for each other. Nothing new here, but instead of legislating this liberalism, we should inscribe
localised sites with it.
In Sidmouth (of all places) there is a “Dissenters Wall” outside an old protestant chapel,
where people are invited to sit and share dissident opinions. Let us propagate such spaces
invisibly; share maps of the less explicit and more accidental ones. To begin, nothing need
change in these spaces but your understanding of them. Take your friends to visit them.
I am talking here about the construction of a secret architecture, a giant glassy structure
without glass, a structure of many imaginary structures, to all appearances transparent and
non-existent, immense and wholly subjective, multiple in its forms – beginning with the Chapel
Perilous of Robert Anton Wilson, with the giant invisible forms that appear at the end of Jeff
Nichols’s movie ‘Midnight Special’, with the different kinds of ‘chorastic’ spaces described by
Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz, and so on. One thing that held back the situationists in their
opposition to the Spectacle was their hatred of art and image. The invisible post-pilgrimage
that I am proposing, with its raising of a shared invisible architecture, is both more and less
iconoclastic; for it is uninhibited about drawing on any art source, while shunning mimesis and
leaving no exploitable trace of its own.
This post-pilgrimage is not an attempt at a counter-culture, but an invisible anti-empire
that sits to the side of, or folded within the organism of, a living world of things about which
we renounce all ideas of ownership.
This is not the poisoned and infected ground imagined by the conspiracy theory ruling class
as beneath its dome; this is the imaginary and real terrain of a heaven in Earth, where the only
god is an un-god (which remains godlike, a nothing or darkness within us from which all
creativity comes). This heaven in Earth, where the abiding myth is of individual self-respect
and realisation, is characterised by a quest, with excitement and self-discovery and queer
treasures, and an obligation to the stranger; its sub-plot is the underpinning meshwork of
empathy and care for others, hence the importance of the apparently un-magical world of
democratic politics and national health and care services. Yet, whatever success there is in such
planning there will always be cracks in which to begin building the invisible.
This world is wholly different from the one you fear; it is wholly different from the dull and
stodgy materials of conspiracy, repeating over and over; rather, it is the generous seat of your
quest."
email: jonone100[at]gmail[dot]com
twitter: @jonone100
Any comments please email me or connect on Twitter.
Artwork is by James Spanfeller for Avant Garde Magazine (May 1968)
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