Len Bracken's new book from Adventures Unlimited, The Arch Conspirator, takes a deeper look at conspiracy in history than few other books ever have. It includes essays and commentaries new insights on global politics and their conspiratorial underpinnings. Bracken follows a maze through interwoven tales from the Russian Conspiracy, through his interview with Costa Rican novelist Joaquin Gutierrez, and follows his Psychogeographic Map into the Third Millenium. The Arch Conspirator also contains Bracken's General Theory of Civil War; A False Report Exposing the Dirty Truth About South African Intelligence Services; the Neo-Catiline Conspiracy for the Cancellation of Debt; Anti-Labor Day, 1997, with selected Aphorisms Against Work; Solar Economics; and much more. It makes a remarkable addition to the library of the thinking conspiracy theorist.
Bracken authored Guy Debord - Revolutionary(Feral House), documenting the biography of the great Situationist thinker DeBord, who helped expose the conspiracy culture as the society of the Spectacle. Bracken also served as the translator of another great Situationist, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, with the first English translation of a Situ classic, The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (Flatland). Bracken is also well-known as the editor of Extraphile, an underground newsletter of the Extranational movement, and has contributed to Anarchy, Steamshovel Press and many other magazines and alternative periodicals. The following essay is a press release of the Baltimore-Washington Psychogeography Association (POB 5585 Arlington, VA 22205; tel. 703-715-6816) . It does not appear in The Arch Conspirator, but reflects some of the book's examination of the dark corridor of conspiracy.
Members of the Baltimore-Washington Psychogeography Association made a pre-Mother's Day (1999) expedition to the Basilica glorifying the Christian Mother of God.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception stands near the backbone of Washington, DC (WDC), the great divide called North Capitol Street that separates city's northwest and northeast quadrants like a pair of human lungs or the hemispheres of a brain.(l) The drifters approach from Harewood Road, NE, and quickly spot an omen: a dead squirrel on the sidewalk with what T-S knows are indications of rat poison on its carcass. The drift continues, and suddenly a mockingbird lands on the driveway hedge and mocks the blare of a car alarm. A second omen, but of what, they don't know. They consider the meaning of this omen for a moment, and suddenly a woman approaches from the direction of the Shrine.
"Excuse me miss," L-A begins, in Spanish, "If may I speak with you for a moment."
"Of course," she says with a sense of inner serenity and strength.
"Can you tell me the difference between the Assumption and the Ascension?"
"Yes, well, the Assumption is when the angels absorbed the dead body of Mary into heaven to be crowned Mother of God by the Father. We celebrate this on August fifteenth every year with a Feast of the Assumption."
She looks at L-A.
"You know what the Ascension is, don't you?"
L-A shakes his head.
"The Ascension is when Christ rose into heaven and we celebrate it forty days after Easter."
"You've been so helpful. I didn't know that, and none of my friends knew it either. Where are you from?"
"Guatemala."
L-A imagines her prayers for peace. "Thank you very much."
"What was that all about?" T-S asks.
"Never mind."
T-S grumbles something about "the presumption of the Assumption," but L-A doesn't want anyone to know that he has the slightest interest in religion, which is why he asked the woman in Spanish and won't translate the answer for T-S. You see, these drifters approach the largest Catholic church in the Western Hemisphere from rival perspectives.
T-S, a fifty-year-old musician, subscribes to spiritist psychogeography--the wine of life trickles out a bag-obscured bottle in Malcom X park while he talks to Dante's statue as if he, T-S, were Virgil taking the exiled poet on a drift through the world of gods, myths, and spirits; as if, in an ideal sense, the series of cascading pools lined by a narrow granite rim were the River Styx.
L-A finds reality in materialist psychogeography; the omens of human ecology disclose themselves in Georgetown shop windows, in the juxtaposition, for example, of a watch boutique featuring futuristic designs and the gargantuan, backwards-spinning clock in F.A.0. Swartz. In an instant of Protagorean perception (2), festive scenes of rag-tag Rabelasian jubilees clash with the sleek, digital conception of time embodied in space-age watches. The wine of life no longer flows the way it did in Medieval Spain during the five months everyone took for holidays and festivals. Time, like the watches and virtually everything else in Washington, is a commodity. All that's left in the bottom of the bottle are a few seeds to sow in a new civilization.
The drifters enter the Shrine through the west entrance. They inadvertently raid the bookstore by mistaking pamphlets for free brochures, then wander down an empty corridor. A door opens and light from an office floods the low-lit hall. A radiant black woman steps out.
"Can you tell us the way to the Crypt Church?" L-A asks.
"My pleasure."
"You have an accent. Are you from Africa?"
"Yes," she says with something of the same serene sense of inner peace as the Guatemalan woman. "I'm from Nigeria."
She leads the drifters around a corner and points down a long hall.
"When you get to the end of this hall, just wind your way around to the Crypt Church."
T-S in turn points to a chapel at the end of the hall.
"Is that a black crucifix?"
"Yes, that's Our Mother of Africa Chapel, the newest chapel here at the Shrine. A Tanzanian carved the figure of Christ out of ebony and the cross was hewn in cherry by a New Yorker. It's a beautiful collaboration."
"What's your favorite chapel here in the shrine?" L-A asks.
"I love all of them."
"Come on," L-A says, "if you had to pick a favorite, my guess is that it would be the Mother of Africa Chapel."
She smiles and nods. After bidding farewell, the drifters begin their journey through Memorial Hall, but soon drift apart. T-S follows the impulse to absorb the light from racks of prayer candles. L-A passes the display of an aluminum tiara donated by Pope Paul VI, then shuffles by the Hall of American Saints--saints such as St. Frances Cabrini, benefactor of Chicago's orphans. L-A then crosses the threshold--over the design of a slave-ship cargo-hold in the floor--to Our Mother of Africa Chapel. His heart races at the sight of her and then keeps time to the drums echoed in the inscription, "Mary, Our Mother of Africa, hear the drumbeat of our prayers."
As the Nigerian woman said, the ebony and cherry crucifix is indeed admirable. And in the gleaming atmosphere of the chapel L-A feels charitable toward art, somehow no longer his sub-dada self. His inner speech is momentarily devoid of slurs against religious kitsch, and he allows himself to be drawn into what a passing tour guide tells a group of kids is a sacred conversation: a sacred conversation after the sacra conversazione painting technique popular in Italy in the fifteenth century. Here the conversation is between a strong and beautiful Mother of Africa holding the Jesus as a child, a slim dark figure of Jesus on the cross, and a right-to-left-reading narrative relief, in bronze, depicting the African-American journey toward emancipation.
Rocking to the beat of the drum, L-A brings his cosmopolitan ethics(3) to the sacred conversation, ethics that entice him to identify with the other, in this instance an idealized African woman not far in appearance from women L-A knows. His soul enters into this conversation with Mother of Africa, her son, and all her children in the heroic African-American race and elsewhere. L-A's mind floods with memories of this other's faces, games, and music that are his too, and he catches a glimpse of his spirit and the human spirit that went into all of the creations dearest to him.
At least the Pope is with me on the cancellation of debt in his Third Millennium Proclamation. The least we can do is cancel debt incurred by dictatorial regimes now owed by countries like the new South Africa. The most we can do begins with cancelling all debt, everywhere....
T-S appears between the columns that flank the chapel entrance, the Pillars of African-American Society. L-A nods and the drifters silently wander into the golden glow of the Crypt Church. The light dissipates ominously into the sacristy. As a priest holds service for a handful of churchgoers, the atmosphere takes foreboding hues. Without warning L-A or anyone else, T-S slyly dons a ghoulish rubber mask, a patch-eyed scull with long black hair and lips growing over its teeth. This gesture, uncharacteristic for a self-described neo-Victorian, quickly turns L-A's sacred drift into a superstition-mocking tale from the crypt. The spiritist and materialist psychogeograher is himself and his opposite just as L-A is white and non-white.
Notes
1. For the French origins and early history of psychogeography see Len Bracken's Guy Debord-- Revolutionary (Feral House, 1997).
For spiritist psychogeography see the attempt by the London Psychogeographical Association to revive Druid councils. Write for pamphlets to BM Senior London WCLN 3XX England.
For a contemporary interpretation of WDC-based materialist psychogeography, see the chapter "A Psychogeographic Map into the Third Millennium" from Len Bracken's The Arch Conspirator (Adventures Unlimited, 1999), particularly pages 71-73 for definitions.
For a humorous, if erroneous, interpretation of the Washington Psychogeoqraphy Association, see the American Standard edition of Pat Tracey's 1998 City Paper article "The Drifters."
2. Protagoras of Abdera (circa 490 B.C.-circa 421 B.C.) was the first professional sophist. He contributed to grammatical and rhetorical theory, and advised Pericles on the theory of democracy. Protagoras was exiled from Athens for his atheist views. Unfortunately his treatise "On the Gods" was burned. His "man is the measure of all things" argument has been interpreted variously as the exaltation of human subjectivity and, by Marxists, as early materialist anthropologism. Also of interest here is Protagoras' two logoi theory that is both the first expression, according to Diogenes Laertius, of the idea behind the proverb "there are two sides to every story," and more. Plato tells us that in Protagoras' "Antilogic" treatise, Protagoras propounds his two-logoi concept that holds, for example, that the wind is warm and not-warm. According to Aristotle, Protagoras' two-logoi principle also entails making the weaker argument stronger.
3. Cosmopolitan ethics refers to Strangers to Ourselves by Julia Kristeva (Columbia, 1991); for definitions see pages 140 and 143. The spirit-soul dictomy used in this paragraph is adapted from Kristeva's interpretation of M.M. Bakhtin, the theoretician of dialogism.
Len Bracken is the author of Guy Debord - Revolutionary, the translator of Gianfranco Sanguinetti's The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy and the editor of the newsletter Extraphile. His new book, The Arch Conspirator, is available from AUP. Bracken can be contacted at POB 5585 Arlington, VA 22205.