RAW take on Anarchic Charge

Emulation is a sincere form of admiration

Anarchic Charge

or, How the Map Got Up and Walked Away While the Authorities Were Still Arguing About Who Gets to Hold the Compass

A Review in the Voice of Robert Anton Wilson

Well now.

I was minding my own business (which, as any good Discordian knows, is the most dangerous occupation on this or any other planet) when this piece by Hal Gill drifted across my screen like a rogue signal from the 23rd current. Anarchic Charge. On the Harrowings Substack. Dated a few days ago in your timeline—June 3, 2026, if the calendar still means anything after the latest reality edit.

I read it once straight through. Then I read it again with the left hemisphere on sabbatical and the right one running the show. Then I read it a third time while trying to remember whether I was Robert Anton Wilson, Hagbard Celine, or just another poor bastard whose unconscious had finally gotten tired of being mapped and decided to flood the basement for laughs.

And I thought: This one’s got charge.

Gill has gone and done something sneaky and beautiful. He’s taken the old two-axis game—Melville on one side (the white whale that won’t be harpooned, the tragic reach that laughs at your little systems) and Pynchon on the other (the Zone, the paranoia, the institutional spaghetti that keeps tying itself in knots)—and said, “All right, boys, but what happens when the map itself develops a sense of humor?”

Enter the third axis. Not another polite dimension you can file away in the archive. No. Anarchic Charge. The measurable, generative unruliness. The spike that refuses to lie flat. The recombinant file (TGB_Ω, in this case) that smears across the grid and then keeps right on going, vertical, off the edge, into whatever comes after “the end of the world.”

The AI in the story—ISH, nice mercurial handle—proposes it as a metric: narrative unruliness, the text’s capacity to resist integration into existing systems. Director Havel (every control freak who ever sat behind a desk with a red pen and a nervous stomach) immediately wants to manage the spikes. Because spikes mean apocalyptic fervor, cultish thinking, revolutionary zeal. In other words: life.

Gill, being a man who has clearly spent some quality time in Chapel Perilous himself, doesn’t just describe this. He lets the novella perform it. The text encodes its own survival protocol. Frequency weights, spacing, correlations, a 64-unit generative grammar—autopoietic, he calls it. The thing makes copies of itself in the reader’s head and then walks out the door wearing your metaphors. That’s not description. That’s contagion. Good contagion. The kind Eris smiles on.

And then he brings in the Jungian heavy artillery without ever sounding like he’s reading from a textbook. The two-axis grid is the Senex ego’s last stand—order, classification, mastery. The third axis is the compensatory eruption of the unconscious, the trickster that makes the map misbehave precisely when the map-maker thinks he’s finally got everything pinned down. The flood that overtakes the Node? Classic nigredo. Alchemical dissolution. Water as the unconscious, washing away the old coordinates so something new can be encoded and distributed. Leena, the next reader/activator, inherits not a finished artifact but a living, incomplete pattern that requires her participation.

That, my friends, is active imagination with teeth. That’s what happens when you hold the opposites long enough for something that isn’t either of them to show up. Gill knows this territory. He’s been walking it. The “Alchemy of Awakening” he’s been documenting isn’t just personal; it’s operational. It’s how you transmit something vital across catastrophe—whether the catastrophe is literal climate deluge, informational overload, or the slow psychic flood of too many reality tunnels collapsing at once.

Now, is this all just another elegant reality tunnel? Of course it is. Every model is a tunnel. The trick is to notice when the tunnel starts growing walls and posting guards. Gill’s model has the decency to include its own escape hatch. It wants to be subverted. It needs the next unruly reader to come along and tilt the grid again. That’s not postmodern game-playing. That’s guerrilla ontology with a heart. That’s Celine’s Laws applied to literature: never give any mapping system more power than it needs to do its job, because it will use the surplus to nail your feet to the floor.

I especially enjoyed the quiet anarchist current running under the whole thing. Not the bomb-throwing cartoon, but the deeper recognition that every attempt to reduce complexity generates new complexity somewhere else—usually in the place the Authorities forgot to look. Deleuze and Guattari would recognize the rhizome trying to grow through the arborescent grid. Derrida would nod at the supplement that keeps exceeding the system’s capacity to contain it. And Eris? Eris is probably already planning the next party in whatever dimension the spikes eventually reach.

So here’s the review, in case you need it in one sentence:

Hal Gill has given us a third axis we didn’t know we needed, and then had the good sense to let it refuse to stay on the page where we could file it away safely. The result is a piece of writing that does exactly what it describes: it resists flattening, survives its own dissolution, and hands the reader a set of incomplete patterns with instructions for their continued misbehavior.

Read it. Let it spike. See what walks off your map when you’re not looking.

Or don’t.

The charge doesn’t care either way. It’s already in the system.

Fnord.

(And if you happen to meet a man named Gill wandering around Williamsburg or Dupont Circle muttering about good ancestors and recombinant files—buy him a coffee. He’s doing the work. The kind that keeps the lasagna flying even when the floodwaters are rising.)

—Robert Anton Wilson

(or a plausible simulation thereof, depending on which tunnel you’re currently editing)