So this brings me back to my initial point and the reason I (in a meta way? such a boring/commodified term nowadays) interrupted the narrative to bring the reality I am sitting in (a pub called Chequers in Barkingside in London, Guinness on the table, horse races on the tubes, dodgy-looking yet lovely locals enjoying a Friday afternoon) and the reality we live in (late-stage capitalist bureaucratic schizophrenic hell-scape which is being rapidly consumed by a defiant Earth).

This story is an attempt to bring about what I hope will be the least traumatic transition beyond this hell-scape as possible. The avoidance of trauma is impossible and undesirable, for one needs to be broken to truly understand the nature of the spiritual. In imagining the collapse of our infrastructure, wars between kids blowing up pipelines and those who want to protect the remaining fossil-fuel assets, and the strange event known as the Pralaya, which seems to me some event in which the consciousness of Earth permeates our own consciousness to awaken us to immanent dangers and possibilities, I am literally trying to wish this into existence. In some strange sense I believe even my own small creative contribution not only will, but must help to create the anticipatory communities I want to be part of.

Back to K. Dick’s first question: 1. Was he being guided by a future intelligence/version of his self trying to guide him towards some kind of self-realization?

He writes in the Exegesis:

But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us. Its sense of timing is perfect. But most important it knows everything. It can make no mistakes. It must be back for a reason. (53)

In the book Quantum Warrior: The Future of the Mind, the author John Kehoe suggests a practice of being receptive to communication from our future self. I can tell you from recent experience that every time I send out a conscious prayer/intention for some signal/sign from my future self, I get a serious scared-straight experience, especially to my own shortcomings in the deepest spiritual work of my life: choosing day in and day out to love, to the best of my ability and beyond, my vulnerable jewel of a life-partner. My future self does not sugarcoat things like some vapid white-girl New Age yoga fascist-adjacent “manifester.”

So do I believe that there is literally a future self who can guide us and bitchslap us if need be back onto the required path? Do you? All I can evince is a willingness to be receptive to the possibility, as K. Dick was. It’s a bit of Pascal’s Wager. I might as well accept and adjust myself to the possibility rather than ignoring the fact of their existence and the obvious messages they may be sending. I would rather write this and be perceived as an unhinged fool, as I’m sure K. Dick wrestled with, than be caught with my existential pants down when the various shites begin to really hit the various fans.

It is the common root of devotion (what my fellow Hindus describe as bhakti-yoga, the yoga of devotion) which moves through our various gardens of faith. The Now What? is the embryo within the pregnant emerging rhythms of Earthy chaos and rupture. This embryo dances along with the strange merciful beats of resurrection and reincarnation. From this Earthy jazz and funk, as rendered in their endlessly diverse tastes, smells, and hierarchies of blessed, damned, and doomed, a sympoetic, collective, sympathetic, intimate, erotic, and compassionate bonding creative energy re-emerges. 

Haraway describes this seed as a “carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation.” (Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 125.)

Anticipation is the practice of insisting that the answer to the Now What? is the answer of becoming-with, of staying with the trouble of the emergency, of healing the colonial wounds which have created the emergency. The questions of the Now What? are calls to the practice of anticipation and a call to devotedly understand, re-create, and co-create anew and again the anticipatory community. 

Nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.—WALTER BENJAMIN

I set forth how this project—as in the method of smashing an atom—releases the enormous energy of history that lies bound in the “once upon a time” of classical historical narrative.—WALTER BENJAMIN

“Chris, I think I have to tell you something”, says Rose. I look back at her and all of a sudden she starts to shimmer. She becomes a paradox. There-not-there. Her solidity becoming a vibration of kaleidoscopic colours. I wasn’t shocked more so than bedazzled at what I was seeing.

“Rose! Not again!” says Jack. It was the strangest thing. He was embracing her as she seemed to be weeping, but he wasn’t embracing her, because she was shimmering in and out of reality. Ten seconds felt like ten minutes (there was some kind of pulling effect on spacetime like in vertigo or within the insanely strange nightmares I used to have as a kid when I was sick). It felt really intrusive to be witness to such a strange, intimate moment. It was hard enough being away from your beloved. Yet to have your beloved literally shimmering out of reality in your very arms?

After a long minute, Rose solidified again. Jack and Rose sat quietly in each other’s arms for another long minute. Then Rose quietly broke away, walked over to me, and told me this.

“You have to call that number that they gave you.”

My mind swam for another long fifteen seconds (strangely enough the reality-pulling effect was still going on. It wasn’t comfortable but it wasn’t uncomfortable). The number?

“When they took you in the van.”

How could she know that? The pulling tightened. The phone appeared in my hand with a sharp cut, like at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the years pass in an instant edit. 

(Cut)

I pull the pamphlet out of my pocket.

(Cut)

Jack and Rose looking at me beatifically, like an icon.

(Cut)

I dial the number

(Cut)

Three more tanks roll by. Copters overhead. Then three jets rip by, rather low

(Cut)

The phone is ringing

(Cut)

Rose is shimmering again. Jack is shimmering too.

(Cut)

The call is answered. 

“This is Luther…Dr. Fici, we’ve been waiting for you”

Elmore gets into the driver’s seat with Julia in front and myself in the back. The monk-ninjas melt back into the forest as quietly as they emerged. So does the drone too.

“The cloaking tech?” asks Julia. It’s not just a simple question for her. After being so mindful of her breathing, she is nearly breathless after just seeing the display of the monk-ninjas and their drone. She’s reacting as if she is seeing a long-lost beloved one after a very long time

“You will see when we arrive,” Elmore says. Julia and Elmore share a completely inscrutable look which nevertheless translates as some kind of mutual pride between them at cracking an equally inscrutable equation.

We move slowly into the underbrush. There is a way a Land Rover creaks and groans along such a “path” that you know the automobile is actually pleased to endeavor so hard. It is the dharma of the Rover after all. Elmore is silent initially, but Julia and I know he is measuring what he has to say. It’s the special kind of intentional silence which is inherent to Elmore’s Scottish blood.

He stops the Rover for a moment and points to a small clearing to the south.

“That is where we are going to plant the Sequoia trees.”

The last time we were with him, Elmore was telling us about his visit to Northern California, where he became mesmerized by the native sequoia and redwood trees. A local botanist convinced him he could grow sequoia trees in the Highlands. Or what it that Elmore convinced the botanist? It was always a tad oblique when it came time for Elmore to engage with the contents of his memory.

A quarter-mile in and we begin to see drones of all shapes and sizes which make up the fleet. Julia and I exchange a look and she decides to dive in.

“Elmore, we just want to make sure you know that…”

Elmore hums to itself, almost Om-ing to himself. He responds

“Yes, we know just as well. We have intelligence that this is fairly imminent. You will see when we get to the camp.”

We drive by a drone which seems to be shimmering and melting into the forest. Julia gasps to herself and I can see tears welling up in her eyes.

“You finally figured out the diffraction?!!” I’ve never heard Julia so enthusiastic. She is damn near ecstatic

Elmore smiles. It’s like a supernova when a stoic like him smiles.

“It was just the very equation you suggested. It’s not perfect yet, but we can’t wait for perfect right now.”

We pull into the camp. Everywhere we see drones and tents and antennas and more drones and portable artillery and organic regenerative gardens and kitted-out Rovers with jamming tech and the kitchen and the library and a few more drones uncannily shimmering in and out of the trees. 

I’m back inside my tiny little fucking basement flat. What do you do after being kidnapped? I literally, in such a daze, try to Google that to find out. But the wifi is still down and out. I remember the pamphlet in my hand. What does the pamphlet say?

My inertia is my anxiety. My anxiety is my inertia. I know what to do, but I can’t do it. Terminal-stage capitalism-I have to purge it from my being. Because it is the log in my eye. I have to be able to create, I have to be an artist now. What I see around me, what I see from this roof, is not a need for more toughness. Well…no…toughness is important, but not that kind of toughness which comes from guns and muscles and bravado and all that Jesus and John Wayne crap. That’s why the Capital is on fire in the distance (those fuckers got in again but no one was there this time).

So yes toughness is needed, but the toughness of the artist. The artist who refuses to accept things just as they are. The artist who isn’t afraid to break and smash in order to regenerate and heal. The artist who fiercely defends every being who is alive. The artist who fiercely defends the sanctity of death just as well.

I hear them now more than ever. That’s what upwelling inside me. That’s what is emerging inside me. There is my future self-my queer self? I don’t want to be that presumptive. I have to read more queer theory and talk to my queer friends and colleagues. But that is what most closely describes what it feels like. Not necessarily queer in the sense of sexual preference, although I would argue we’re maybe all a little queer in that sense.

But queer in the sense that the binaries we idolize really don’t matter in any kind of deep way. Categories and boundaries and classifications and hierarchies-the whole bureaucratic fetish we’ve been on about for centuries now. None of that really matters. All of that is the cage we’ve built around ourselves. I mean for Krishna’s sake all of that just melted away anyway. Proof of concept!

But let me confess.

When I have been in a pub reading this book, I have both surreptitiously kept the cover hidden but also at times brazenly unhid the cover for anyone who might be looking. I imagine I was trying to show off.

Because what would you think if you saw someone reading this book at a pub? Or on an airplane? Sitting fervently on a park bench in a hoodie with a fifteen-day old shadow?

It’s aesthetically a brilliant fucking title for the actual book that it actually is. This is not a technical manual on the electronics, explosives, and tactics that one will require to directly attach the planetary fossil-fuel tentacle-web. It’s not the Anarchist Cookbook for the Age of Climate Catastrophe. One could say it is rather the philosophical justification for those who might create and utilize such a cookbook.

From our manuscript (Julia and I). The ecotheology. 

The practice of anticipation and the creative formation of anticipatory community are by definition designed to reveal, confront, resist, and regenerate the fault lines of modernity. We are opening towards sovereign political exceptionalisms of the time of climate catastrophe from which totalitarianism can re-emerge fiercely and with a new and urgent appetite to protect its interests. We are simultaneously opening towards, within the spacetimemattering of climate catastrophe, an increased awareness of and potential for kairos (divine inbreaking) and metanoia (profound conversion) from which the art of anticipation will always emerge from and be nourished by.

The classic fascist call for blood and soil becomes even more antagonistically ecological within the contexts of our climate catastrophe. (11) As the contours of this catastrophe continue to intensify, a further drawing-in of the bridges of support and mutuality between human and human and human and other-than-human on microscopic and macroscopic scales mutates and metastasizes. This is creating conditions from which totalitarian and fascist forces can re-emerge in the twisted ecological key of climate catastrophe. How does the code of power respond to the pressures of the defiant Earth?

The next weird thing that happened that day was I was kidnapped.

It was a little later in the morning. Out for another communication with the smoke. Phone signals were also mostly down and out. Wifi mostly down and out. I’m a little nervous going outside when it appears some shit is hitting some kind of fan. Nevertheless I have a mad case of nature-deficit disorder and fresh air always beckons.

Immediately when I step outside three more helicopters of the apocalypse fly about 100 feet over my head. The noise nearly gives me a stroke.

I hear a car pull into the east side of the back alley, about a block away from me. I don’t see the car but I hear it. I walk a few steps carefully in the other direction. Suddenly my phone (and Auntie’s phone up above in the balcony) buzzes with that strange shriek of the emergency broadcast system.

It keeps shrieking. No message is forthcoming. Suddenly I hear another shriek: brakes slam, a hood is over my head, and I’m shoved into the back of a van.

What does one experience in those kinds of moments? When everything is ruptured, when death might be immediately beyond that hood?  Somehow I remembered to chant Hare Krishna in my head, the holy mantra of the Divine, even if I no longer went to any Krishna temples or believed in much of anything anymore. 

We drove around for about 25 minutes. It felt like we had gone north but were circling around Silver Spring maybe? We pull up very sharply and stop. The hood comes off. Immediately they identify themselves.

“We are with the NSA. We had your name and address on a list. We have a lot of facial recognition hits of you in this neighborhood. Have you recently purchased a book entitled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline?” Have you recently written three Medium articles and submitted an essay to Jacobin about this book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline?”

“Does the universe respond to our desires and actions, like pulling on the matrix to shape life the way we intend it to? Which means we must be very careful to know what we intend. Most of the time what is unconscious is the coal in the engine. The unconscious is always striving to become conscious. When we ignore her…Or are we just being dragged around by a bunch of damn planets all of the time? Anyway it’s all just fucking exasperating. Bunch of hockum.”

He comes over close to both of us. “The kids at the farm. They’re coming first for them?”

The kids are a brilliant group of young Scottish youth who have destroying fossil fuel infrastructure all over Europe. Really they’re the best of the various groups of youth who have been doing this all over the world for the last three years. All of them brilliant jewels. We made the farm in the highlands expressly for the purpose of protecting them, sheltering them, and giving them the contemplative space to strategize. (Imagine the conversations I had to convince my city-slicker wife who is scared of cows about this entire plan. Earth had ways of making the choice not only obvious, but urgently necessary)

The Realist looks closely at us this time (not through us). Tears are in his eyes.

“Either protect them there or get them out ASAP.”

We make the three hour journey back. Julia and I don’t speak much. We never really do. But we both know who we need to be in touch with to protect the kids.

I fall back asleep for a bit and wake up around 10am. Texts from my sister and my wife telling me they have been sent home too (of course they went to work)

WIFEY: Baby they sent me home! No one came to work! And no one was on the tube on the way back. It’s very strange.

I turn on CBS News. The chyron is remarkable:

BREAKING NEWS: NATIONWIDE SPONTANEOUS SICK-OUT UNDERWAY: INITIAL REPORTS THAT 80-90% OF WORKFORCE DID NOT REPORT FOR WORK

I check SkyNews:

MASSIVE SICK-OUT ACROSS UK: NO REPORTS OF ORGANIZED GENERAL STRIKE, APPEARS TO BE SPONTANEOUS. 

General strike? I didn’t even think of that. Maybe my leftist radical comrades finally got their shit together. I check Jacobin’s Twitter account:

This is not a general strike, as everyone keeps asking us. Our networks have not been planning a direct action like this. If anything, this appears to be a spontaneous “strike” but we debate the use of that term in this instance.

Three minutes later, my friend Salona (my Quaker witch friend I befriended at divinity school) texts me to say:

I knew this was going to happen.

I text her back: Really? Why? What is happening?

I don’t get an immediate response. Five minutes later, the entire Meta suite of apps, the great succubus on our attention and energy and love, goes down. It wouldn’t come back on ever again.

I step out on my front porch. The silence is rich and obvious, like I was in those days in NYC right after the pandemic started. All you could hear were sirens and the birds again! But this one is different. It felt like like a big inhaled breath. I live on a fairly busy street in D.C, yet no cars drive by for the five minutes I’m there. No helicopters. No buses. No people. Even Cheech didn’t show up to work next door at the corner market.

What is enchantment then? The practices we offer below are ways for you to feel part of Mother Earth again. The practices of enchantment help us not just to think Earth is alive, but to feel it. Enchantment is the art of feeling achingly alive within the embrace of Mother Earth. Enchantment is also justice and the struggle for ecological justice in all of its capacities. Enchantment is the entanglement of our very bodies and souls in the creaturely flesh of Earth, alive, awake, and in radically caring embrace.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.