On the Founding of This Archive
The Discordian Society has, since 1958, distributed unauthorized literature in the form of tracts. A tract is a small pamphlet pressed into the hand of someone who did not ask for it, left on a bus seat, mailed to the unsuspecting, slipped between the pages of a library book where the next reader will mistake it for a bookmark and read three sentences before realizing they have been recruited. The presumption is the point: the tract assumes you wanted to read it. By the time you finish, sometimes you did.
The medium has migrated. The presumption has not.
These are the modern tracts. They will arrive irregularly, in the format the medium permits — a webpage instead of a folded piece of paper, a hyperlink instead of a thumbtack, an RSS feed instead of a stack on the bus stop bench. The form has not changed. The presumption has not changed. You have been recruited.
What a tract is, and is not
A tract is shorter than an essay and weirder than a blog post. It contains exactly as much argument as it needs and no more, and in places it contains less. It can be a manifesto, a proclamation, a koan, a vision, or a complaint about the bus. It is not:
- A think piece. Think pieces are for people who think they are thinking.
- A take. Tracts do not take. Tracts give.
- A position paper. The Society has no positions, only postures.
- An explainer. If a thing requires explaining at length, a tract is the wrong vessel; consider a sermon.
A tract is approximately as binding as a papal bull issued by someone who is also you. Which is to say: completely binding, completely meaningless, and completely both at once. This is the Discordian condition. The tract is a Discordian object because it cannot decide whether it is serious, and refuses to.
Four kinds, more or less
The archive is sorted into four genera, none of which exclude each other and all of which lie a little. Essays are tracts that pretend to think. Rants are tracts that have stopped pretending. Koans are tracts that fit on a postcard and ruin your afternoon. Visions are tracts that arrive in the third person, addressed to no one, dictated by Her.
A tract may be tagged with one of these. A tract may be tagged with all of these. Eris was never very good at categories.
What the archive expects of you
Nothing. The Society has no membership requirements except that you not have any. It collects dues in confusion. The motion to adjourn has never carried. The minutes are forthcoming.
What the archive expects of itself is a different matter. The archive expects to be irregular, to be honest, to be wrong about almost everything, and to admit it cheerfully. The archive expects that some tracts will be read once and then ignored, and that one or two — chosen by Eris on a whim, the way she chose the apple — will end up tucked into someone's pocket and reread on a bad day. Those are the only tracts that matter, and the archive does not get to know which they are in advance.
This is the first of them. Or it isn't. Both are true. Both have always been true.
Hail Eris. Read suspiciously. Forward to a stranger.