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01/16/2004 Entry: "Lux Lucre (Kerry Pearson) 1963 - 2004"

Lux Lucre (Kerry Pearson) 1963 - 2004

The picture of himself he loved is here on L. Neil Smith's site "The Libertarian Enterprise" (Kerry is in the middle). An older picture of him (age 33) as Deputy Leader of the Libertarian Party of British Columbia is here on the site of the Vancouver Island Libertarian Association, hosted by libertarian Spinnaker Systems.




The above picture shows a stamp Kerry designed 14 years ago (it was produced by Anna Banana, Queen of/on Bananaland's "International Art Post" at Banana Productions; you can go bananas here) and is, as announced on my main site (see my "CB's notewok" for the short obituary or its permanent link), the special and very good reason why this long obituary appears on this specialized panarchist site of mine, and not on the main, more general one.

A very good reason indeed. As you may know, we panarchists or exterritorialists (or any of the other names for it) have not yet become mainstream, in spite of a recent noticeable increase of references to it on the Web and elsewhere. When I asked John Zube these days whether he could name any persons that presently are somehow active in a continuous way to promote panarchism, not like some who promote only one or two elements of it (like monetary freedom for instance), he wrote: "Active promoters of panarchism? I know of none but us poor three! [CB: meaning John Zube, Gian Piero de Bellis and myself] Not even 12 'Apostles' as yet!!! But that could also be an excellent publicity option:'Become one of the first apostles or pioneers for panarchism and full monetary freedom! Full "religious" freedom in this sphere - can change the world very much for the better.' In the future you might then be counted among those justly famous. However, here not only the votes of the living count but the voices of the dead have still a very significant weight, just like the voices of many long dead philosophers for philosophy and scientists for science and economists
for the science of economics. And these voices can be mobilized or made accessible even by a handful of people, using modern facilities. The time is more than ripe for the spread of such ideas."


And here comes in Kerry, who once wrote to me "Hey, you are obviously familiar with John Zube and Panarchy, great!". We now have Four Apostles. A 33.33 % increase! Therefore

let us all get a and hoist a drink to Kerry's spirit and always remember him with the strong memory of an. *"reinbeer" and "eleplant" are "animelds" contributed by Kerry and drawn by Alison Frane. She just wrote to me the following: "Yes, you may definitely use those illustrations. I am (right now) going over the massive list of suggestions from readers to decide what to draw next, and it saddens me again to read his name hand scribbled into my notes with his contributions. The odd thing is, I may yet be using more of his suggestions in the future, so he may have some Animelds 'published' posthumously. Ah well, we'll all remember him (what we knew of him) when we see his name as it appears again every so often on my pages, I suppose. His ideas were good, and still hold much promise, so I'm sure I will be using more of them. By the way, I'd hardly count myself among his 'inner circle of friends' (see below) we knew him as a big fan of our (Looney Labs) games, and he was very active in our e-mail list community, but I don't know whether we ever actually met him in person. /humorous aside:/ I say 'what we knew of him' because I'll admit it was not until recent events that I realized '/Kerry Pearson' meant 'aka Kerry Pearson'. I'd been thinking all this time that he was two people! On all our lists, he was just Lux Lucre, and rarely used his real name, but when he suggested Animelds, he threw it in, I guess. For accuracy's sake, I'm changing the attributions to read 'Lux Lucre (Kerry Pearson)'. I, for one, will be less confused, although after his unfortunate demise, I'd be unlikely to forget the connection now. Thanks for your interest. Once again, you are welcomed to use them, and any others in connection with Lux. Actually, I think there's one going up this week."

I myself never met Kerry in person either, we were cyber acquaintances. Our all too short cooperation started a bit more than three months after I had fallen in love with his flash animation "The Philosophy of Liberty". I only have vague memories of having run into things by him several times on the Web before that date, and if I have any records of this, they are either jailed in a damaged hard disk I yet cannot afford to bail them out of, or hidden somewhere else where I cannot find them quickly enough. So I will start with that falling in love.


Cliff Walker had drawn my attention to the flash animation on December 18, 2002, and when, a month later, I had thanked him for this, he wrote: "Thanks for the response regarding the Flash I recommended. Nobody else remarked about it, and I was not very happy about that: This thing is too good, it is too important!"

Then on April 28 last year I wrote to Ken and Kerry (the text of the animation being from the prologue of Ken Schoolland's famous The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible) to get the authorization to put the animation in several languages onto my portal site, meaning, running there, not just a link. I expressed my admiration in the following words: "Your 'The Philosophy of Liberty' is something so unique, so great, so important, so fundamental, of such universal value that I can hardly express my admiration for this achievement. When I watch it (and listen to it), it is almost like a religious happening."

This authorization was gladly given. Ken: "Yes, feel free to use the flash animation as you like." Kerry: "Christian, please feel free to use any of my flash work on your site! Ken and I want the word to spread out in all ways!" But then some difficulties started right away. While I had downloaded the animation still with the wonderful and so fitting music "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield, this had to be dropped as permission to use it was not given. And I was unwilling to put the animation on my site without music. I preferred to wait and offered to help find a solution with the music. And volunteered to do some translation work. We corresponded over this and about the various difficulties involved, also mine, which had a lot to to with financial problems hampering all I was eager to do, to which Kerry, when I once mentioned that my life was full of problems of all kind already, and that I hardly had enough money to survive, commented "Believe me, I know the feeling well!", while time passed.

I did not have enough time to thorougly deal with all I had planned, could not compose myself like in my younger years, lacking a piano and everything, and my contacts with the first among a list of musicians taken into consideration did not work out satisfactorily, artists often wanting to abstain from politics (except when it means pocketing taxpayers' money from government subsidies...): "Our philosophy at [...] is to be free - but free from any politics or religion, too." etc. ~ to which I had responded, among others: "[...] As for the ideas, you may call them 'political' in a sense, since anything is political, even ignoring politics. And I think that the ideas in the flash movie are very compatible with your slogan free music*free mind*free world, and above all they precisely want to get rid of not only party politics but the whole political system stealing our freedom. Artists appreciate freedom of course particularly, and they succeed in attaining it to a large degree for themselves by living in their own restricted circles, which the majority of people cannot do as easily. And if the less smart and gifted majority succumbs to or unwillingly and unwittingly supports totalitarianism, the artists and their fans will also be victims. Also, I have rarely met artists that did refuse subsidies from the beast (the state/the government). Historically they were mostly the supporters of all kind of regimes. So much for the independence from politics. Or religion. Just think of Johann Sebastian Bach."

Fortunately, in the meantime ISIL found a satisfactory solution for the music and I am still free to look for a better one. As for the translations, I only did one perfect revision of the German one of "The Atlanta Declaration", but when I sent it to Kerry and even shortly after "claimed" that it was not yet online, he told me that he couldn't, as he was in the process of moving his site to another server and had no access yet to the new one. Later he must have forgotten about it (it is still not online) for a simple reason that reminds me of my own situation: I just need to quote from one of our exchanges around that time: "Hi Kerry! How are you? ~ Hi Christian, not bad, too busy for my own good!"

As for the revision of the partly very bad German translation of "The Philosophy of Liberty", it so happened that I was not able to concentrate on it anymore and we arranged finally that Mario Knezovic would do it and I have a look at it when it is done. It's just done now and I am waiting to receive it.

Rereading all my correspondence with Kerry now, I got the slight or distinct, I dunno, feeling that since half a year he must have been in a different shape from before. He may have been disappointed by me, as he did not write anymore and never answered my latest letter to him, or my difficulties during that time may only have been a mirror of his and other people's difficulties everywhere. Trying to figure it out, I finally discovered one reason I feel guilty and so sad about. I myself had never answered his last letter to me, of June 27, and it must have been important to him. And it was important to me too, unfortunately. But the dumb thing was that it had slipped into my "Waiting Room" folder where I put messages that I cannot answer right away at moments when I receive just too many messages. There had been a moment like that then. And I later completely forgot about it. Having, among other things, inquired about those panarchy stamps he had made 13 years ago, he had sent me a picture of one (see above) and made me a very reasonable offer to buy them which I very much regret now to have missed. This actually had been and still is important to me, unfortunately. Such is life. Sometimes very difficult. And maybe more so for libertarians sometimes, under present circumstances. He was a rare man in many ways. And how many will you meet so far who are promoting panarchy? You can be sure that I will not forget him. I am very sad.


Isn't all that real sad, considering that he had written me "I look forward to increased cooporation between us, Christian!" and signed "PIOT! Kerry"?! Please note the use of John Zube's close and ceterum censeo, the acronym of the motto on Kerry's stamp!

As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
—WILLIAM JAMES

The electronic postman for Kerry will not ring my doorbell anymore...

Christian


PS: Some reactions I got in the mail:

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