Nameless Wildness

In 1330

A troubadour and mystic

Called Henry Suso

 

Saw some strange creatures

Dancing and shouting in the streets

And asked, “Who are you?”

 

“We’re nameless wildness!

Live out every caprice!!

Untrammelled freedom!!!”

 

These boisterous sprites

In Calvinist Geneva

Would disrupt churches,

 

Undress in public:

“Brethren of the free spirit!

Be Gods in Eden!”

 

Like Tantric Buddhists

They’d unselfconsciously

Do it in the road.

 

Animist anarchists,

They’d declare that to confess

To a tree-trunk

 

Was much more useful

Than confessing to a priest

In a stone-cold church.

 

To brothers and

Sisters of the free spirit,

Public ecstasy

 

Was uninhibited.

Making love was Paradise.

They’d unlock Eden

 

And hand out duplicate

Keys to the unhappy and

The undeserving whom

 

They said were poorer

Than the poor. Being naked,

They’d get arrested.

 

Some were even hanged,

But they still exist today:

Fritz Teufel was one.

 

Spassguerilla, or

‘Fun Guerilla’ and ‘Pudding

Assassin’, who threw

 

Bags filled with flour

And yogurt at the US

Vice-President,

 

Hubert Humphrey, on

A state visit to Berlin

In 1967,

 

While distributing

Posters of the President’s

Rectum – ‘Das privat ist politisch!’–

 

And translating it

For the outraged FBI:

“The personal is political”.

 

Humphrey’s bodyguards

Shared a humor by-pass

With German police:

 

Teufel’s ‘Witz als Waffe’

‘Wit as weapon’ was disliked

By authority –

 

By the Pig Empire

(The global fourth or fifth Reich,

Now merging into one).

 

Fritz stood in the dock,

Crapped into his hand;

Threw it at the judge.

 

This was in Berlin,

In 1969, and

The police had been

 

Stopped from entering

Squatted streets in Kreuzberg

By sharpened caltraps

 

Strewn all over the road,

So that approaching police cars

Would burst their tyres

 

Which slowed them down;

And the cold war was still on,

And the Berlin Wall

 

Divided the world

Of totalitarian

Warmongers, both

 

Mad on money

And on centralizing power.

The wall meant nothing

 

More than two dead states

So Fritz and friends painted it

With surreal slogans

 

Like “This wall belongs

To the Insect Trust”,

Meaning bureaucrats.

 

People were shot at

If they even touched the wall.

No man’s land between

 

East and West Berlin

Was electrified. Rabbits

Flew up from the ground.

 

Out of the snow. Dead.

At an action in Wannsee

Fritz Teufel was caught

 

Running through the woods

He was arrested and charged

With ‘krieg gegen die polizei’

(Or ‘war on the police’),

 

And in court again

His number 2 weapon would

Sail through the courtroom.

 

Fritz accompanied

The flying turd with a six-

Hundred year old song:

 

“Ich bin namenlos wildheit

Lebe jeder caprice aus

Freiheit uneingeschrankt.”

 

“I’m nameless wildness!

Live out every caprice!!

Untrammelled freedom!!!”

 

These clarion calls

Still inspire troublemakers

Worldwide every day.

 

For there are no rules –

Only atrophied mindsets,

Unmagical thoughts

 

And credulous nonsense:

‘You can be helped if you vote

For people to help you!” 

 

Whether voting for

Jesus Christ or a chocolate

Teapot you’ll soon see

 

Power politics

Trumping altruism, and

Money counting votes

 

Whilst ambition,

As persistent as a floater in the bog,

Shouts, ‘Love me! Fuck you’.

 

Voting’s not real life.

Life is cooperation,

Not top-down orders.

 

In biology,

Cells meet cells without voting.

Voting’s unnatural.

 

Birds’ formation-flight

Works without leadership or

Any president.

 

If you’ve seen starlings

Billowing across the sky

Making perfect shapes

 

(Their wingtips keeping

Aerodynamic distance,

So they’re free-floating)

 

You’ve watched a working,

Levitating bio-mass

That’s pure anarchism.

 

Farmers need water?

So they combine together

To irrigate land.

 

“Autonomy and

Cooperation make governments

Irrelevant.”

 

Riddley Walker said:

“The only power is no power”

That’s the heart of it.

 

Each baby is an

Anarcho-primitivist

Whose feelings persist.

 

“Anarchism is,

Not a romantic fable

But the hard-headed

 

Realization,

Based on five thousand years of

Experience, that

 

We cannot entrust

The management of our lives

To politicians,

 

Kings, priest, generals,

And county commissioners,”

Edward Abbey wrote.

 

‘Ignore alien

Orders’ – unless, of course, you’ve

An infantile need

 

To subsidize

Some authoritarian

Uniform fetish

 

Otherwise known as

The State – designed to give you

A splitting headache.

 

There’s really no need

For anyone to cough up

For authority.

 

Seen ‘Anarchy lives’?

Or ‘A’ with a circle round?

It comes from Proudhon –

 

‘Property is theft’ –

As does ‘l’Anarchie, c’est l’ordre’

That’s why there’s a ‘O’

 

Round Anarchy’s ‘A’.

It stands for natural order

Which evolves slowly

 

When society

Makes force and money-grubbing

Unfashionable.

 

Stones on Proudhon’s grave

Appear like this, in homage:

‘A’ with a circle.

 

Anarchist order

Arises naturally, whilst

The state’s a mirage

 

Which demands you pay

For armies in pointless hats

To monopolize force

 

And then kill people,

Whom they’ve never met before,

On the orders of

 

Military skinheads

Wearing stamp-collections

On their puffed out chests –

 

Medals for folly

As they strut past cenotaphs

And nationalist

 

Totems, forgetting

Life’s too precious to give it

To death-dealing states

 

Selling you the lie

That their soldiers die for you.

No one dies for you.

 

No one dies for you!

People live for each other,

Then they live longer.

 

Anarchy is wild,

And resisting anarchy

Makes you very ill!

 

It’s man’s natural state,

Making all other systems

Quite superfluous.

 

Anarchy’s pretty.

Anarchy’s for lovers and

It has more fun.

 

 ‘It’ll never work.’

No? yet there’ve been countries that

Forgot to have governments.

 

Whoever logs on

Is now part of a system

Beyond all control,

 

Where authority’s

Gone and nation states

Are fading away.

 

Society is

A money-mad rebellion

Against anarchy.

 

If anarchy is

Thought to be anti-social

That’s the reason why.

 

There are labour pains

When anything new is born

And innocence refreshed.

 

 

Heathcote Williams