Nomad Codes

second-century Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy in an attempt to solve some dizzying problems in data sets and computational linguistics. Socially, Daybreak covered all the fronts: he huffed it over the Bay Bridge for Students for a Democratic Society actions, designed psychedelic light shows for the Pranksters, and cranked out idiosyncratic code with the hackers at the Stanford AI Lab. In 1968, Daybreak either dropped out or was expelled. On July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the man left for Asia.
    It’s here that Daybreak’s tale becomes pretty ludicrous. In the manuscript, he claims to have somehow eluded the Soviet authorities and entered East Turkestan. There, in the savage gullies of the Karakorum Mountains, a few hundred kilometers southwest of the Taklamakan Desert, on the southern fork of the ancient Silk Road, he “discovered” an unknown and isolated people—the ngHolos. Though the lay ngHolos had settled down into a sedentary life of subsistence farming, weaving, and hash-growing, the community’s religious order of monks and nuns, known as the Virtuous Ones, remained nomadic. The Virtuous Ones wandered on foot or horseback through the “Folds:” the high passes, hidden valleys, and endless plateaus of their severe mountain surroundings. But Daybreak’s descriptions also make it clear that for the Virtuous Ones, this bleak physical environment “unfolded” into an abstract, visionary realm, a constantly shifting locus of cosmic memory and oracular landscapes haunted by demons, “alien gods,” and insectoid Buddhas. Daybreak repeatedly cites one of the ngHolo’s countless slogans: Here your eye does not follow the warp of the land. Here you follow the warp of your own eye.
    To judge from his tone, Daybreak does not seem to have gone insane or sunk into the mire of narcotic psychosis. I choose to read his text as I read Castaneda, with a mind not particularly concerned with anthropological accuracy I wouldn’t really be able to judge anyway. In any case, from the fragments I’ve been able to decipher, the Virtuous Ones—or “Virtuals,” as Daybreak sometimes calls them—are fascinating. Their radically eclectic and syncretic religious philosophy juggles elements from the various faiths that passed along the Silk Road—gnostic Manichaeism, Mahayana Buddhism, Mongolian shamanism, Catholicism, heretical Sufism, Taoism—without trying to tie them up into one grand system. As Daybreak writes, “The path is a network of paths.”
    Even more fascinating than the ngHolo’s religious collages are their spiritual machines. In the early seventeenth century, a Jesuit named Francis Lumière brought the first clock to the region. Daybreak writes, “Having long since assimilated whatever Christian motifs that compelled them, the ngHolos found the man’s uncompromising theology obnoxious and his clothes in poor taste. But they loved his machine.” The lay community put great store in their bronze prayer wheels, whose constant revolution supposedly generated the compassionate energy that kept dreams alive and that cloaked the Virtuous Ones from wild animals and enemies during their mystic peregrinations. Inspired by Lumière’s device and ngHolo beliefs about the cosmic implications of metallurgy, a Virtual nun named Aieda made the spiritual link between metals and mechanics. Along with the somewhat baffled Jesuit, she set about applying the clock’s mechanism to the ngHolo prayer wheels. Their subsequent machine not only relieved the peasants of the daily chore of spinning the wheels, but it led within decades to a number of inventions, including irrigation pumps, automated pottery wheels, and a programmable loom used to weave the mystical patterns of the ngHolo’s rugs (apparently, they never bothered making more clocks). Aieda believed that the punched cards used to program the looms—an incomplete Italian Tarocco (tarot) deck still venerated today—allowed the ngHolos to communicate with the “Metal-mind,” the spiritual consciousness that lay asleep in all metals and was awakened through metallurgy.
    After a yearlong nomadic meditation, during which she never stopped walking, Aieda “received” the knowledge of how to program open-ended and unpredictable combinatory sequences into the mechanical looms. The spontaneous patterns that appeared on subsequent rugs were read as auguries from the Metal-mind. Despite a tradition of symmetrical mandalic forms, the ngHolo rug