"There exists no possible construction other than that based on individual despair and the ways to overcome it: the efforts made to mask this despair and to repackage it would be enough to prove it."
Raoul Vaneigem
I sat up whole nights listening to you gushing over your bank accounts, your art, your international expositions and your random sexual liaisons. You were always in the shadow of your great-grandparents and stepfathers, each of them an exploiter of defenseless natives, an oppressor of black peoples. Even now you feel no shame in seeing their faces in newspapers and history books, heralded as direct forerunners of the crimes you now perpetuate. You rhapsodised about Shakespeare, Beethoven, Van Gogh, never suspecting that, had they lived to see this day, they would undoubtedly rise in arms to obliterate the bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche, this ridiculous class that nourishes its hysteria in their names. You do not see that these men – whose names you pronounce so meticulously – held your class in absolute contempt. You do not see that the characters of Shakespeare personify all your inanity; that the music and deafness of Beethoven were protestations against your existence; that Van Gogh cut off his own ear so that you might recognise yourself and your cadre as executives of a backward and worthless system.
Ah, populace! I saw you at the British Parliament, wearing a tie and waving your arms, cheering and backing laws that, years later, would justify your crimes in the Malvinas – just as you justified the crimes in India, Africa and all other countries within reach of your ravaging claw. Soon afterwards I saw you applauding the ‘changing of the guard’, that medieval spectacle, as if those boneheaded soldiers were in any way defenders of the people or of humanity. Then you were soiled and drunk on the Vienna-Istanbul express, assaulting an unknown woman for some small wager. On a Greek island you skulked from tent to tent selling narcotics, heroin and LSD to the commune of peripatetics who – having witnessed the truth of their families, religions and governments’ hidden agendas – wander the earth, scrawling their protests on the walls of history. Ah, desist from this privileged reactionary spiel about the trends of the Parisian youth, as if only the walls of Paris could register such ‘rebellion’. Preach no more of how the incidents of ‘68 were something mystical, or that the police repression in Mexico was legitimate. Please, no more of this ignominious quarreling. For I know too well the origins of this farce and the pillars that bolster it. It is no use! In your ignorance you never could understand that – as Koestler said – a harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
You were in attendance at Ibiza and Formentera, battering down doors with machine-guns, barking Franco's clichés to frighten and oppress defenseless men who were painting and composing for the future happiness of their children. Those mellifluous melodies wafting out over a calm Mediterranean Sea left you unmoved, so resolute were you in your ransacking and frisking, in search of a few milligrams of heroin or a crumb of marijuana. And all the while your ‘chiefs’ were drinking to nightly stupefaction, your lover was slumbering in a barbiturate stupor, and even you – an informer – fuelled your crimes with the odd crafty snort of cocaine. Wake up you poor clown, you puppet of governments and landlords; wake up before a ‘superior order’ determines your own destruction.
Once, I sidestepped your censors and published an article in your newspaper, declaring the falsity of your greatest historical-religious character, that ‘apparition’ whose existence so many respected researchers have proven beyond doubt. The following day you realised your system had been compromised and fell to your knees before the religious mafia that keeps you in power. You suffered a whipping from your ‘saint-wife’, then publicly begged forgiveness from the incensed horde who demanded immediate explanation and severe consequences. The entire city – a gathering of idiots! – rose in arms in your favour, shocked with an article that merely stated that the entire story is nothing but a senseless legend, a soap-opera made up by ignorant and orthodox people living in degradation. Oh! You can never permit someone smarter or more learned than you to question your dogma. Your soul is founded upon lies, jokes and incurable neuroses, and a simple blow would reduce you to a pile of ashes. I have challenged you to an open dialogue on this, but you mentioned it no one, preferring to continue publishing the insane pamphlets of your fellow fanatics, who cannot understand even the basics of my article. Ironically, your newspaper’s tyrannical response brought Nietszche’s Anti-Christ to the attention of your readership and many actually read his excoriation on the Gospels:
"…I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward – the instinct for cleanliness is lacking… Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius… immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound… In the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously–that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less – what did it matter? The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has any value–and that is at once its criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?"
Dear populace, I know it is difficult for you to fathom the depths of this disease; this delirium, this arthritis, scrupulously inflicted upon humanity from cradle to tomb. All of you emasculated bosses and executives are – to borrow from Mao-Tse Tung – paper tigers, puppets animated to frighten the children, as well as the demented gophers who shit themselves in fear that you or some other occult force might take away their livelihoods. Yes, fear is your key, the only reason that a gang of workers has not already slit your throat, or at least beaten you black-and-blue and demolished your molars. You have never faced a man eyeball to eyeball – no, not really faced them – not without a hired henchman or a sniper awaiting your signal. Your bank account and daily social column are the magical weapons of your megalomania, maintaining the illusion that you get off unscathed by this process, while the poor writhe in infestations of parasites, leeches and unholy insanity. You - you shameful charlatan, you pusher of bullshit and promises, you user and abuser of the guaranteed prerogatives of the Constitution – you purchase votes, forge hidden accounts and elect yourself house representative. You promote yourself to adviser, then deputy, senator, and governor, until suddenly you are President of the Republic. You rule for four to eight years, and your stooges line their pockets while you are globe-trotting between conferences, flaunting and swaggering at worthless ceremonial banquets.
Oh populace, ever dominant, ears cocked, heir to all human property! Oh, landlord of country estates and cityscapes. You systematically diminish life until you are exposed, and then you are found hanging by a rope. One day everyone will be aware of the fear that motivates you and spawns the oppression and repression of the people. Have you ever thought of denying this fear of your own hands, of denying the thoughts that purportedly drive you to massacre others and then strangle yourself?
I see you barking orders and counter-orders, you fat woman with disfigured, rheumatic legs, face contorted into a caricature of chronic despair. Your beady eyes flicker and roll as you weasel out any shortcut to personal advantage. You feed off public institutions like a parasite sucking the tits of a mad cow. You employ your grandsons, uncles, brothers, cousins, lovers, godsons and all. You reward them with high salaries, while the ordinary workers slog for your survival, for your bread and butter, for the excess flab that hangs about your gut. I am sat right behind you, sniffing your body odour and shadowing your every gesture… I can barely conceive that you – such a withered, dried up shrew – can have some fifty to five-hundred healthy and promising young neophytes so ready to bow to your command, despite being so instinctively hostile to your values that they might be Eros to your Thanatos.
I see your picture in newspapers everywhere featured as Seeker of the Philosopher’s Stone, a clinical therapist, a scientist, an educator, a philanthropist and as an intellectual. I read the monumental statements you plagiarised from notable sources. I gasp at the scope of your crimes, and the contempt you hold for a naïve and ignorant society. But there is nothing I can do. There is nothing anyone can do, because, as you know, the masses and your clients are just like you. Yes, you are all one singular, symbiotic blister, feeding upon each other’s festering mass, cultivating the ultimate of all farces: the greatest cooperative sham in all history. Even crooks like you are necessary in this manic-depressive world. Your mystical-scientific disinformation provides solace to this monstrous crowd, who were eagerly queuing to enlist for massacre, humiliation and annihilation as soon as they had lost their monkey-tails. I laugh when I see you on television – a hired suit, eyes locked into the camera lens, intent on transmitting the illusion of an intellectual to your ‘disciples’, jaw held rigidly in check so as to muzzle the rising wail of despairing panic. I snigger quietly, inwardly, gauging the vast contradiction between your statements and your behaviour, certain that you cannot sustain this comedy for much longer. You would sell your wretched soul for the power to storm through the plant or the ministry, barking commands and dealing out punishments. You cannot sleep unless you’ve brought a subordinate to his knees, for these displays are the only proof of your ‘power’. As you stand to make your speech as union leader, as a minister of the people and as a religious fanatic, you teeter before a terrifying abyss, to be unmasked as an obvious clown, a vile tyrant and an insane parasite that judges one and all from the same perverse perspective. You attributed the evil of the world to savagery, then to the monarchy, then to the capitalist system, to communism, anarchism, the devil, and to the atheists… Why are you always looking for the root of all this shit outside of your own self?
Oh, populace! I have been roaming for years in the alleys and labyrinths of your cities, dressing in your fashions, dozing in front of your soap operas, praying to your ‘God’, feigning epilepsy at your group mystic trances, having intimate relations with your daughters, and soberly saluting your addiction to messianism... But you have never fooled me. I always saw beyond your masks, beyond your family name and beyond the slaves that your mother still keeps in segregation. I saw beyond your ‘elegant’, stereotypical gestures, your pedantic smokescreens and your insufferable theories. If you or any of your teachers, priests, politicians, policemen, mystics or parents ever reach judgment, you will find your rightful place below (well below!) the whores, delinquents and starving dogs of the street. And this is precisely why I want to piss in many colours over your name, over your titles, your weapons and deplorable desires! Only by subjecting myself to your will did I glimpse the all-encompassing totality of your deprivation. Your mother (a poor and miserable woman) and your father (an asinine thug) came together, created you, and destroyed you with their matrimonial exploits. A short stroll with you is enough to smell the lack of affection and security you suffered, the vacuum of happiness or love. For you are grandson, nephew and son of the common people. You were undesired, rejected, psychically raped and slaughtered. And alas, you probably always will be. Oh populace…
It is so transparent, the way you try to procure affection, hoping to be showered with compliments and gifts. You sleep with him, then convert to his religion or party, no matter how ridiculous and absurd. I saw you that day, apologising to St Francis of Assisi and to Stalin...and then to Emma Goldman and to Messalina! For you it is all the same; so long as you can hide your wounds, speak at coffee meetings, violate the odd student or patient and get drunk in secret. I know you intimately, you library-thief, you authoritarian technocrat, you petty delinquent. Today you sport the ideological diapers of Krishna and Rajneesh, when only yesterday you were dressing in Gestapo leather and mercenary heels. Under cover of night, you slit the throats of Angolan, Vietnamese and Inca children! I know why you disguise yourself, join these sects and comply with their conditions… I see how history has made a puppet of you, manipulated your actions by the deft right hand of a higher criminal. I cannot deny the sadistic thrill of seeing you attacked by the vipers that you nurtured. On moments like this I am reminded of that wise Romanian Cioran:
"History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable… Even when he turns away from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: His need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasants’ Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the victim's moans parallel the moans of ecstasy. Scaffolds, prisons and dungeons flourish only in the shadow of faith - of that need to believe that which has forever infested the mind. The real criminals are men who establish orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic. The present society is a hell of saviours, sick beasts that call themselves enlightened and even apt for cure. .."
You shall soon understand that all prostitutes (oh yes, including your wives and daughters!) were enslaved by your economic dominion and your repressed sexuality. Subjected to centuries of sexual-cultural bondage, they invented their own exclusive language and a subtle strategy with which to reduce you to an imbecile, a rich and influential idiot with a chronic sexual deficiency. All your bogus chastity and Christian morale will shatter when you discover that all women (even the few that don’t become frigid in your embrace) think of you as a lecherous bastard, a sexual clown that nonetheless holds the key to power, politics, science and law. Now you know how I regard you, your works and beliefs, your achievements and dreams. How you fume with hatred and fantasise to destroy me once and for all… However, your life does not encompass your fantasies... At least for the moment I can sleep soundly, far from your murderous hands.
I know all of this yet I suffer you in silence, you merchant, industrialist, transvestite. You ‘Son of Mary’, cousin of Jehovah and torturer of political prisoners. You call yourself a "doctor", you consider yourself ‘noble’! You proud grandson of a colonial family! You latent homosexual! I have stood by in silence, testing the ground that supports your pillars. You understood not a sentence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, you know nothing of the words of Zarathustra, you read not a scrap of Ibsen nor a syllable of Cioran. I have tolerated you in silence because I know how much you fear loneliness, truth, and all the simple things of life: the embrace of an infant that approaches in an alley or in a prison of minors, or even the natural passions of a loving woman. I pity you as you run frantically through the streets with sweat-stained trousers, graying hair, and a handful of contracts and life insurance policies in your manicured clutches. This morning you stammer under the interrogation of managers and officers of the law, this afternoon you fart on a crowded train in anticipation of a glimpse of your housemaid’s panties. I pity you as you queue restlessly, waiting for your name to be called, waiting for a bonus or for your precious child to gain a permit to the so-called judicial asylums. Oh, if only you could truly see the travesty that you venerate as science, the quagmire that you call Society... Your blindness and laziness fill me with bile, for all beings are contaminated by these qualities, the compliant and resistant alike.
How I loathe your affectations to genius, your diffident handshake, your perfumed skin and your clown costume. Your displays of golden fortune are reminders of the workers who toiled for them, reminders of the statistics of starving and miserable people. Do not tell me they are your rightful inheritance or that you paid for them with sweat; no, we all know you sweat for other reasons. Wealth and superfluous goods are only acquired by robbery and fraud, by stealing public funds, by the ten percent under the table at your office or City Hall. My only consolation is a dream; that one day those official thieves will have to hide their wealth, and everyone will know that today’s rich men were yesterday's crooks. I am disgusted by your massacre of the weak, your torture of the children, your grinning religious pleas, and your drunken celebrations of revolution at the coup d’ètat against Somoza. Years later, you are excelling in charlatanism, plotting counter-revolution in exchange for a promotion at work, for an apartment in Miami or for five thousand dollars a month deposited into your Texas account by the CIA. Oh you common people, you have the hateful logic of a poor man. Instead of robbing the big mansions, banks, multinationals and luxurious areas of the city, you prefer to wait in ambush for your own miserable fellowship. You serve as a lackey to a system that considers you a worthless being and a piece of shit. The state of alienation in which you live does not permit you to question that gigantic institution called the State. So you call for elections, for fascism, for the constitutional assembly, for communism, for Plato's Republic, for the return of monarchy and even for the Zionist revolution. You shout for freedom of expression, for the right to vote, for the democratic ballot-box. You remind me of the words of Bellegarigue:
"…by means of the vote the voter tells the candidate: I give you my liberty without restrictions or reservation. I put at your disposal my intelligence, my means of action, my recognition, my activity and all my riches. I give you all my rights of sovereignty and, by extension, the rights and sovereignty of my children, relatives and countrymen, those working and those in retirement. All this I give to you to be used in the best possible way, your honour my only guarantee. It does not matter if the candidate is this or that, a communist or a fascist, a republican or a democrat. The man to be elected is my master and I belong to him. It thus becomes clear that the vote is on one hand a farce and on the other a perversity or, more precisely, an exploitation. When you ask your government for freedom, the inanity of your request reveals that you have no knowledge of your rights. Your request itself is a subordinate act and a declaration of inferiority. As government confirms its superiority, it takes advantage of your ignorance and treats you as a blind person. You really do not see a thing. To be free you just need to will it. We dumbly expect freedom to be bestowed upon us as a gift from other men. But we are free and to obtain it there is no need for rifles or barricades, turmoil, votes, factions, etc. All this represents only hysteria. Now, as freedom is honest, one can only attain it with reservation, serenity and decency."
Oh, populace! So many times the world has rallied against you in a millennial hatred deposited in the heart of libertarian man. The world has nothing against hatred, after all, only hate could return you to the place you migrated from.
Oh, you cattle farmer, destroying the forests to plant soy to rear your cows! There are more cattle than people in your country. Your nation is a great, merciless slaughter-house. When you get to heaven – as you so surely will – doubtless a million cattle await, all queuing eagerly to stick their horns up your arse. You play out a persistent ‘honeymoon’ period with a ‘wife’ who is a slave to your fears. Deep down you know that you are only held together by interdependence, by competition with each other and by a firm bond of violence. You know that you hate her (although not as much as she hates you) but you must stand by her, for you need to show her off, to use her, to destroy her – and of course you cannot risk being labeled as single, lonely, gay or widowed. You are doomed to be an eternal stereotype of mediocrity, a dependent child, fragile and lost…
One thing is certain, I am wasting my time on this old keyboard. Why? Because I know that none of this means a thing to you. You dismiss it all as "literary spite". It will not deflect you from your path to premature insanity. You are quick to forget the barbarisms you’ve committed. Your conscience registers no trace of those processes you initiated which lead Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair. Or am I mistaken? Do you remember those two brave Italians who you traitorously lead to their death? They intuited the scope of your imperialist alliances and dedicated their own lives against it. Oh, you will never touch the hem of a Sacco, you will never hold a candle to Vanzetti. You are a coward, blind to the spontaneity of life. You – alienated little man, cruel little politician – you will never understand Sacco’s last words, just before your executioner flicked the switch:
"I will die for being an anarchist militant and it is true, that I am. But so certain am I of my probity that, if I could be reborn, I would live that life exactly as I have lived this one…" You will never be as brave as Vanzetti who said to Judge Thayer "It has been seven years since we were incarcerated. What we have suffered these seven years no human tongue can speak. However, I do not tremble before you! You see, I look you straight in the eyes and I am not embarrassed or ashamed, and I do not feel fear!..."
These innocent men were murdered by bastards like you, murdered by your silence and your collusion, murdered by individuals who know nothing of the pleasures of life, who live symbiotically under the tyranny of the four secular illnesses: The Family, The School, The Church and The State.
[The Family]
"Because of a lack of gods we had to invent potent abstractions; none of them more powerful and destructive than the family" (D. Cooper)
[The School]
"The schools are fatal places for children! Education is neither something that the person gets for himself nor something that is granted or put at his disposition by another person. The child that educates himself (and if he does not then who will?) will be free, like the adult, to decide when, in what measures and in which way he should use the resources offered by the school. There are an infinite number of ways for education; each child should feel free to elect, find and build his." (J. Holt).
[The Church]
"Here we have the source of everything that you suggest to be holy and sacred in all that you pitifully call religion. Here are the sources and origins of all those so called "saints" and "divine" laws that obligate you to observe as coming from god. Religion is the source and origin of all of those pompous and ridiculous ceremonies that our priests simulate, the source and origin of all the false mysteries and all the solemnities and divine cults. Here we have the origin of all of those splendid titles of Lord, Prince, King, Monarch etc., in virtue of those, and under a pretext to rule them, oppress them like tyrants. In virtue of those, under a pretext of good and the public necessity, they steal all they have of beauty and good, and still, in virtue of those, under the pretext to have the authority of some other divine authority, make themselves obeyed, feared and respected as if they were gods themselves. Finally, here we have the source and origin of all of those names of nobility, of count, duke and of marquis, those of who the planet is full of. All religions are nothing but mistakes, illusions and fanatical impositions!" (J. Meslier).
[The State]
"It is the joint of all public institutions, legislative, legal, military and financial etc., by the means of those who steal from the people the management of their own business, the direction of their own security trusting it to some that, elected by the vote or by force, find themselves in the right to legislate about everything and to everyone, and to force the people to respect them, enforced by the support that renders the power of all. In all times and everywhere, no matter what name the government uses; no matter what your origin and your organisation, your function is always to oppress, exploit and violate the masses, to defend the oppressors and exploiters. Their main bodies, characteristically and indispensably are the police and the tax collectors, the soldiers and the jailers, those who join spontaneously with the merchants of lies, priests and teachers, paid and protected by the state to educate the spirits and make them docile and submissive to the government!" (E. Malatesta).
You do not understand the heart or the origin of these institutions, the purposes for which they were created or the reasons why they generate all the stupidities of this world. Until you do you will ride in desolation like a bear at the circus. Until you gain emotional maturity, and abandon these four social monsters, until that day all the organic foods, the holidays in the Caribbean, the Lacanian therapies, the massive doses of Prozac, the music of Albinoni and the ginseng, all of this will be useless! Until you stop replicating the irrational cycle of these four vampires, your existence will be a dive into nothingness, a battle with your demons at every turn.
Oh populace, you break the window of your home and attempt to throw yourself out of the tenth floor in a manic crisis, and I try to understand you. I believe I could love you one day, once you quit your self-loathing. Yes, I could learn to love you, despite that time you denied me shelter and food when I dared to knock at your door. Despite the time I was frozen in the snow in some foreign land and reached out for your assistance… But you are the same, the same bastard in every corner of the world: on the streets of Amsterdam, in the hotels of Marrakesh, in the prisons of San Salvador of Jujuy, in the countryside of northeast Brazil, in the rooms of the Vatican, in the Spanish brothels, in the universities, and in the campsites of idlers. You play your parlour games, talk your idle talk and enact your schemes to get your arse fucked, suck some pussy or blow a few grams of hashish. Always this same phony face, bleating despicable altruisms and philanthropies.
I have seen your fat gut, and heard the stagnant waters in your belly as you jog through the streets of Paris and lounge in the Agua Mineral in Brasilia. You are always protected by a writing desk, a credit card, a pressed shirt collar and a matching hypocrite’s smile. I offer you my writings for a pittance, just enough to keep myself oiled and turning in the gears of your social machine. You read my words with a practiced expression, feigning interest, avoiding my gaze to avoid succumbing to a pitiful obligation to regard me as a beggar and throw me a few cents. You gesticulate omnipotently, all the while suspecting the true magnitude of your inability to appreciate art, music or life. You never cared for liberty or wisdom, even less so for human dignity. You always pursue instant gratifications, and when you do make a ‘sacrifice’ it is with eyes set on heaven’s door, never from a desire to disarm the rotten traps of society. Do you recall Marcuse, the idol of your pseudo-hippie phase? Here:
"The toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in road-rage, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations. They are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs – the mature delinquency of a whole civilization."
Oh, populace! You have cluttered the world’s streets with cars, garbage and smoke. You spit, shit and pollute the four corners of the earth and then complain about hurricanes, storms and the desertification of your land. You can barely walk now; your liver has expanded and your muscles have atrophied, despite all the absurd sports you practice to divert from sexual tension and your libido. I have seen you practicing yoga along the banks of the Ganges and in the parks of New York City. You jog and fence and practice transcendental meditation - the petite-bourgeois customs of our decade - like an alien, like a fanatic… You were surprised to read that the only gymnastics necessary to man is the spontaneity of making love. All those other sophisticated and mediocre pursuits were invented for hermits or for those that believe sex will condemn them to purgatory. You are incapable of any real study, you gossip about everyone and devise your own apprenticeship in despotism. You are as superficial as the shine of the sea. In Jungian terms, you are still crawling up the shore: a ripple upon the waters might obliterate you like a tsunami. You always play both sides, kissing your god and hugging your devil. You are the vilest of dualists, an absolute slave to good and evil, a purveyor of corruption and sentiment. And you wonder why you cannot pull yourself out of the quicksand of your bestial beliefs and morbid dreams.
I slow down my pace to tune in to you and again I find you boasting. My indomitable rage exhorts you with the words of Mephistopheles:
"You, little skirt-chaser, a simple man-eater could tear you apart! You are the son of mockery, made out of mud and fire!"
Yesterday I stood before you and your hands were trembling; you frequently cleared your throat and obsessively lit one cigarette after another. Did you think I might dissolve you with a touch or a look? Your fear saddens me but when I approach you in good faith, you fear me more. You speak nervously about your life, pain, fears, unsatisfied desires, but you have no time or interest to hear me and even less to look me in the eyes. Why? Why do you let yourself be taken in? Perversely, I find that I hold you in boundless affection, as if I had not stalked you over millennia and witnessed your strikes against life. I could hug you in solidarity and trust, all the while knowing that you would misinterpret and betray me. You are oriented by medieval concepts and, in this interminable punishment of Golgotha, you are in an excruciating contradiction! You accuse me of having only one philosophy and I respond with the words of a Japanese poet:
I don’t have a philosophy, I have nerves.
Nights! Early mornings! Clear dawns of warm sun! Memories of lost loves! Easy twilight, roads, and cypress scented adventures … All this passes undetected through the vacuums in your personality. You behave as if you are a king with many slaves, yet you have somehow become confined deep inside your own castle, insensitive and stupid, blinded by obscurity.
Almost every day you interrogate me about life and matrimony. I respond with the ords of Emma Golfman:
"The institution of marriage turns woman into a parasite, completely dependent upon another person. Her inability to fight for life destroys her social consciousness, paralyses her imagination and holds her in a rat-trap, a parody of human character."
You are silent for a while, then you ask about the revolution, about the human soul, about having children, about work. Later, like a mercenary, a zombie, a ghost of the true human condition, you conclude that I am idle, a libertine, an anarchist possessed by the devil. You and your partners idly think it a perversion to scream with abandon during orgasm, an act of infamy to sleep spontaneously with an attractive woman. You believe those who will not devote their being – emotionally and physically – to an alienated and futile occupation are the embodiment of indolence. Anyone who refuses to bow before your oppressive laws, your tyrannical State and your corrupt politics exemplifies anarchism on earth. Anyone who will not grovel at the feet of your stupid and impossible ‘god’ is clearly possessed by the evil fluids of Satan. Oh, populace! Poor foolish populace! Your mind is completely intoxicated by the excrement of life. There are few differences between you and a donkey – although let us pay respect to equine atheism compared to the religious obsession of Homo sapiens.
I have mingled on purpose amongst your sons and daughters across the world, on luxurious palatial carpets and under the filth, and the infected corners of your cities, and I assure you; your sons harbour an irreparable hatred of you. You only gave birth to prove your ‘virility’ or ‘fertility’. Did you forget that pigs and wolves have sons too? O vain populace. Now you wonder about cosmic eternity, about an almighty god, about kilos of gold and about a management position in the State, by means of which you can vainly manipulate fifty-odd slaves. Of all passions, vanity is the best hidden.
"It hides in such a way that it is hidden even from itself. Even the most insignificant actions are born many times from a mystical vanity that, for those who have it, do not know nor distinguish it." (Matias Aires).
Poor populace! You sacrifice the essence of life in search of a chimerical world beyond the stars, ‘intuited’ by some lunatic in a delirious depression. Stand up populace! Free yourself from the shackles that destroy you; raise yourself up, and soar like an eagle. Walk barefoot along the footpaths of the world and make your own diagnosis of the fever of people, of the nocturnal melancholia of a black neighbourhood. Look into the faces of those who pass through the tunnel of resentment and keep you awake, in the last carriage of a train that tears across the continent. Wake up from your cancerous sleep and you will find that life awaits you with an open heart and the innocence of a wild rabbit. It is time to shout "enough", to say no to the entire social joke, to let your body run wild and forge new paths. Only then can you acquire a new vision, a new conception of the world, of things and of yourself. Cast your gaze beyond the barbed wire and trust more in your heart than in your eyes. Heed the primitive world over that of your masters, stoop not to the dogmas of a eunuch, or to the damning hypocrisy of those that have never tasted the beauty and charms of life!
I state all this and you call me a romantic dreamer. Your mind is already off wondering about the horse-race, the lottery numbers and stock market fluctuations, fretting that you may be late for Sunday mass, and contemplating the finer distinctions between the "theology of misery" and the "theology of prosperity". So, with dashed hopes, I withdraw crestfallen and ashamed for having violated and desecrated your secular history. As Dostoyevsky said:
"I spend my days in my den, grappling with an evil and vain consolation that the intelligent man will never amount to anything serious, that only the imbecile can achieve anything. Yes, that is it gentlemen, the intelligent man is morally obliged to be a creature without character; the man of action is usually mediocre. This is my conviction of forty years."
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