Nomad Codes

artifact, and the object of a million banalities. What Erik does is draw out a whole esoteric history that informs the record, both in its production and reception, tracking the way that revolutionary energies are both displaced onto and secretly resting in an object of everyday life. What distinguishes Erik’s work from the mass of pop-cultural meditations and academic cultural studies that have blossomed since the 1980s is his affirmation of religious or spiritual energies as valid aspects of this everyday world. But it’s a critical spirituality that Erik affirms, equally skeptical of postmodern irony, dogmatic materialism, and born-again fervor, even as it remains open to the world as he finds it.
    There is a tradition here that Erik is a part of, a tradition of religious dissent—independent, non-conformist, often hedonistic in orientation. Its most recent form is the great revelations of the 1960s, whose echoes and ripples were still everywhere in Erik’s 1970s SoCal childhood. From there, we go back to the older, weirder America, the DIY transcendentalists and Great Awakeners who persist in the margins and roominghouses of the imagination, back to the vast history of vanquished seekers, the Ranters and other heretics of the English Revolution who crossed the Atlantic, the Albigensians and Anabaptists and other dissenters from Christian orthodoxy who haunt European history, right back to the Gnostic sects of the Biblical era, trying to square Jesus with Epicurus and the Upanishads, and beyond that to the murky characters lurking at the very beginning of what is called history, who refused to get down with the priests of the Rig Veda or the founders of the state of Uruk. And that’s just in the Western lineage, which is only one small part of the history of what has gone on on this planet. A lot of unfinished business ... which is why it persists and returns today.
    Second definition of the gnostic situation: a flash of illumination that allows you to escape. But how do you do that? Erik’s interests are a catalog of the spaces and practices by which contemporary people have tried to trigger the flash that allows escape. They include: yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and other Asian religious traditions; hermeticism, Neopaganism, and other Western esoteric traditions; psychedelics, of both the old (LSD, shrooms) and new (DMT and MDMA) diaspora; theory, notably of the Deleuze and Guattari lineage, but including skirmishes with Žižek and anarcho-mystic Hakim Bey; pop- and subcultural artifacts including zines, comix, fandoms; festival/party/pilgrimage scenes such as the Rainbow Gathering, the global outlaw rave scene that originated in Goa, and Burning Man, of which Erik is the most celebrated chronicler; the personal computer and the Internet, and the proliferation of cultural forms around them, including MUDs and MOOs; most of the interesting music scenes of the last twenty years, from the Mekons’ post-punk through the ’90s alt diaspora, psy-trance and other electronic sounds to the freak folk scene and enduring tricksters such as the Sun City Girls.
    Did anybody actually escape through any of these means and forms? That’s a secret—you have to find out for yourself! But what makes Erik a writer in the heroic sense of the word is his ability to get on the bus and take the ride without a whole lot of delusions or Romanticism about achieved utopias. The problem of “failed transcendence” is not high on Erik’s list of priorities, and he can put up with all manner of goofy shtick if the result is a generous and progressive social situation—as in the case of Burning Man, for example. There’s a whole vocabulary of enjoyment that comes with this: “fun” of course, but also the “juicy,” the “tasty” and the “yummy”—moments where righteous vision is attained, usually through some kind of protocol or practice.

    Erik’s work has an ambiguous relationship to the world of academia. A graduate of Yale during the heyday of literary theory, he gravitated instead towards a tai chi teacher he would visit after his Hegel and Nietzsche seminar who said to him: “PhDs don’t impress me. People who’ve confronted the void impress me!” The category of “the impressive” is a puzzling one to me—after all, there is no one to impress but the gods in the zones where anything that really matters happens—but it’s an important one in Erik’s lexicon, both in terms of what he’s attracted to and