Nomad Codes

Images of established religion and canonical texts acquire a kind of mutability, a tendency to drift , to reflect the subjectivities of the (often anonymous) visionaries who sift through fragments in order to produce more fragments ... The world of apocrypha is a world of books made real ... The apocryphal imagination turns “Tibet” or “Egypt” into an amulet or mantram with which to unlock an “other world,” most real in books and dreams and dreams of books.
    Wilson is more than willing to navigate this no man’s land, but unlike many fringe thinkers, revisionists and spiritual autodidacts, he never lapses into kook logic or shallow rants. For an anarchist, he has a remarkably traditional respect for rigor and cautious argument, as well as a great love for the dusty bibliographies and arcane disputes of classic scholarship. Still, he hates the academic world, and thanks God that a trickle of family money keeps him “independently poor.” This marginality grants him little status, for as he points out, “in America, the concept of an independent scholar is a null set.” This is a shame, not only because Wilson’s one of the few Americans writing about Islamic culture for a popular (or at least hipster) audience, but because his essays and lectures argue for the ultimate unity of imagination and intellectual investigation. Despite all his footnotes, Wilson is ultimately less interested in historicity than what he calls “poetic facts,” insurrectionary images that puncture history. And he’s more than willing to inhale on the opium smoke of exoticism to conjure them up.
    Sacred Drift picks up the thread from his earlier collection Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy , which remains in many ways a more scandalous book. Along with discussions of Javanese shadow-puppets and the Assassins (the heretical order led by Hassan-i Sabbah, whose dictum “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” was famously imported by William Burroughs), Scandal includes material that even today’s rather jaded audience would find heretical. Besides praising the mystical use of hashish (and including a recipe for the cannabis brew bhang ), the essay “The Imaginal Game” offers a sympathetic portrayal of “sacred pedophilia,” the practice of staring at beautiful boys interpreted as a kind of imaginal yoga.
    Sacred Drift wanders through similarly marginal territory, from Islamic Satanists to some playful Rumi translations to a profound discussion of the problems of sexuality and authority in modern Sufism. But the heart of the book is the title essay, which uncovers the “nomadosophy” of heretical Islam via Situationism, Islamic travel narratives, and the delightful figures of the flying carpet and of Kzehr, the Green Man of the Koran. The spirit of this wonderful mosaic is best summed up by a line of Rumi that precedes the essay: “Journey forth from your own self / to God’s Self—voyage without end.”
    “I admit to being a romantic,” Wilson tells me as he lights up a Camel straight in his messy, funky apartment in Alphabet City. I had asked him about Said’s famous critique of Orientalism. “Romanticism is definitely part of the problem he’s identifying, and Orientalism in general does lead to fantasy. But fantasy—reveries, childhood dreams, fancies and magical images—is not entirely to be despised.” It was by becoming infatuated with such exotic fantasies that Wilson first began his relationship to Islam—which is itself a perfect anticipation of the imaginative spiritual erotics he later found in Sufi poetry, in which the mundane self is annihilated through a radical romantic infatuation with the Other, the “Beloved.”

    To describe his anti-colonialist embrace of the East, Wilson prefers the term orientalismo —an echo of the tropicalismo that freaked-out Brazilian intellectuals used to describe their mad cannibalism of First World culture in the late ’60s. For him, the trick is not to shackle the nomadic imagination but to refuse “gaping at cultures or trying to appropriate their spiritual sap without paying any karmic dues.” With his translations of Sufi poetry, collected in The Drunken Universe and elsewhere, Wilson gets around the problem of appropriation by cotranslating with native Persian speakers.
    Wilson derives his romantic image of cross-pollinating cultural exchange from the syncretisms, mutual poachings, and heretical countercultures that litter the history of religions.