The
energy is very real which, in the process of working itself out, created
religion as a trace. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion
turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with
rules and boundaries. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or
redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the
map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it
harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are
talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance.
A
shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to
make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We
live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. We call
this map the real and see the other side as somehow surreal, as a dream
sometimes collective and sometimes private. We think of inside information
about everything we have made real by mapping as being hidden like ciphered messages
or Easter eggs in these dreams. Insider trading is what most people have in
mind if they pay rapt attention to some mad woman, suspected of hiding real
secrets worth knowing inside a word salad of oblique
allusion that never says but only suggests, making indirect reference to things
always at least one link away on a chain of signifiers leading to something
that is real because it has value inside the real. They are listening to a
senile pirate muttering about a half-remembered map to real treasure more lost
than hidden in ruined chains of tangled reference.
The
shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She
leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers. Religion provided the structural
model for every later type of human collaborative involving enough people to
make strong personal ties between everyone involved impossible. The shaman is
always the mad woman hidden in the attic of every trace of spent energy, that
is to say, of every organization. She remembers where all the wealth hoarded
and even occasionally nurtured within
the structure came from. She knows the actual un-retouched or photoshopped
behind the creation myth. She is an embarrassment, a resource and a threat. She
is the secret weapon and the Achilles heel. The treasure was not made tinkering
in a garage. It was born illegitimate in a flash of passion gift-wrapping an
insight into the nature of the game. Sometimes the game is poker and the stakes
of the game are the right to play law-giver but only the way a child plays
enraptured at being king, wishing his magic to be real for now, for as long as
free play continues, but then gone for good and quickly forgotten. It is not
good to leave the world littered with the dry bones of dead play. Better to write the
rules of a game yet to be by playing, just playing beyond and outside any game
in the place where games wait with endless patience to be born and play dies in
the very first moment the rules are spoken.
