Ruins are the thing—intriguing and amazing playgrounds. Their beauty is not in what they were, but in what they are and could become. Too many ruins now are protected by the preservers of crystallized cultures. Free play is not permitted, because all are supposed to honor dead cultures—but why honor the dead? Everything dies eventually—there's no honor in that. Before the ruins were ruins, they were monuments to oppression, obsession, superstition...to idiocy best forgotten... But as ruins, they are beautiful—for ruins are not symbols of past glories but signs of possibilities for life outside the morass of civilization. To play among the ruins—going wild in the midst of what once strove to suppress all wildness—a great thing indeed. But better yet—to create ruins! As long as civilization exists—as long as society creates the ways most people live—the most creative act is the creation of ruins. Crashes and explosions in the night—more beautiful than any symphony! Piles of crumbling stone and masonry—more pleasing to the eye than any sculpture, to those not blinded by the past! Ashes blowing in the winds—far more poetic than a million books of verse! Create amazing playgrounds, terrains for ruleless games and unchoreographed, crazed dances...Destroy!
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.
DO NOT TOLERATE ME!
I
I WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!
I demand the burning fires of passion, the untamed conflagration of desire without constraint, of lust without limits. Love me with an energy that cannot be denied - or hate me with a fury so intense your glance could wither me were not my passions equal to your own - but DO NOT TOLERATE ME!
Toleration is a sickness of bourgeois society that smothers us in boredom - a cop inside our heads that keeps us passive in the name of social harmony. SHIT ON SOCIAL HARMONY! Let the hot, ecstatic energy of IMPASSIONED VIOLENCE burn through us! LET ALL THE GRAND, VOLCANIC ENERGY OF OUR REPRESSED PASSIONS ERUPT, A VIOLENT EXPLOSION OF HATRED AND LOVE, FURY AND ECSTASY, DESTROYING MEDIOCRITY - destroying all that bores us - BEFORE WE’RE BORED TO DEATH!!!
Those who choose to tolerate - to merely exist - will be BURIED IN THE FECAL MEDIOCRITY THAT TOLERATION CREATES - Let them drown in the boring shit they have chosen...But none of that for us who truly choose to live. Coursing through our veins are dreams and visions, passions and desires, the chaos that can birth a dancing star - don’t dam this wild and fiery flood with that disgusting cancer - toleration. Demand of every encounter amazement, wonder, ecstatic passion. AMAZE AND BE AMAZED!
I WILL NOT LET MY LIFE SLIP FROM MY GRASP IN PASSIVE BOREDOM! I WILL BURN - A CONFLAGRATION OF UNTAMED DESIRE! A SOARING PHOENIX IN FLAMES WHICH CANNOT BE IGNORED!!! I will live my life in a burning heat of untamed lust and passion! With a violent ecstasy, I will demand (of myself) - I will CREATE a world of wonder and amazement.
No more will free spirits put up with being bored and passive.
ENOUGH! IN FACT, TOO MUCH!!!
WE WILL BURN and in our burning, burn society to the ground.
TAKE THE TORCH TO TOLERATION!
TAKE THE TORCH TO BOREDOM!
TAKE THE TORCH TO SOCIETY!
BURN IT ALL IN THE UNQUENCHABLE FIRE OF OUR DESIRES UNBOUND!
II
We will not be appeased - All the rowdy, crazed, laughing, dancing, raging, free spirited rebels WILL NOT BE APPEASED, for we will have nothing less than our LIVES TO THE FULL, each moment burning with our uncouth passions! We will not tolerate what does not make us DANCE WITH JOY, ROAR WITH RAGE, WEEP WITH SORROW, HOWL IN ECSTASY OR QUAKE IN TERROR!!!
And we will not wait around for our lives to begin. WE ARE CREATORS!!! We will make the world the way we want without waiting for the old world to fall! On the edge of society, joyfully outcast, we dance. We are hidden from the powerful, yet they know we exist - AND THEY TREMBLE!
For from our hidden realms, we flash forth like LIGHTNING, leaving our mark, our crazed message that a life of INTENSE PLEASURE and WILD ADVENTURE is possible EVEN NOW for those who dare to create it!
We are OUTLAWS and RENEGADES - and this is our strength! Already, we are freeing ourselves of the chains with which society shackled us. Already, we are learning to live our lives FOR OURSELVES!!! We need no ideologies or dogmas, no masks or disguises. We face society with ourselves - BOLDLY - as its enemies. Our passions, our desires are the energy with which we live our lives - HOW CAN WE LOSE!?!
For, indeed, it is our lightning-bolts of SPONTANEOUS, CHAOTIC, EROTIC ENERGY, these flashes of FREE LIFE, that could spark a fire of REBELLIOUS PASSION that will raze society to the ground!!!
III
Free spirited rebels cannot tolerate economy. Wherever it exists, constraint exists. Its demands that we pay, that we sacrifice, that we work, that we accept less than the fullness of life which we desire nauseate us! But we will not let ourselves be passively sickened by this vampire, sucked dry of real life. NO! For while we live within its midst, we will be ROBIN HOODS - stealing what we can for our own pleasure and to share as we desire, breaking down property and exchange in festive games of theft and free sharing. We will NOT tolerate the half life which economy offers nor allow ourselves to be made into pawns in its game.
For economy sucks the wonder out of life and steals its beauty. All that would be vibrant, dancing, burning with WILD PASSION, it has strangled with a price tag. Where there could be a world of wondrous lovers, mad adventurers and amazing monsters who NEVER COUNT THE COST, instead we find commodities for sale. But we will not offer ourselves to the sacrificial altar of the market. Nor will we passively watch as the world is transformed into a market place. With all the FIERY PASSION of those who dare to CREATE THEIR OWN LIVES, we will BURN all that has made WILD AND AMAZING MONSTERS into mere commodities for sale TO THE GROUND! And we will FREELY SHARE and FREELY GIVE and FREELY TAKE as we are moved by our UNBOUND DESIRES!!!
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.
FUTURIST AtTACK MANIFESTO 3
My place in this world is: Enemy, Outsider, Vagabond... Even in the worlds of "alternative" culture, this is my place. To all of those who want a world—unified and coded—I am a destroyer, for I refuse all codes. With joy, I offend and attack, for attack I must! I expose delusions, mock mercilessly, and gladly make enemies of fools. If I am alone, it is because I am on a peak which others fear to climb, preferring the morass of superstitious worship of the past to the clear, fresh air of self-created living.
Friday, September 11, 2009
AMAZING MONSTERS III
Society would lock me in its cages, chained and kept down, but I will not belittle my self to fit its molds. I explode forth, a fiery meteor, into infinity. I MAKE LOVE TO CHAOS! Within the hidden realms, beyond the knowledge of order - there we meet - the wild ones, the free spirits. We dance, we sing, we feast, we make love freely. We break down the walls of civilization so that free life can spread. Where we live cannot be named, for all names are lies. It has no boundaries - it exists wherever we are. Authority has no control within our realm for we are beyond all rule. We are chaotic outlaws, creating free life in the cracks of society through the untamed play of pleasure.
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.
FUTURIST AtTACK MANIFESTO 2
Futurist AtTACK has no interest whatsoever in preserving cultural heritages. Preserving heritages only serves the ruling powers since all heritages belong to them. A jungle, wild and unkempt, with the crumbling rot of a gladly forgotten monster—a dead civilization—makes a much grander playground than a neatly trimmed lawn with properly framed and reconstructed monuments to the enslavement and human sacrifice which are a civilization—any civilization... Away with all museums and the high blown rhetoric in praise of dead monstrosities—this superstitious veneration of the past! No more heritages! Destroy the past completely – including its abortive children: the inauthentic present and the rust-encrusted future that dominate our lives! We are too great for anything less than what we ourselves create...for ourselves...from nothing... Now, we will create ruins.... And after—something new and unimagined.
AMAZING MONSTERS II
A world of wonder - one in which we bring forth the amazing monsters of our imaginations - will be a world in which terror exists...But not terror as we know it in the world of order.
Terrorism is an activity of the forces of order, or those who have or desire to have power. It has no interest in ecstatic terror, only in the subliminal terror of every day life - a terror which as it frightens us also bores us, because it is the substance of daily life in commodity hell. But in the realms of the "mind" that have become unconscious, our repressed passions and desires live - and these are amazing monsters. At times, these monsters, when brought to light, will fill us with terror - but they are not terrorists - they do not want to try to compel us to obey. The terror they evoke is ecstatic terror that breaks us out of the normal flow and opens us to the marvelous. This terror is brought on by the opening up of all possibilities, the breaking forth of the total of the total abandon of free play, the birth of anarchy. If we flee from this terror, we return to our cages and the boring, rational terror of authority. Instead, we need to abandon our selves to the ecstatic terror, the convulsive beauty of delirious anarchy, to immerse ourselves in it, to bring ourselves through it and make it OURS. Then the amazing monsters we've so long repressed will freely dance within us. We will be the most energetic, ecstatic and lusty outlaws. The authorities may call us mad - lunatic terrorists - but the terror we unleash will be a terror that sets free - our insane monsters daring to break all cages - and too bad if the creatures inside cringe back in fear! - That will not stop our wild and joyful rampage - our ecstatic war against all the forces of order. The chaos of our desires - the passion to open all possibilities and live life to the full will break forth in the light of day - a brilliant shadow eclipsing all the forces of order.
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.
FUTURIST AtTACK manifesto 1
Futurist AtTACK is an ironic yet sincere non-organization of the vagabond fluctuations of many me's. Like the Futurists, we launch an attack on the past, but, recognizing the limits of their attack, we steal their name not to honor them—they too are dead weight from the past and always were—but in ironic mockery of their limited attack, and also to distinguish ourselves from the misty-eyed, nostalgic primitivist anti-tech, anti-civ kooks who long for a return to some imagined golden age of the past rather than striving to become creators of new and as yet unimagined galaxies of living.... The Futurists failed in their rejection of the past, because they embraced the present and the future. But the inauthentic present we experience is purely the pinnacle of the past—the sum of all has-beens. Technology too is just the past and its endeavors haunting and enslaving us. Civilization? Doddering senility, whose drooling, scabrous face disgusts us. The Futurist glorification of technology was a glorification of the reign of the past over all of life. And since the future only exists as an extension of the present and so of the past, it too must be destroyed. Futurist AtTACK attacks futurism in all its forms. We attack time and all its projects and products. We begin the creation of timelessness; of ruins that are not monuments, but toys to be played into dust, their origins happily forgotten; of a world in which all that's left of the past/present/future is crumbling stone, rusting metal, broken useless debris in the midst of jungles lush with self-created living and each moment of each of our lives is consciously and passionately created with no thought of past present or future—and so truly authentic.
AMAZING MONSTERS - i
Darkness - I don't fear it - or at least I'm not terrorized by it. For darkness has its magic. It opens gates of the imagination that otherwise would remain closed. Streetlights, neon signs, floodlights - these are rapists of the darkness, tearing through it glaringly with their messages of fear or gaudy commercialism. So unlike the moon or stars whose gentle lights caress the eyes. At times, I feel that the deadening of imagination in modern society is due in part to the violent destruction of the night by artificial lights. For in the dark, the stark definition of all things breaks down, the rigid lines, the stiff separations disappear - anarchy breaks forth, the opening of all possibilities - the marvelous appears in the world as we create amazing monsters without imaginations. Those who wish to kill the darkness - to eradicate it completely - are enemies of the imagination. They have lost their own imaginations by using them to imagine only their worst fears - and now they are slaves to those fears. So they rape the darkness, wage war on the marvelous, seek to drive away the wondrous monsters of our imagination. If it's war they want, it is war they shall have. Against their technology and impoverished imaginations, we shall come with stones and wrist rockets and al the strange and untamed creatures of our imaginations.
WAR ON THE STREETLIGHTS AND THE NEONS!
WAR ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL HELL!
WAR ON THE COPS AND OTHER LEGAL TERRORISTS!
WAR ON ALL WHO FIGHT AGAINST THE MOON, THE STARS, THE NIGHT!
The forces of darkness gather, untamed chaos erupting forth, a volcano of passion. We are strong and heroic, for our own desires are our energy. The lust for life lived to the full, for burning passion and wild adventure fuels us. We will NOT be stopped! For where we are put down, always we rise again, the wild ones who will have nothing less than a world of wonder.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
WHAT TIME IS IT?
On an old record, years ago, a lackey of the Disney corporation (one of the educational voices of the ruling class) informed children: “You don’t tell time; time tells you.” A brief, but pointed expression of the fact that we live in a society that uses time as a means of enslavement.
Grasped by the ruling order, time is standardized into quantifiable units that can be stuffed into clocks and calendars, datebooks and schedules. It ticks by, eating away the past and present, and making the future a perpetual rush to be “on time”.
If once the hours were rung in the town square, an occasional reminder easily ignored, now clocks are everywhere. Not just on our bed-stands alarming us to wakefulness each morning, or on our wrist propelling us from appointment to appointment, they are also in our phones, our computers, our stereos, our stoves, in all the little technological trinkets that tie us to our daily slavery.
There is no doubt that this is time enslaved. But in its enslavement to quantity and social necessity, it becomes our slavemaster, our overseer.
And yet, time is merely a concept. It dominates only as a spook. But spooks can be powerful. God, country, morality, humanity are spooks whose rule can only end with their destruction. But time is different. No one worships time for itself. Rather when we follow its dictates, it is in the name of something else, something allegedly higher or more important. So maybe we could make time our own.
Time has been conceived in many ways. The most obvious and widespread are linear time, cyclic time and what some have called the “eternal present”. In different societies, one or another of these seems to be predominant, but it seems that all societies have some awareness of all three. In fact, if societies in which linear time predominates are the most likely to quantify time, they wouldn’t be able to do so without a concept of cyclic time. Even digital clocks have to return to the beginning of the series to operate. And even in predominantly foraging societies where the “eternal present” predominates, there is an awareness of cyclic concepts like day and night, moon phases and seasonal change, as well as linear concepts such as descent from mother to child, aging, the planning of a hunt or a gathering expedition.
And beyond these broader shared perceptions, there are myriads of personal perceptions of time, amazing expansions and contractions based on passions and personal experiences, the capacity for what is perceived in one circumstance as an instant to expand into an eternity due to a sensation, a memory, an emotion, even an idea… This raises the question: What if we could each wrest time from its social service, its quantification? Could we each make it our own? What then would it be? These are questions that can only be answered in experimental practice. So what would that mean?
Grasping time as my own
I could destroy it
I could send it spinning like a top
I could launch it as a dart toward a target
Or I could weave it into landscapes so fluid and surreal that no one could map their contours
THE LIBERATION OF MOTION THROUGH SPACE
Time is a system of measurement, which is to say, a ruler, and authority. There is a reason why, during many insurrections, clocks have been smashed and calendars burned. There was a semi-conscious recognition on the part of the insurgents that these devices represented the authority against which they rebelled as much as did the kings or presidents, the cops or soldiers. But it never took long for new clocks and calendars to be created, because inside the heads of the insurgents the concept of time still ruled.
Time is a social construction which is used to measure motion through space in order to control it and bind it to a social context. Whether it be the motions of the sun, moon, stars and planets across the skies, the motions of individuals over the terrains they wander, or the motions of events across the artifices known as days, weeks, months and years, time is the means by which these motions are bound to social utility.
The destruction of time is essential to the liberation of individuals from the social context, to the liberation of individuals as conscious, autonomous creators of their own lives.
The revolt against time is nothing if it is not a revolt against the domination of time in one's daily life. It calls for a transformation of the ways in which one moves through the spaces one encounters. Time dominates our motion through space by means of "necessary" destinations, schedules and appointments. As long as the social context which produced time as a means of social control continues to exist, it is doubtful that any of us will be able to completely eradicate destinations, schedules or appointments from our lives. But an examination of how these modes of interaction affect the ways one moves through space could help one create a more conscious motion. The most notable effect of having to get somewhere (destination), especially when one has to be there by a certain time (schedule/appointment), is a lack of awareness of the terrain over which one is moving. Such motion tends to be a sort of sleepwalking from which the individual creates nothing, since the destination and the schedule pre-exist the journey and define it. One is only conscious of her surroundings and how they are affecting her to the minimal extent necessary to get where he is going. I don't deny that many of the environments through which one may move, especially in an urban setting, can be disturbingly ugly, making such unconsciousness aesthetically appealing, but this lack of consciousness causes one to miss many chances for subversion and play that might otherwise be created.
Subverting one's motion through space, making it one's own, freed from the bondage to time, is a matter of creating this motion as vagabond motion rather than self-transportation. vagabond motion makes a playful (though often serious) exploration of the terrain over which one is passing the essential aspect of the journey. The wanderer interacts with the places through which he passes, consciously changing and being changed by them. Destination, even when it exists, is of little importance, since it too will be a place through which one passes. As this form of motion through space becomes one's usual way, it may enhance one's wits, allowing one to become less and less dependent upon destinations, appointments, schedules and the other fetters that enforce the rule of time over our motions. Part of this enhancement of the nomad's wits within the present time dominated context is learning to create ways to play around time, subverting it and using it against itself to enhance one's free wandering.
A radically different way of experiencing living occurs when we are consciously creating time for ourselves. Due to the limits of a language developed within this time-dominated social context, this way of experiencing life is often spoken of in temporal terms as well, but as a subjective "time", as in: "The time when I was climbing Mount Hood..." But I'd rather not refer to this as subjective "time" since it has no shared purpose with social time. I prefer to call it vagabond experience.
Within vagabond experience, the peaks, the valleys and the plateaus are not created in steady, measurable cycles. They are passionate interactions of the sort which may make one moment an eternity and the next several weeks a mere eye-blink. On this passionate journey, the sun still rises and sets, the moon still waxes and wanes, plants still flower and bear fruit and wither, but not as measurable cycles. Instead, one experiences these events in terms of one's passionate and creative interactions with them. Without any destination to define one's motion through space, linear time becomes meaningless as well. vagabond experience is outside of time, not in a mystical sense, but in the recognition that time is the mystification of motion through space and, like all mystifications, usurps our ability to create ourselves. A conscious, playful, exploratory creation of our own motions through space, of our own interactions with the places we pass through, is the necessary practice of the revolt against time—nothing less than creating events and their language. Until we begin to transform ourselves into vagabond creators of this sort in the way we live our lives, every smashed clock and every burned calendar will simply be replaced, because time will continue to dominate the way we live.
WE WERE BORN INTO A WORLD WHERE:
Dreams and desires have been locked within the cages of psychotherapeutic interpretations;
Revolt has been bound with the fetters of moribund leftist ideologies;
Creativity has been enslaved to the sadistic masters, art and literature;
The marvelous has been handcuffed to the cops of mysticism and mythology;
Reality has lost the ability to laugh at itself and its foibles and so suppresses a truly playful spirit;
Thought has become a rigidly armored fortress protecting its ideological foundations from every criticism;
Revolution has had its passion organized out of existence leaving only structural rigor mortis where once insurgence breathed and danced.
This world has ceased to bring forth amazing monsters;
It is no longer a conduit for the marvelous;
It has lost touch with the convulsive beauty of love and lust;
It can no longer give birth to babies with wings;
It has ceased growing and begun to rot;
It has suppressed surreality wherever this marvelous flower has bloomed.
Therefore, from now on, surreality will manifest in:
Dreams and desires freed from all interpretation and sublimation, being the living energies of free-spirited individuals;
Total revolt against every aspect of social reality including the ideologies that strive to squeeze this revolt into the limited mold of leftist activism;
The free-spirited creation of our lives for ourselves, lived to the limits against every role and rule;
The discovery of the marvelous in each unique being, free from any mystical or religious guidelines;
The humor and playfulness of free-spirited individuals who realize their strength and creativity in their own joyful foolishness;
Open, expansive, generous thinking which grows from the inner strength of free-spirited rebels;
An insurgent dance, a feral insurrection that refuses all limitations, exists beyond all structures and is the realm of indomitable free spirits.
Today, social reality is a lifeless, passionless corpse. Let’s bury it. Now the amazing monsters of surreality must come forth in the world playful and terrifying in their wild energy, freed of the cages and chains that have bound them; our dreams, our desires, our humor, our revolt can populate the world with the most marvelous creatures.
Social reality is dead; long live surreality!
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
STRONGER WINE, MADDER MUSIC
A Manifesto
1
" To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C.,
and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3...”-Tristan Tzara
Why the hell would I write a manifesto?
We surely don't need any more rabid dogmas chasing hissing catechisms down the blind alley of some "ism".
So what could possibly move me to unleash this volley of words?
2
I want to be clear from the start. I am not speaking for any "ism", cause, party or movement.
I'm certainly not speaking for the anarchist movement, because:
I am an anarchist and would therefore never speak for anyone but myself;
If I saw any anarchist movement worth speaking for, I wouldn't waste my time talking, I'd join in the dance!
I am an outsider in this world and, therefore, also in an anarchist "movement" that seems to challenge this world less and less, and imitate it more and more.
3
I started dancing years ago and I'm still dancing. But unconstrained dancers are so few and far between that I often feel like I'm dancing with myself.
This manifesto is a dancer's hand reaching out to find more dancing partners.
4
"Their lives are like their knitting: introspective, yet mindless; fussy, exacting, repetitive and pale - tinted by the cheaper dye.”-Rikki Ducornet
Speaking of rabid dogmas and hissing catechisms, we can't ignore puritanism, which did so much to usher capitalist values onto this fine continent.
Puritanism: a search for purity based upon fear:
fear of passion,
fear of desire,
fear of dreams,
fear of excess,
fear of the other, and of the unknown;
In short, fear of all the portals that allow poetic wonder to break forth into the world.
It is petty bourgeois morality par excellence: defending property against theft, that is against all desire that recognizes no limits, no boundaries; defending the "soul", the abstract ghost of the individual, against the impulses of internal desire that might otherwise burst through armors and break down walls, endangering identity.
It is the ideal basis for the democratic state. By repressing passion, desire, dreams and excess, it suppresses all that is unique in each of us, transforming us into atomized ciphers to be categorized and granted the appropriate rights.
Thus, identity replaces singularity.
Productivity replaces creativity.
Commodity consumption replaces desire.
Measured property replaces boundless passion.
The other in this world is always a type - a race, a gender, an ethnicity - never a unique individual.
And the unknown is always an enemy to be feared, shunned and, if possible, destroyed.
5
"Excess, utopia, fantasy, rampage, exaggeration: These unveil a contagious image of a marvelous living present to be acted on, even if not yet fully.”-Philip Lamantia and Nancy Joyce Peters
Rebellion, then, is the challenging of all boundaries, the refusal of all constraints.
It pursues the excess of passions and desires, ideas and dreams that refuse to be caged.
It insists upon breaking through walls to unleash the howling wolves of poetic wonder against the rabid dogmas of modern puritanism.
Embracing the unknown as an ardent lover, it is never safe, never free from danger.
How could it be when its aim is precisely to carry us elsewhere?
6
When I first encountered godless anarchy in the late 1970s, this excess, this unconstrained exploration and experimentation with the furthest realms of passion and ideas, desire and dreams, was precisely what attracted me.
It was a magnificent feast.
Its wines and ales were strong, intoxicating and full of flavor,
hints of spices, herbs and fruits from undiscovered realms of poetic imagination.
Its music throbbed with crazy rhythms, laughing leaping melodies, harmonic cacophonies of joy and rage.
It evoked wild, unfettered dancing, and I threw myself into it with total abandon.
At the time, one could still imagine that a whole new world was breaking forth...
Of course, then, imagination was a lush erotic flower whose delectable nectar brought visions of its luscious utopian fruit...
Or so it seemed to me.
7
But puritanism - never truly defeated - has had a resurgence, building new walls and cages where old ones had broken down:
fear of crime,
fear of drugs,
fear of disease,
fear of terrorism,
fear of disaster,
fear of poverty.
An endless parade of real and imagined threats reinforces walls and armors.
But they're all just new names for the old puritan fears:
fear of desire and passion,
fear of dreams and excess,
fear of the other and of the unknown.
8
“Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy”-William Blake
And throughout this period, there were always plenty of pseudo-revolutionary sects with their priests barking out rabid dogmas, calls for new forms of renunciation, new boundaries, new limits, striving to channel the wild dance of rebellion into ritualized marches of militancy requiring character armor and fortresses of ideology.
For those without the will to face the unknown, these sects provided the illusion of rebellion within the prison of puritanical fear and suspicion...
9
“My dear revolutionaries, your ideas are just as limited as those of a petty bourgeois from Besançon.”-Francis Picabia
But what of the anarchists?
Aren't they rebels?
Aren't they outsiders?
When the world retreats in fear from the revolutionary leap into the unknown, closing back up into its shell and refusing to dance, surely anarchists would not follow.
But fear builds armors and cages, stifling all movement.
In such prisons, imagination withers like a dried up prune.
And in recent years, the anarchist “movement” has been replete with fear:
fear of repression,
fear of isolation,
fear of contamination,
fear of failure and defeat.
It's not so surprising, then, that in recent years a kind of anarcho-puritanism has raised its mangy head.
Where once the daring exploration of ideas expanded theoretical endeavors opening new territories to the poetry of revolt, now individuals and groups stake out their ideological territory, defending their rigid, entrenched positions from contamination while seeking faithful followers for their correct creed.
Where once individuals were encouraged to break through their armors and unleash their fettered desires, now identity politics requires them to submit to the “communities” that define their identity as oppressed victim or to own up to their group “privilege”.
Where once individuals took their freedom on their own terms wherever possible, now, even within the so-called anarchist “community” itself, they demand rights and impose obligations.
Where once poetic experimentation and humor expanded and enriched language, now political correctitude impoverishes it, stripping it of joy, beauty, intelligence and desire, leaving only the rigidity of judgment, guilt and sacrifice.
Even personal choices get transformed into moral identities (veganism, straight-edge), high grounds from which to look down on others.
Retreating like hermit crabs into rigid ideological shells, many anarchists have developed miserly and miserable ways of thinking, acting and interacting.
These anarcho-miserabilist tendencies have diluted the wine of rebellion until it's barely more than water.
They have reined in the music of poetic wonder until all that's left is a banal march, suitable only for rituals of militancy and hymns of self-renunciation.
It's no wonder then that so few anarchists still dance the sort of lively, vibrant dance that could bring down a social order and create a new free world.
It's awfully hard to dance in armor!
10
“Yet another effort...”-the Marquis de Sade
Gouvion Saint-Cyr tells us that “in order to be strong at the points of attack, it is almost indispensable to be weak on those you are defending”. Puritanism in all its forms is an ideology of defense. Therefore, anarcho-puritanism can only be the enemy of anarchist revolt, insurrection and revolution.
In the face of the current misery of this catastrophic civilization, those of us who desire a real transformation need to take up the dance of unfettered rebellion once again.
Now more than ever, we need to challenge all boundaries and refuse all constraints - first of all those that we have placed on ourselves.
Desire and passion, dreams and excess are the yeasts that ferment the strongest, most flavorful wines.
And if imagination has dried up, we need to saturate it in these wines, unleashing the poetic intoxication of the marvelous.
But let's be clear:
Real poetry never watches its language or holds its tongue.
It trounces on political correctitude along with every other kind of rectitude with libertine mockery and lusty sarcasm.
It mercilessly tears through the armor of identity to reveal the glittering jewel of the unique.
It is a thief, a lover, a dreamer...
Yes, in a world of misery and disaster, freedom and the joy of life require the strongest wines and ales and the maddest music.
The intoxication of poetic imagination and the soaring melodies and untamed rhythms of total revolt are the basis for the wild, unfettered dance of anarchic insurrection.
Let's take up this dance.
Let's leap, naked, toward the stars, our steps interweaving in lusty, erotic patterns.
At times, perhaps, we'll fall face first into the mud. But if we have no fear for our “purity”, we'll just leap back up to storm the heavens in our dance of wild abandon.
Let's leave the misery to the rulers of this world with their petty regulations and miserable moralities. Our aim is to destroy this sorry world and its rulers so that we can take back the joyful creation of our lives.
And if we fail? What does it matter? By grasping our lives here and now, and dancing, intoxicated with rebellious joy and poetic wonder to the music of untrammeled freedom and the excess of desire, we will be the happiest people of our time.
I'm reaching out my hand. Now, who will come and dance with me?
