Jul 4, 2023
Fourth of July in Network Space
by Exeunt
{Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.
– Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara (Quoted by Maggie Nelson)
His body was like topaz, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of a multitude.
– Daniel 10:6
I seem to have a strange, recurring tie with the ancient parish city of Lichfield, England. Something about the weird synchronicities that pile up in one’s research practice. Did I live there in a past life? Is there some ley line electromagnetism that connects my path to this town? I’ve never been - though, when I brought it up over drinks one night a few years ago, it turned out that my wife’s friend has an uncle who lives there, a history buff who takes kindly to visitors and loves to give tours. She shot him some texts, and I was told - through the generosity of social networks - that I always have a bed in Lichfield.
My first exposure was by way of a footnote on the life of Lady Eleanor Davies, the poet and mystic - a millenarian radical who, in 1625, after taking into her care a deaf-mute orphan with prophetic inclinations, went on a decades long crusade, foretelling in dozens of pamphlets the coming of the end times and a period of retribution that would mirror the events of the biblical Book of Daniel. The relational spark of the whole tale always compelled me. She was 35 before she ever met the child, and was apparently transformed: the Lady’s life as an outlaw was no loner’s, but rich with encounters, friendships, interpersonal ekstasis and the lectio divina of her relationship with others’ words. Famously, if honoring these tangled and chance-laden affections, she anagrammed out of a slightly distorted version of her name the injunction: REVEALE O DANIEL!
You might be surprised - history is strange this way - that she had a real, historically documented penchant for prophecy, correctly and very publicly predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham, and then her husband. By 1936 she was a widow and ex-prisoner, having been confined for smuggling her manuscripts across the border to England from Amsterdam. Apparently attempting to settle down, she moved in with a friend named Susan Walker in Lichfield. Even then, she couldn’t help but sow seeds of dissent. After a series of protests about the class and status-based seating arrangements at Lichfield Cathedral, on December 18 of that year she performed what the parish called “insufferable profanations”: dousing the Cathedral altar in tar and taking the bishops throne to declare herself ‘primate and metropolitan.’ She was quickly imprisoned. Seven years later, during the English Civil War, the Cathedral was set fire and nearly destroyed in a siege.
My later run-ins with Lichfield sprang from a fascination with the English Midlands during the time of the Enclosure (mainly due to the intrigues of one Abiezer Coppe as detailed in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a story for another time). This period was made up of a number of cynical “Statutes,” declaring the right to seizure of common tracks and removal of any inhabitant who didn’t have written deed to the land - an absurd display of the law, given that nearly all of the rural cottages were built by illiterate peasants who had assumed unwritten custody of the land for generations. The Enclosure of the common lands around Lichfield was a scandal that went on for centuries, from the 1500’s apparently through to the 1800’s. The “working class poet” John Clare wrote, from the Eastern half of the Midlands in 1821:
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground /And barked of freedom - O I hate that sound/ It grows the cant terms of enslaving tools/To wrong another by the name of right/It grows a liscence with oer bearing fools / To cheat plain honesty by force of might / Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide / But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight / Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside / And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite / Een natures dwelling far away from men / The common heath became the spoilers prey / The rabbit had not where to make his den / And labours only cow was drove away / No matter- wrong was right and right was wrong / And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song / Such was thy ruin music making Elm / The rights of freedom was to injure thine / As thou wert served so would they overwhelm / In freedoms name the little so would they over whelm / And these are knaves that brawl for better laws / And cant of tyranny in stronger powers / Who glut their vile unsatiated maws / And freedoms birthright from the weak devours.
There is a long debated story that Lichfield Cathedral was consecrated upon the site of a mass grave of martyred christians under the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, in the 280’s or 290’s A.D. As extra insult, the near thousand killed were left out to decay in the open, so the legend goes. Lic is an Old English word for body, corpse, still used by some rural English dialects today. Lichfield: Field of Corpses.
I was on a trip up the West Coast probably a year later when I picked up a 3 dollar copy of John Michell’s pseudoscientific 1969 tract, The New View Over Atlantis. The book, which I hadn’t realized was about England in particular, is important in the lineage of “alternative archaeology” or the “Earth Mysteries” movement (I just thought the pictures were weird and rad). Two thirds of the way in, to my surprise, Michell takes a quick tour into the geometrical and astrological significance of - you guessed it - Lichfield Cathedral, where he cites another explanation for the name.
A clear example of a Gothic cathedral constructed according to astrological principles is that of Lichfield under the sign of Mars. Lichfield Cathedral stands on a levelled prehistoric site, sanctified according to Christian legend by the massacre of 888 early martyrs, a number which refers to the name of Jesus. It is dedicated to St Chad whose feast day is also that of Mars, 2 March … Lichfield Cathedral is also red, the Martian colour. Moreover, the astrological character of the city is clearly indicated in its name, for according to a mediaeval document in the church archives, quoted in Britton’s The History and Antiquities of Lichfield, ‘The City of Lichfield was formerly called Liches from War.’
He goes on - forgive the lengthy excerpt:
Although Mars seems originally to have been a god of fertility, he was chiefly involved by the later Romans as a warlike deity and a bundle of spears, his magical weapon, was kept in the Temple of Mars in Rome and consulted for omens in times of trouble. At Lichfield, Mars, under the name of his Christian successor St Chad, was evidently also considered a warrior. This is suggested by a curious episode that is said to have occurred in 1643 during the Civil War, when Lichfield was attacked by a parliamentary army and the Cathedral, with its close surrounded by a wall and a ditch, was occupied as a stronghold by the royalist defenders. The event that then occurred is so remarkable that, were it not an apparently well documented historical fact, it might be taken rather as an allegory illustrating the miraculous intercession of the warrior god.
Lord Brook, the commander of the parliamentary forces, in order to dislodge the defenders, ordered a gun to be trained on the Cathedral with the intention of blowing it up. However, uneasy about the proprietary of his proposed sacriligous act, he stood up and prayed allowed for some omen of obvious assent or disapproval. At that moment a bullet was fired from out of the Cathedral and Lord Brook fell dead, shot through the head. The man who fired the shot was deaf and dumb from birth, a member of an old local family, known as ‘dumb Dymoke.’ The bullet was made inside the Cathedral of lead taken from the roof, and and the day was 2 March, the feast of St Chad, and formerly, of Mars. The enigmatic story became celebrated locally as an example of divine influence …
Sometimes I can’t tell if my little synchronicities, the intimate encounters and lines of association I encounter in my aimless reading aren’t overwrought, a superstitious misunderstanding of the nature of statistics or the self-referential character of the historical record and the tropes of Western culture. Was the deaf-mute soldier of the latter story the same one who, as a child 18 years prior, had sparked Eleanor Davies prophetic lifepath? Was the passage on Lichfield a magic invitation from a Mount Shasta new age bookstore to go further into the mythos of the English Midlands?
Perhaps it all has something to do with Enclosure, the foundational sin of our modern period, the early beginnings of a colonial project that would conflate everywhere extraction and theft with innovation and courage, and freedom with domination. Clare: “Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide. But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight.” But what if there were another freedom, the kind that comes from being impacted, moved. What were all these encounters with the dead? Are we living in a field of corpses… or is Lich-Field at last a feudal myth?
When I get lost in the archive, all I feel is life. And networks.
Recently, a gang of us was working through the values statement for our new project out here in Portland, PDX DAO. Our hope with PDX DAO is to reflect in our actions and work not just our own incidental values, but the values of the crypto space, the fundamental assumptions of (for example) the social organism that is Ethereum, which have managed to somehow seem anti-partisan while still making a powerful intervention into the political. That intervention, a friend and I thought, was about sovereignty, autonomy - freedom. We proposed some combination of the three as a core value. Inevitably, the group pushed back, and I couldn’t help but agree- somehow, the term is tainted, spoiled (apparently this isn’t new, given Clare’s comments almost two centuries ago).
Regarding this two faced term, like Michell’s Mars, we might ask (if you’ll let me indulge in the synchrony a little more): is the egregore freedom a god of war, or a god of fertility? Was ‘dumb Dymoke’s’ shot a bestowal of legitimacy from the heavens, a scarce leakage of a precious sovereignty that is primarily withdrawn, hidden - that must be claimed by violence and defended jealously? Or was it a networked feature of a vast plane of forces, rhythmic with differential relation, entanglements that reach through into little sovereignties everywhere? Is the earth fertile, robust with legitimacy?
Perhaps the divinity of freedom correlates to one’s openness in this profusion. Freedom asks, what are the networks, across enclosures, across decades, that I can bring to bear to find my sovereignty, my singularity, my path? Why would I look to the heavens when there’s so much Right already, in the open fields, the mischievous spark of an orphan’s words, the shelf of a bookstore at Mt Shasta, the lead of a roof at Lichfield?
The fundamental thesis of the new crypto economy is that legitimacy, like all kinds of power, is a network effect, abundant wherever there is freedom, and scarce only in the confused logic of coercion and capture. Public protocols break the spell of this scarcity, offering networks of legitimacy built in an atmosphere of freedom that provide resources and nourishment for more networks of legitimacy, more experiments to freely opt in to, to protect and amplify everyone’s chance path. Sovereignty spoken in ‘a voice like the sound of a multitude’.
Freedom is relational, I repeat, networked; not a claim or a Right given, but the patient negotiation that’s discovered, teased out, and the savage, singular expressivity that comes in those moments of trust. It’s a rebuttal to the atmosphere of fear and vulnerability that extractive, monopolistic systems, the nation-states and the supercorporations, promote and depend on. No transcendent eye: ecstatic pareidolia in non-coercive process. Freedom is care, non-possession: fare thee well, we’ll meet again. In the dense, synchronous pages of being, the great entangled mystery-network, rage quit is a synthesis.
07.04.2023
Collect this post on Mirror.