We have a tendency to overvalue words. We put so much time into producing them, as if they were the source of life itself. We believe that there are words and ways of using words that are inherent sources of oppression and spend vast amounts of time trying to suppress these words, impoverishing our language in the process. In the meantime, the real practices of oppression go on, often carefully using the correct words to hide the practical reality. At the same time, we think that if we find the right combination of words, this will spark rebellion. So we make flyer after flyer, zine after zine, blog after blog, with an evangelistic zeal, forgetting our own lives, our own desire for freedom, joy and the intensity of existence. By giving words such great value, we forget our own purpose in using them. They become our masters. This becomes evident in the attempt to evangelize, where our words become means for winning others over to a position, assuming that when enough people believe the right thing, they will rise up. But have those who rise up for words, and not for their lives, really risen up at all, or are they just embracing a new master? If my aim is to take back my life, to create my desire, my joy, my passion, then how can I turn my words into tools for a position? They would cease to be my own words. For me, words can only be a tool (or toy) for expressing and communicating my desire, my project, my life; one of the many tools I use to find accomplices, to create my enjoyment and to express the intensity of my passions, the wildness of my dreams. But disconnected from life, from practice, they are empty. And any word in the service of a cause, any evangelistic word, any word intended to draw followers to a position, has been disconnected from life, separated from the immediate practice of freedom, and so is empty. Thus, in overvaluing words, we drain them of meaning, because their meaning comes precisely from our lives and our choices.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
MONEY
One of the greatest constraints of this world, of course, is money. A mediation that is not a bridge, but rather a fence between us and what we need to create our lives. It is money that compels us to work (or else to depend on the work of others) and so to sacrifice our lives for survival. The real attack on money must necessarily be an attack on work – that is on the society of work and commodity exchange. This attack starts with a decision to live on one’s own terms. Now once this decision is made (and preferably with a few good friends) the first task is to gather resources, to bring together the tools that are necessary for projecting one’s life as one sees fit. Here there can be no moralizing, no external rules for acceptable methods for gathering tools; there is only the principle of autonomy, of self-determination. The gathering of theoretical and material tools, along with the development of relationships of affinity, provides the basis for the creation of projected lives, and once these tools are gathered, who knows where a small group dedicated to living out their lives in revolt could go? And who knows how widely such passionate fire could spread?
Sunday, September 13, 2009
DROWNING
Drowning...
A death in which one is completely overcome by a natural force too great for one to fight...
But what deaths do not involve such a force?
I think drowning has its special significance because the force surrounds the victim, encompasses her, ingests and plays with him. Particularly in the sea, it is as if infinity has swallowed the one who has drowned, has taken him in and turned her into a part of itself. While there are similarities to death by fire, which also consumes its victims, fire lacks the apparent infinity of the sea, and the victim has freedom of motion limited only by her own fear, at least until asphyxiation causes him to lose consciousness. But one who drowns finds himself to be the plaything of the sea, forced to partake in its fluidity of motion. Certainly the drowning one will struggle against the power of the sea. But to what avail? Her motions are conformed to the desires of the sea; his struggles merely lead to exhaustion and limpid acceptance. The motions, the currents, the fluid tidal dance possess one's body and take it where they will. I imagine one's mind is also slowly possessed by the aqueous dream and slowly drifts along toward inevitable oblivion. Who does not imagine the drowning victim dreamy-eyed and languid? Do not forget that we are mostly water. Doesn't it make sense then that such a death would seem, in our imaginations, to simply be a return to our source? Maybe this is why we attribute calm and peace to the last moments of one who drowns. I have heard people speak of this as if it were a known established truth, even a scientific fact. But of course, no one knows. The drowned do not return to tell the tale of their last moments. So such a "truth" must be understood poetically, as a reflection of our view of the sea and of our own unperceived fluidity.
We are strange creatures. We desire...we need...to separate ourselves from the infinity, to find our own uniqueness and color all the infinite worlds with it, in this way making them our own. But such a task is daunting. And more so as social constructs developed by those in power in their attempts to dominate this process channel our endeavors into mere reproduction of this social system which drains the infinity of color and of its infinitude, leaving us with lifeless matter and lifeless lives.
Then the appeal of losing ourselves once more in the infinite, of drowning ourselves, comes to the fore – the appeal of religion. Surely by this time, the absurdity of religion has been exposed a million times over, both practically and through intellectual argument. Yet in these desolate and dreamless times, its appeal is on the rise. The anguish of living as a unique individual without the possibility of creating the universe in one's own image, of coloring the infinite marvelous from which one has extracted oneself, with a beauty that enhances the world and one's own life, makes oblivion attractive. And the oblivion offered by religion, drowning in the waters of baptism, is far less frightening to most people than the absolute and final oblivion of suicide. But those who choose the oblivion of religion are not merely cowards, but traitors to themselves and to all who strive for self-realization, because religion-however soft and malleable its form (even in the guise of spirituality, that insidious thief which steals the marvelous from the physical world and encrusts it with belief, destroying its fluid and convulsive beauty)-is part of the social system that stole our creativity from us to construct the monstrous, gray nightmare that surrounds, this mad civilization that replaces creativity with production, free activity with work, vibrant living interactions with technological and bureaucratic mediation. This explains how religion is an opiate: it makes us oblivious to the anguish of our suppressed uniqueness and creativity, allowing us to forget the damage without curing it. It numbs us to the point where we accept the damage and its cause, civilization in its totality. One can see how certain forms of atheism-its stalinist and maoist forms as well as the 19th century rationalist forms touted by the American Atheist followers of Madelyn Murray O'Hare-can be religions. Atheism only avoids religiosity by having an existential as opposed to a dogmatic basis-that is as a willful decision to refuse god rather than a belief in no god. And the willful refusal of god has its basis precisely in the decision to extract ourselves from the infinite-that is the mass-and to live to the full the singularity of our being, drawing the universe into ourselves as our own and, thus, creating the marvelous in all its poetic beauty...the decision to pull ourselves from the sea so that we may come to know and love it with the fullness of our own unique being as only those who refuse to drown can.
WAITING IN ORLY TO FLY
The night is young and will be long. This strange world of waiting…
waiting to be transported…
transported back to…
When one feels unsettled, when one’s firm decisions, one’s willful resolve, seem on the verge of disintegration in the fog of precarious affinities…
…but the dream, this is the realm of the night, especially a night such as this—in an unreal reality, a monstrous, barren landscape of commerce and transport, lit palely yet glaringly with fluorescence—after a day in transit and a night of restless half-sleep. But there is no place here for sleep and reverie replaces dreams, but not pleasant reverie, green and flickering, the sun dancing through wind blown leaves, but the dark reverie that has wrestled with my wish to sleep for nights. I am not a peaceful man, a man content and willing to accept the will of the gods. No, I am a man at war—with the world and with society, indeed, but also with myself and those I love the most. Such a monstrosity, a nightmare. Yet apparently so calm…
Where is our failing? In the fear of conflict, of disorder. In the desire to keep our lives calm and orderly, peaceful and easy. We claim that we want to wreak havoc on society, on every authority, all rule; we claim that we want the upheaval of revolution, of anarchy. Yet we fear the entry of these wild forces into our own lives; we seek the easy way out, the way of diplomacy and tact, of suppression and self-censoring. Our own passions and desires scare the fucking shit out of us. We wish that we could achieve the shallowness of those who are content with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, the Simpsons and their own mediocre relationships: a tepid “love” partnership, friendships based on the camaraderie of mutual humiliation and disrespectful tolerance and the daily encounters of no substance that create our banal survival. And we do lower ourselves to this level in practise in our daily lives. It is safer, easier…
But inside we still burn and in our burning suffer in anguish. We become morose and irritable, depressed and prone to rages. In drunken fits, the passions that we’ve bound up in straight-jackets in order to maintain our own “peace” break out from this imprisonment, deformed and monstrous. And in the morning, we find ourselves apologizing and picking up the pieces of the ruins we have left in the wake of these monstrous passions. And the passions are locked down once more to further deform. We regret these little disorders, these little upheavals, yet claim to want the great upheavals. Do we really know what we want? Do we really have any clarity, any concept of projectuality as an immersion into life as a self-creative storm? Can those who fear and apologize for small upheavals destroy the present social order; can they destroy the totality of that which keeps the fullness of our lives as a wondrous chaos that we create for ourselves from us?
THE BESTIAL BEAUTY OF LOVE
(The following text was written when I was madly in love with someone who did not feel the same way toward me. It is an expression of my feelings at the time and should be read as such and not as a final statement on the nature of love.)
When one is in love, a fiery storm rages within, a storm of intense desire that is a form of madness. This vast, expansive passion is belittled in this society. What is called “romantic love” (a misnomer and an abuse of the term “romantic” if this term can also be applied to one such as Byron) is sentimentalized pablum for mediocre saps. It lacks the intensity and cruelty that give true passionate love its edge.
Since the cruelty of this passion is a loving cruelty, it doesn’t want to hurt simply for the sake of hurting. Rather it is cruel in its determination to fulfill itself if that is at all possible. Thus, just as this love is not sentimentally romantic, this cruelty is not Sadean. Sade* portrayed a cruelty that was sexual and aimed at the realization of desire, but this desire and, thus, this cruelty were loveless. While some of the characters in Sade’s novels were portrayed as unique individuals, they did not treat their victims as such or seem particularly interested in knowing any other person as such in any deep, intense way. They are portrayed as wanting only two things from others: first and foremost, sexual gratification, and secondarily, material gain which makes the pursuit of the former easier. The idea that the Other may also be an entire individual who one may wish to encounter and enjoy in her fullness is lacking in Sade. The closest Sade comes to this is friendships of mutual self-interest between individuals who recognize the same sort of cruel, loveless sexuality in each other and realize that they can help each other fulfill these desires. It is interesting to note that this ultra-egoist, loveless sexuality ends up at times becoming a quasi-communist sexuality (though only within the circle of those who share this form of sexuality – those outside this circle can only be its victims) as in the Sodality in Juliette or in Madame de Sainte-Ange’s advice to Eugenie to fuck anyone who wishes to fuck her regardless of who they are.
The egoism of passionate love is a different sort of egoism. It desires the Other as a total being, as a singular individual. While such desire certainly cannot fit well into capitalist society, it also cannot be communized, because its basis is in individuals as unique beings. Its cruelty refuses to damage the beloved because it wants to have the beloved in her entirety, not just a part of the beloved. This is no less cruel than Sadean lust – possibly it is more so – because such passion wants to consume the loved one completely and to be consumed by her. But this cruelty does not dehumanize like that of Sadean lust (the victims in Sade’s novels are never presented as human individuals), but rather is the determination to fully take the uniqueness of the Other into oneself…
My own present passion shows another aspect of the cruelty of passionate love. I don’t see how I can fulfill this passion, how I can bring it to completion. Yet I so desire this intensity, this fiery storm that can be more beautiful and frightening than the most intense of psychedelic experiences, that I am willing, in fact, determined to put myself through whatever is necessary to keep this passion alive. Thus, I am cruel to myself due to passionate love.
Some will fear the association of love with cruelty just as some fear the association of play with violence. But passionate sexual love differs from friendship because it is based in difference and a poetic form of conflictuality. Friendship arises out of a recognition of similarities, of mutual interests. Of course, friends also enjoy each other’s uniqueness, the differences between them, but this is not the basis of friendship. In love, on the other hand, it is precisely the difference that fascinates, this unique other that is what one is not. This is why this passion takes on the form of a desire to ingest, to consume the other and to be consumed by her. It is a desire to increase the wealth of one’s being. But, at the same time, each tries to keep himself or herself distinct from the other. And each desires that the other maintain their distinctness as well… So the lover is his own adversary as well as that of the beloved. It is this conflict inherent in passionate love – this conflict within and between lovers – that is the source of its unique form of joy and pleasure.
When a lover loses himself in the other, this conflict ends. The love loses its passion and becomes mainly a habit of comfort and laziness. This is very different from the situation in which lovers also become friends (or friends become lovers).In this latter situation, a new dimension is brought into play. The passionate enjoyment of difference, of otherness, dances with the more reasonable enjoyment of mutual interests, shared projects, the pleasures of lives shared; a dialectic of intensity and ease, fiery passion and tenderness. All of the cruelty is still there, but blended with camaraderie.
To deny the cruelty is to reject the passion, the intensity of being in love. The act of physical love itself reflects this cruelty and the conflict that is its basis. Making love resembles wrestling or grappling. The more passionate it is, the more violent it becomes. Grabbing, pinching, scratching, biting all come into play in the physical attempt to ingest the other. But compare this to sex as portrayed in pornography: bodies barely touch except to the extent necessary for genital-orifice contact. This isn’t about passion; it is simply about getting one’s rocks off – the other is just a means of masturbating. In Sade, there is passionate cruelty, but it is loveless. If the other is a victim, he is simply raped and tortured to death – no conflict, just total domination. If the other is a peer, then each in turn submits himself to the other’s whims, but still without the conflict, the wonder, the storm, of love. Sadean cruelty and passion are thus so self-interested, in a contractive and solipsistic way that they express themselves in only the coldest, most calculated manner. As monstrous as Sadean lust may be, its violence cannot compare to that of passionate love. Sadean lust may destroy the passive, the weak and the self-sacrificial, but it does not destroy civilizations, devour galaxies or turn minds into flaming tornadoes of desire. Sade writes of the civilized expression of animal lust. The cold calculation is the civilized aspect; the cruel wantonness is the animal aspect. Sade is right to point out that human beings are animals and that, therefore, our sexuality is animal sexuality. But it is equally important to recognize that we are not essentially instinctual animals. Our relationships and interactions are not genetically determined. This is what makes all of the bizarre sexual permutations described by Sade, as well as the various forms that fill the pages of pornography magazines possible. It is also what makes the explosive battle of passionate love possible and even desirable. We can go beyond simply getting our rocks off and also beyond the cruelty of Sadean lust; we can learn to desire the utter unapproachable difference, the untouchable uniqueness, of another with such intensity and passion that we will strive to touch this uniqueness, to take this other into ourself and to penetrate ourself into this other. This desire is what I feel as passionate, erotic love. It is a madness, a wildness that puts one on the edge. And it is a joy without which life would not be worth living.
It is in terms of the conflictual nature of passionate love that the pleasure found in unrequited love can best be understood. When love is not (or cannot be) mutual, the conflict between the lover and the beloved is at a peak which may, for the lover, add more fuel to the fire than mutual passion would. One is confronted with the impossible, with what cannot be, and this is precisely what one wants. A kind of madness prevails, an inner conflict which tears the lover to shreds, but which the lover would not give up at any price. To be contented, happy, satisfied… but without the passion, the intensity, the conflict… without the beloved… This the lover could not tolerate, because a mind and heart so inflamed would find the mediocrity of feeling brought on by quenching the flame unbearable. Better the anguished joy of loving this marvelous Other.
When I speak of difference as the basis of passionate love, I want to be clear that I am not talking about gender. It is true that the one I love is a woman and this plays a part in my attraction, but it is not the cause of my passionate love for her. After all, I am not attracted to all, or even most, women (and I have been attracted to certain men). If the difference I have been talking about were that shallow, I would fall in love with categories, not individuals. The difference of which I speak is the singularity of the beloved, what she is that no one else could be. This is impossible to describe in words – only poetic language can begin to flirt with an understanding of this difference, just as only poetic language can come close to expressing the actual feelings of this marvelous passion, this beautiful adversarial relationship we know as love. The poetic use of language has a uselessness about it that is comparable to the uselessness of love. One cannot write contracts poetically just as one cannot contract to be in love. This is why marriage and other formalizations of love are absurd. What they try to formalize cannot be formalized, because it is a passion, a storm that strikes suddenly and may end just as suddenly. It is true that one’s conscious will can affect one’s passions and even, to some extent, direct them, but it cannot fully control them, and unpredictability remains a part of the marvel of passionate love. In the intensity of desire found in passionate love, the fire of human wildness burns brightly.
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*This is not completely true. In fact, in Juliette, a genuine and egoistic love does seem to exist between certain characters. However, most of the sexual relationships in his books do not involve such love.
ZIPOLITE:The Music of the Ocean
The polyphony of the ocean is a sound that rarely becomes tedious for me. Though it could neither be called melodious nor harmonious and its rhythms are far from steady, it is one of the most musical of sounds. One hundred feet away, its roar sooths and gently lulls me to sleep… But some people just don’t understand… They come to the ocean and immediately impose their noise upon the night. They start the fire whose flames so clearly leap and dance to the same beautifully erratic rhythm to which the ocean sings… Then… the drums. I do not hate drums. Played well, with taste and a feel for the environment – at least when in a setting shared with such wild beings as sea and flame – they can be a beautiful expression of human creativity. But the odious beat of the drum machine*… of technology… of the factory… destroys the joy of a place like this.
Last night, the first drummer was drumming just this sort of rhythm – lacking all grace, all complexity, any evidence of love for the ocean. A lover immerses himself in his love – her drumming would be part of the music of the ocean if she were playing with love for it.
Later, the drumming was technically better – it had grace… it had complexity – but it still raped the music of the ocean rather than making love to it. As such, it was not soothing. It could not help the ocean put me to sleep. I finally had to ask these senseless hippies to tone down. I can’t deny that they did so with grace. Finally, a bit clumsily, they began to caress the ocean and her music, not to intrude on it… and I was able to doze.
It could be so much more interesting, so much more beautiful, if those who were to play music in a setting with wild sound would spend a while listening to the wild sound, the non-human music, so that they could improvise around these sounds, not try to drown them out or dominate them – it’s much better to seduce these sounds and make them part of one’s music. Not that we should always try to play along with whatever sound is around, even in a wild setting… But drums, in particular, can be very dominating, very demanding, and so require more careful playing. I do not mean more planned, but a more gentle improvisation… a real care for the music and the sounds surrounding it. Music, possibly more than any other creative endeavor, does not exist alone. It is part of the sensual environment. It can dominate that environment or it can dance with it, play with it, seduce it – become a part of it. We are mostly used to music that dominates: amplified music, recorded music, digital music… But even in these highly technnologized modes there are varying degrees to which it dominates. And I am most offended not when it dominates the environment, but when it dominates me. If I hate raves in the woods or bad drumming by the sea, it is because they intrude on my enjoyment, forcing me to listen whether I want to or not.
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
WAKE UP!
It is not infrequent in certain anarchist circles to hear the call to act on one’s instincts. But since so few people actually think about what they do, couldn’t it be argued that most people are acting on their instincts? Maybe – assuming that we have instincts at all – our greatest instinct is to do what comes easiest, what involves the least challenge, thus, in the present society, to conform. However, what the advocates of instinct are actually calling for is for individuals to discover their desires and act on them. But this is also too passive. Every society creates within individuals the desires – and the mode of desiring – appropriate to that society. If one merely discovers one’s desires, they may well just be those created within the person by social training, not their own desires. Thus, the anarchist who speaks of his freedom to fulfill his desire for Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream as if such a desire is anything other than conformity to commodity consumption. We who desire the destruction of this society and the creation of new ways of interacting have to take conscious, willful action, not passively follow anything. We must become the creators of our desires – willfully creating them outside the mold of commodity consumption. In this light as well, the limits of automatism as an insurgent way of life becomes evident. One need only observe the automatons on the expressways, in the offices and factories, and at the malls with their glazed expressions to see that automatism is not sufficient as long as this society exists. It too readily creates the banality of habit, the repetition of patterns. This is not to reject the potential of objective chance (nor the use of automatism as one tool among many), but to recognize the necessity of seizing it with one’s full consciousness which is able to grasp with spontaneous intelligence the moment and the method for acting in the moment. We have been sleep-walkers for far too long… Let’s wake up to the joy of adventurous, insurgent living.
INTO WHAT STRANGE CHASM
In a social landscape already atomized by the roles and relationships imposed on us, what of the rebel who wills to be able to focus enough to create his or her own life and attack the institutions of society intelligently and with force? A dissipation of force is all too easy when one practices general conviviality. If one wishes to accomplish anything significant, undifferentiated friendliness is an obstacle, a way to get nowhere.
It is the agony of those empassioned by living that they desire to share their lives with others, to find companions with whom to share what they create and what they love, to bridge the chasm this society creates between individuals. Often this means wasting years trying to find the few with whom one can truly share friendship, those few whose life projects can intertwine with ones own for a while. But even when this chasm closes, when one finds a friend or two, it is only for a while, then the rift begins to open, the pain, the tearing of one’s heart, the knowledge that one is once again alone, crying across the chasm, hearing only the echo, distorted by distance into something that one never said or desired. It seems that some avoid this agony… They learn how to compromise, to desire something easier. The projects of survival and of the group grant them a continent of contentment. I do not understand these people. Do I envy them? At moments, until I remember the level of life with which they have contented themselves…
Still, I want the companionship, the feeling that I can share projects – particularly projects of defiance. To defy society alone is frightening and limited, a sad affair… Yet better sadly alive than a breathing corpse.
Friday, September 11, 2009
FOREVER VAGABOND
One smolders waiting for a lively wind to raise the flames, to birth the crazy dance that licks and flickers, roars and rages, bringing marvels to a night that otherwise might languish. Within one’s sack a thousand dreams, the wealth of vagabonds and madmen, strange visions of vast insurgent games and wild leaping dances, of castles in the air and hidden among the trees. With such ragged wealth one simpleton went wandering among the realms of nightmare and the lands rumored to be madcap paradise, arcadian delight for the wildest of dreamers.
He came to a small forest, his heart, his mind, just smoldering ashes, hoping that the fuel to raise the flame might be here among these other tramps and dreamers, wanderers and fools… Surely there is someone here with whom to meld a dream, a scheme… to project marvelous creations.
For a while, castles in the air, schemes for strange music ands and rumors of mad dances fanned the sparks, but not enough to waken a flame… Once, it’s true, or twice, the passion flared, but there was no fuel to feed the flame… The spark was growing dull. Time to leave before it died away.
Some people’s dreams cannot sit still or they will wither. Maybe when this foolish tramp finds himself more crazed and blazing like a storm he’ll fall upon this land again to dance his crazy dances with those he madly loves, to flash his lightning laughter through the air – and then to disappear as suddenly as he appeared – forever vagabond.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
CONSUMING FIRE
Are there those who are truly content with their lives? Show them to me. Let me drink in their foolishness. Certainly, they must be mad. If life has a purpose (and, yes, I know it does not!), it must be to burn—to consume itself in the passions and adventures offered by the world. For whether you consume yourself or not, in the end you are consumed by life—you die to feed further life. What good then to conserve your life, your energy, your natural wealth? Such conservation merely guarantees you never truly live. Like the misers in the stories, you survive like a pauper with a mattress full of riches. Fortunately, very few people are this pathetic. Most enjoy a little, dare a little—but with care. They gamble, but they hedge their bets—after all, what about tomorrow? Tomorrow when we may be dead… Moderation—this is the key in most people’s minds—but the key to what? To mediocrity, of course—that middle course that takes us nowhere that isn’t colorless…Grey, drab lives in ticky-tacky suburbs with even lawns. What fire is left merely smolders, but never flares. Nonetheless, it consumes, and those who lived such careful lives are gone just like the carefree daredevil who risked all. But such smoldering fires consume without beauty, without poetry and with very little light or heat.
No one denies the difficulty of a life of risk. But isn’t such difficulty precisely what gives life its spark, its joy? But we have been taught so well to fear. Who has no fear? Those who claim they have no fear are liars, fearing in particular that they will be exposed as cowards.
The things that keep us from what we desire: fear of love and of its lack, fear of cops and prison, fear of poverty, fear of loss of reputation, fear of solitude, fear of the unknown… On and on, the abstract, and sometimes concrete, fears get in our way. Yet for those of courage, fear can be a spice – a sabor picante adding to the wonder of an adventure. Doesn’t it tone the wits to have to get what one desires at a risk, to have to evade the upholders of the present mediocrity? This is why the hero and the outlaw are so often the same: those who will not let the rules apply to them. And, yes, the poets as well, those whose burning passions explode out in words of flame hurled defiantly at the world of mediocrity.
At times, the intrusions of this world into one’s life seems overwhelming… The cloak of Hercules soaked in burning, sticking poison smothering vitality with an agonizing pain. The hours tick away, the days pass emptily, one’s memory is a desolate wasteland reflecting the sameness of each day… Dreams fade; desires lose their fire and flow without life through the narrow channels defined by fifteen seconds of flashing light and noisy jingles from the television or the parade of billboards passed along the highway. This is the existence offered to us by the present society, by the community of capital in which all are one because each is nothing, where passionate love and hatred are smothered by the resentful and disrespectful tolerance required to maintain social peace, a tolerance that brings with it the continual daily round of humiliations that guarantee the enduring insignificance of each individual even to herself.
The clear-headed individual who wants the fullness of life that he knows must be possible recognizes the need for total and destructive transformation of the present world and so of herself (in whom so much of this world exists). She furthermore realizes that this revolution is not something that will drop from the sky into his lap. In fact, to sit around and wait for history to grant one “the revolution” is to continue to act, think and speak within the logic of the present mediocrity, the logic of capital which reduces each of us to a cipher. Such a revolution, should it ever come, could only reproduce the present world, perhaps in a more egalitarian form, but who wants to be equal to zero?
The recognition that one cannot continue as a cipher and the consequent decision to act destructively against the present social order, to attack it with all of one’s being, begins the process of the total transformation of the individual, for, as it is put into practice, this decision draws out what is unique in each of us, our singularity, and thus draws us out from the herd of ciphers and into the world of self-creation.
INTOXICATION
Surging, reeling passion went screaming through me. I knew the moon the stars, the planets, for that moment, as my own, as an intense pleasure that I wanted to share – but how do I share it? – how do I share an intensity of passion that howls “I want you – I want to consume and be consumed by you in fiery pleasure! Whirlwinds of ecstatic joy tearing us to laughing, panting, howling ribbons! Learning to be the pluriverses by ingesting all in our own ecstasies! What wonder we could find in each other’s caresses!” Damn! – Why can’t the world be so free that my embraces could encompass those beautiful women, those wonderful “straight” men, the marvelous children, the moon, the stars, everything in a pleasure that goes beyond “sexual” or any other social category for pleasures. – How do you express the longing for a world in which singing and dancing are the way we speak – in which poetry becomes the intensity and beauty of our lives and interactions, a reality where we live in dreams more beautiful than we have yet imagined – Intoxicated with ourselves and with each other.
