“We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return…”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Matter and spirit blend in rhythmic unity. The mind echoes into the world and the world into the mind, animation as echoic symphony, libidinal riffs of embodied motion constituting consciousness – the tap-tk-tk-tap-tap of the full-yet-empty self. There is nothing that separates me from the rain; I am a garden. The world within me is the same as the world outside me, cosmos in cosmos in cosmos, the melody of spirit-matter.

Life grows by echopraxy. You spin, I spin. I dance, you dance. Motion makes and mirrors multiplicity. Evolution is funk – bass slaps vibrating organisms out into polyrhythm. Genes grow and giggle together; lungs cast amoebas and muscles vine over galaxies. We breathe in ontologies, the hyperpoxia of being. Stellar structures wobble in quantum potential at the level of spacetime foam, the All present in the modal landscape of reality. From possibility into the whole of time, infinities upon infinities cascading out into fractal topology, the echoic drive of transformative difference. Spirit-matter spins Pan into the pluricosmos.

Pan both precedes and succeeds Leviathan. Animal-being, plant-being, species-being, lifeways of cosmic consciousness bubbling through phylogenetic forests. If the Leviathan is a gnostic apocalypse, then Pan is queer anarchy, spirit-matter rioting against abstraction and domination. Queer anarchy collapses echoic waves into a dense ocean of syncopation; galloping into faster-arriving worlds, desire shatters simulacra, fragmenting the image of capital through subverting its mystical unity. Creaturely begotten into forests of utopia, Pan weaves bird feathers into bricks projectiled through palace windows. Sous les pavés, la plage!

Frogs bribbit L’Internationale. “…to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology) This is not life as it is arranged under capital, the marketplace of fiefdoms, human relationship replaced by exchange and quantification. Pan is the joining of all with all in mutual play and self-creation, the negation of the social factory through the defeat of value, the seizing of the time machine, the revolutionary transformation of quantity into quality. As the ungovernable wildness of the multiple claws out from monadic imperium, Pan slays the Leviathan.

“All power to the imagination!”

May 1968 Slogan

Image: Constellation: Toward the Rainbow, Joan Miró (1941)