[Kwot] Zenarchy (Kerry W. Thornley)

And here I am, typing down the last words of Kerry Wendell Thornley's short none-treatise on the politics of non-political counter-culture, Zenarchy.

 After writing The Idle Soldiers on his then-friend and comrade Lee Harvey Oswald (long before this latter's defection and the murder of JFK), but before founding Discordianism with his childhood friend Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger), Thornley (alias the Purple Sage, Omar Khayyâm Ravenhurst - not to be confused with the 11th century Iranian sufi polymath of the same name) wrote some of his ideas on life, compiling stories and examples about counter-culture and Zen (some funny, some laughable, some profound and some very relevantly useless).

Here are two extracts, from the first and the last Chapter of Zenarchy. Let us think, or not.
The whole booklet can be downloaded here free of rights (literally "All rites reversed").

The Unborn Face

[...]

Although we sometimes called ourselves hip or hipsters or hippies or flower children, at that time those were just names among many that seemed occasionally fitting. As a social entity we were not yet stereotyped. Between a hard-bopping hipster and a gentle flower child there was a distinction, and neither label stretched to include us all.

[...]

Becoming hung up on avoiding names, of course, can be as misleading as being named, classified and forgotten. We were not making an effort in either direction. We intended, however, to avoid abstractions that short-circuit thought. An unborn face entailed a naked mind.

Zen is called Zen, but when the monk asks the master, “What is Zen?” he does not receive a definition but a whack on the head, or a mundane remark, or a seemingly unrelated story. Although such responses might baffle the student, they did not encourage him to glibly pigeon-hole the Doctrine.

[...]

The Forgotten Sage

In Flight of the White Crows, John Berry reminds us that Chaung Tzu says the true sage is absent-minded: “The absent-minded man cannot remember his bad deeds; he cannot remember his good deeds.”

 read and typed in june 2013