Nomad Codes

his own stance. I take it to refer to the importance of the gift economy to him, the generosity of attainment which serves as a vehicle of friendship, prestige, and community. It recognizes the authority of practice over theory, event over system, action over word—with the twist that, as with all great writers, he still is drawn to write about this stuff!
    Erik moved back to California in 1995 and has become a cultural archeologist of the region, uncovering scenes and characters including the alternative film and visual arts worlds of LA and San Francisco, figures like Wallace Berman and Jordan Belson, and the locations and histories described in his third book, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape . Perhaps Erik’s solution to the gnostic dilemma—which, as scholars such as Hans Jonas have noted, is one of existential homelessness—is to explore the groundless ground of what is called home, which for him means the state of California, and the various attempts to found intentional communities there, and to attain realization.
    The title of this foreword is taken from a song on Sonic Youth’s remarkable record Daydream Nation , which came out around the time that I first met Erik. This record, which both of us love or have loved, is always associated in my mind with him. The sense on that record of urgency struggling to make itself known in the face of an overwhelmingly deep, sluggish trance, a trance which the band is all too familiar with, reminds me of Erik’s work, as do the enormous surges of euphoric clarity, which do break through that trance, again and again.

PREFACE

    Two insights lay in wait for me when Yeti graciously asked me to compile this collection. As I began combing through twenty years of reviews, essays, articles, fantasies, and profiles, I realized, first off, that reading most of that stuff makes me woozy. This will not do was a constant refrain. So I cherry-picked shorter and snappier pieces whose prose crackled and sang regardless of the topic, which was, as often as not, the (semi-) popular music of the day. When Marcus Boon took a look at my initial selection, he complained bluntly that a lot of the pieces seemed dated and slight. He argued that it was my more substantial if sometimes less razzle-dazzle essays that were most worthy of being preserved in cellulose. He was right.
    Once I returned to the sifting process with this in mind, the second realization came to me: that a single concern threaded its way through the bulk of my eclectic scribblings, or rather that a single terrain kept appearing between the lines of whatever subjects and genres I was exploring. Call it occulture, or, as I have here, modern esoterica. It’s a hazy no-man’s-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience, whether psychedelic, or yogic, or technological. It is dodgy terrain to explore; I like to think that it calls for the intrepid adventurer to shed any territorial claims and go nomad.
    Of course, even nomads come from somewhere. My desire to write about and engage with spiritual culture, both my own and that of others, was sparked during my Southern California stoner youth and shaped in particular by the zeitgeist of early- and mid-nineties America, when I lived in Brooklyn and then in San Francisco and wrote like a maniac. It was a time of bright passages and exuberant mutation, of margins colliding and thickening into skeins of novelty. The cut ’n’ scratch of hip-hop gave us all permission to enact and celebrate the mix—the miscegenation of machines and memes, of highbrow and low-end, of sacred and profane. The spread of rave culture, ecstasy, and faceless electronic music also helped spur a renaissance in psychedelia, a florescence best articulated by the mushroom bard Terence McKenna. Within spiritual culture, the New Age excesses of the 1980s were outflanked by more scintillating moves, including the wonderful run of Gnosis magazine, the infectious viruses of a revivified American Buddhism, and the sort of ritual anarchy that marked Burning Man and other feral temporary autonomous zones. At the same time—and not coincidentally—the half-hallucinated cyberspace booted up by networked personal computers hosted a feverish eruption of experiments, debates, and virtualreality dreams that, however naive, carved out a genuine space for the