stirring in the thickets of long ago

"Life is one thing, politics another. We must avoid the scandal that would come from bad tactics."

"Miserable asshole! We can rule ourselves! Death to all leaders."

"They're toying with us, but not for much longer!"

"Only shitheads ideologize."

..."the left that talks only about the things television talks about."

Comrades show up, thinsly disguised with pastel eye-makeup, mesh shirts, audacious scarves, tight bulge-enhancing pants -- (small cadre tripping on LSD naked from the waist down)... organization fromed around various swirling loci of magnetic pull-repulse invisible dynamic points of strange attraction; ruptured links ; momentary sub-committees formed and reformed as the scene devolves into the obscene, into uninhibited displays of anonymous amour fou, an orgiastic potlatch of repressed desire ; an evanescent libiinal economy, a micro-civilization of eros... a nighlong autnomous zone of passional attraction...a chaotic game of lustful free-association...room filled with smoke, record broken saying "e-baby" over and over for an hour before anyone notices -- comrade-girl tearing everyone's clothes off, everyone's hands in other comrade's pants as they lick cocaine off naked chests -- broken mirrors, blood & saliva & it all smells of the swarming masses rallying around that lone AK-weilding comrade atop an overturnd tank billowing smoke, Red Square, year 2018, Talinn, Finland.
No more vision, now only feeling, little hands and mouths colliding and slipping off onto newly soaking flesh.
Collective dreams of red flags, chesire cat grins..
distorted cathartic go squeeze chain-drift
dead-end pathways


Morning after -- everyone who can wak up sits in a circle on the black Persian rug, smoking Gauloises and burning incense -- everyone who cannot get up is excluded (pending excecution)...comrade unfolds a large, tattered hand-drawn map of the world marked up according to some code -- red/black points of convergence, pink zones for cultural operations...proposals are made, rejected, revised --
I assert the necessity of occupying a cafe in hip Paris decoupaging the walls over with medieval broadsheets and large posters of the May '68 riots, serve black caviar and blood soup, then burn it all down. Comrade proposes we go to the southwestern desert, dig long trenches, live in pipes until the micro-climate metamorphoses into a series of small oases -- build and inaugurate the pleasure-dome. Proposal rejected near-unanimously -- girl eating a fruit says, lips not moving, "would work more fruitfully if we commandeered a dirigirble..."
She is immediately excluded New slogans: Radical epicurianism! Take-over the context! Seduce the bourgeoisie! (make them feel perverse lust for the syphilitic crusty orifices of the proletariat -- radical supercession through the fusion of erotic fluids, sweet of the workingmen, bloody saliva and dainty perfumes)

"Lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, 'being, nothing else, without any further determination or fulfulment.'"

Speaking the lake, the infinite Småland sky; peaceful, fertile farmland running for kilometers in all directions, dotted with quaint wooden barnds and cottages -- "being, nothing else," work-times, sweaty boys stripped to the waist, muscle taught, sneezing amid thrown-up straw and flitting insects. Homebrew, folky Swedish music, dancing in circles, stomping and clapping -- Lapin Kulta -- reading Benjamin (flaneur meanderings in Stockhom, Malmö, Göteborg, Kopnhamn), Barthes, Fourier, Scandinavian situationists, Nordic myths, Chuang Tzu, Baudelaire, Sufi dervish tales, anarcho-french anthropology (The Gift, Clastres, Bataille), A Thousand Plateaus. Long candle nights studying Swedish / english unspoken, or only with shame.

drab colors, patches, (tattoos/piercings).
Hats of sorts. Clapping, stomping in circles.
Stripping to the waist. Self-cut hair, beards, teeth.
Bikes, DIY, heat & closeness, drunken revelry. Directness, simplicity,
brazen laughter, provinciality, hand-rolled cigarettes, frayed-threadbared clothing, sweaters with buttons. Mustaches. Hardwood.
Jug bands, valorization of pirates, hobos, gypsies. The irish.
Big rock candy mountain, yell-song. Sweaty paroxysm.
embryonic rupture. "Psychic t.a.z."
I can't play an instrument -- I am an instrument.

Sick, sick, sick. With what? Deep malady -- unknown. Fixed in a box: six walls, submerged. White walls & no tv. Evil sub-epidermal twitch, linked with image-withdrawal.
You can escape, they said, but to where? Corridors, bad corridors. Phallic men, helmeted -- embodiments of the Idea -- guarding every vault and porthole. (Guns that shoot word/image complexes.)
Deep malady; anomie; syrapy malaise. Enfolded in sheets of cloth and penetrated by the Idea. Idea: arcane architect, necrophilic logic, preserved dead, encrusted archivist.

Goo. Purified goo, not a cacophony but a stream, a congealed laser. Neither image nor word, but direct goo. Some, and you always know who, call it the Antidote, supression. I can not disagree, but malady has tokened me out and they are all tied to my affliction.

The world ends tomorrow and you may die!!! But seriously: the world is quite clearly -- in a purely ecological sense -- going to shit. Reification, alienation and all that insidious "subjectification" crap is near-trivial if we take into account worldwide ecological degradation. So with this knowledge I could become an eco-anarcho and go wild and fuck shit up in one last ditch attempt ... but that-s just as alienating and so not-me, and futile all the same -- if what these EF!ers say is true, the best course of action really is hedonistic decadence, "radical aristocratism." Not "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," fucking and doing heroin on the deck chairs as they slide down into the churning waters. Which means -- time to sop thinking in terms of alienation, but ecstacy; and, because sex may be perpetually unattanable (and especially love), take pleasure in food, travel, drink, drugs, even your own weird desperation. In lack.

I'm sitting in a greyhound bus, trying to write. Can't write. Every word or concept that comes down on paper feels like an injury; like someone should punch my brain. Writing anything is like trying to give birth to a too-sticky massive blob of mucous or taking a shit when you're constipated. It hurts. It's mean to even propose you could possibly be a writer. And God do I hate that motivational-seminar self-help "writing for dummies" bullshit -- "pay attention to detail", "write in cafes", "do something spontaneous", "start a story with [insert 'silly' line here]" ... and yet, I want to write, I envy people who do write or can write, etc., etc.
Yes, this malady afflicts me in all my wish-endeavors, a symptom of the times that most slavish fools can't detect; those poor blind fools.

Benjamin:
"What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the rubble, but for the way leading through it."

"The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble."

--
Hamlet: "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
--
Barthes:
on symbolism.
"As soon as it meant something it was less dangerous."
"The tourist belongs to a subhumanity by nature deprived of judgement and who ridiculously exceeds his condition when he claims to have any."
"Nomination is the first procedure of distraction."
--
"I revolt, therefore we are" -- Camus


[]

The list goes on and on: if this society has a surplus of anything, it is banalities to rearrange.

i'm a scribe. scribbling away in my study. scratch, scratch, scratch. curmudgeonly hermit; get up and turn over some Satie record. smoking a pipe, eyes glaze over staring at the fireplace. i trade in ideas, send letters to other hermits smoking pipes and scratching away in their stdies. the world, the "social whole," seems to operate in another dimension, an inverted plane -- "the whole is false" said a sage, whose books fill a fond corner of my treasured collection, residing behind a glass door. any attempt to communicate verbally with regulars is like a time-traveling alien from 2096 dealing with ice-age cave men. the only message that ever gets across is the inability to exchange meaning. so here i sit.

Artaud strike. Quickie-M'artaud. Artaud D2. Artaud & Revolution. Artaudtality. Artaudtal liberation. Our toe.

Nomadic, rhizomatic thought.
Taoist dialectics. Aufheben!
Dadaist epistemology. The war machine/model. The Will to Power.
Paradox, hypocrisy /rupture, paroxysm, ex-plosion...!
non-ordinary consciousness, utopian traces...


Almost like mysticism, shamanism, magic -- at least if you can actually live it -- difficult of course, because this is traditionless & contentless; these are new, artificial concepts/ideas...it's true, you have to practice it, like you practice guitar or cunnilingus, or graffitti, or nintendo. But now I'm thinking in terms of religion, bad -- like scientology: buy these books, engage with them, transform yourself accordingly; or buy further books, etc., blah. Where's the magic?

Discuss it over coffee with all-too-interested theory-mongers or beautiful, indifferent, better-than-you girls...

One of the most insidious, tragic and ruinous things about the present social order is the way it has turned every town, every place human aggregate, into a wastelad of cars and grey -- our built environment is repetitive, monotonous, even sickening. Pedestrian wandering is great, but as far as being attuned to the psychogeographical effects of the miliou, the "decor," it's the same boring, ugly, repetitive cars, telephone polls, pavement, exhaust, McDonalds, gas stations, etc., etc. Vast expanses of pavement. The derive has to search for little signs and messages of "ways out," of utopia, of the grand detournement of revolution and the collective reappropriation of space for "the free creation of situations," for real life, real desire & passions.

Detournement, in the sense of re-appropriating commodities or images, may still have a subversive (or at least "ludic") aspect, but it has now become Art, the activity of artists and their brethren, advertisers. Writing a speech bubble on an advertisement, etc., is funny, sardonic, but thoroughly hackneyed. Boring. It-s necessary to (re-) extend the concept. Connect it to radical subjectivity. Every image, architecture, commodity, even idea or word is in some way "authoritarian" -- perhaps that's the wrong word -- but think how they are presented to you as an "authority" or a "fetish" or "reality," final and coherent before you got there, full of metaphysics and theology. Detournement becomes a stance, a way of seeing (& being), a (re-) appropriation of all that exists, all that is presented as solid, real, final...all top-down meanings and ways of perceiving things, interacting with the world, etc. I think this may get close to the (true meaning of) that flabby and over-used concept, "deconstruction." We must deconstruct all top-down meanings/readings, appropriate and loot them, and reconstruct them in bottom-up, anarchic ways. On what this actually means, I'm not the authoriy...but I feel it...and maybe it is more affective & bodily than intellectual, grammar bound, "conformist" (language-wise)...so it can't be communicated, like the Tao.