"We created an everyday DADA, an anti-aesthetics of everyday life. What is beyond beauty will be invented by the revolutionary act, created by subtle gestures, your eyes crossing mine in the streets and seeing ourselves for the first time, an image of a Chinese girl bending down to tie her shoe-laces, the tip of her black hair touching the sidewalk, and will be created by a disordered discipline or from an authentic madness!!!"
D. Cooper
Once upon a time your daughter had sexual intercourse with her lover simply for the orgasmic release, for a heavenly dive into the pure pleasures of fleshly lust. When you discovered this you had some kind of hysteric-religious fit. You could never dream that any woman – and certainly no your daughter! – might make use of their genitalia for any purpose other than reproduction and urination. You assume all beings possess a void sexuality like your own. You believe that your contemporaries ought to be as cold and frigid as you. Sexuality cannot be a natural phenomenon, a source of pleasure and happiness, a fundamental fulfillment of the human body. As a child you were caught masturbating and threatened with bloody castration should you ever toy with those unclean parts again. What you proclaim today as being your ‘conception’, your ‘philosophy’, your ‘sexual freedom’, are merely the neurotic scars of infancy, deep traumas that fragment you before your desires. Are you consciously aware of the discrepancy between your values and your perverted desires? Do you even recognise the instincts that propel you to brutally repress the sexuality of your children, your students and your congregation? Oh populace, one day you shall realise how fatal and cruel it is to deny a child such ‘precious things’, lest they are forged in matrimony under God’s blessing. Oh what bullshit, populace! How petrified your heart! To deny your daughter to orgasm outside of marriage, and to study Nietzsche and listen to Piazzola on an autumn night. And then there is the son that you had committed to a psychiatric ward. Anyone who will not prostrate themselves before your religious and social jokes is a candidate for incarceration. Just a few regular dollars to the health profession will secure hospitalization, isn’t that so, family man? Isn’t that so, diseased and delirious bureaucrat? You buy a country cottage with public monies and loan it to paramilitary groups for torture. Isn’t that so? Did you ever see the asylum where your son resides? Did you ever speak with your daughter about her affections, desires and needs? Do you know the places your wife goes, seeking the adventures that you cannot provide? Open your petrified eyes and stop defending this loathsome bullshit. If you are too far gone in your illness, the least you can do is allow your children to escape the rat-trap you are caught in. Remember that children are nobody’s property – not yours, nor society’s. They belong only to their own future freedom.
I see you pompously pontificating at intellectual cafes, dispensing your sarcastic ‘wit’ to the passing girls whose gaze you imagine strays momentarily between your legs. Oh you alpha male! Do you ever question your behaviour? Are you really that libidinous? Could it be that your genitals have atrophied and you can only relate to prostitutes? For surely only a prostitute could receive you for centuries without complaint, without vomiting or stabbing you in the gut. Why do you do it, really? Does your libido truly pulsate so, or are you driven by the involuntary recall of your homosexual experiences at school, at college and at the barracks; the terrible secret that must never come to light and discredit you? I tell you now, it is not too late to stop and consider the motivations behind your fetishes, to cut the chain of unthinking causality that has brought you to this insufferable position.
I understand you, you little dictator in disguise, even when you sign up for your local faux-democratic political party and calculate the advantages of collective ignorance. I know what lies behind your words, your sudden fear, your ‘common sense’ and your false friendship. I see you running in the shadows of the night, denouncing colleagues, buying houses from destitute families, and violating adolescents. Last week, I saw you go to work with a clean consciousness and a book of Kabbalah under your arm. Your optimism is denial, a refusal to look around and use your brain, a neurotic game that pushes you to desperation, into a chimerical world.
O little wife, little family woman. I follow each of your fake love-affairs and I hear your mantras against life, sexuality, your children, and all that does not accord with your senseless religious fancies. You never tire of feigning passion and faking orgasms. You saw a stray arm to hook onto, the arm of a sucker who might tolerate you forever. I know perfectly well that celebrated phrase you mumble, that "sex isn’t everything!" I know what you seek in your discharges, your daily migraine and your masochistic waffle. You’re really not that ‘mysterious’, you’re not fooling anybody. You are not so saintly and you are no medieval witch. Your hormones are not really responsible for your erratic moods, as you habitually claim. I have watched you carefully for a long time, picking up the children from school, hugging clients in brothels of Barcelona, seducing politicians and businessmen in the labyrinths of the Senate and Ministries where you circulate as a respectable lady. In all these places you are the same, exactly the same in every situation. Then he, the unwitting man, craving you as a lover, ended up with you as a mother, a cook, a breeder, and an obsessive neurotic. You tidy up your little jugs and clean the doorway twenty times a day, you inspect the cupboards day and night, ever vigilant for cockroach eggs. When single, you were elegant and seductive – the black widow strategy passed down by your aunts, godmothers and grandmothers. But after marriage, you plummeted into self-neglect and apparently fashioned your hips after a zebra. Now you only value gossip (the herald of mental illness), competing with the neighbors, instilling your religion and morals to your children, and avoiding a divorce at all costs.
Your safe is stacked with the wealth of others, which has, ironically, deformed you into a servant and a slave. Your fingers tremble each time you caress it, your voice changes and you look frightened. I think perhaps you only have two choices: either become a shameful libertine or an unbearable tyrant. For money forms your morality. Resentment forms your history. Lies form your existence. The fake facade that you exhibit is always tragic. Your success was always virtual. The giant you pretend to be is merely the extended evening shadow of a pretentious and despicable dwarf. Under the darkness of night you crawl to the mountains in hope of camouflaging your failure. You are weak and asphyxiated, with all the symptoms of having eaten rotten mushrooms of the desert. You attempt to summon saints and mystics, gods and messiahs who, despite having indicated for millennia their absolute indifference to your pleading and accusations of abandonment, have continued to receive your veneration as creators and controllers of everything. Yes, everything: from the cry of a newborn child to the fart of a whale.
Your ridiculous obsession with money, power and occult matters, these are the abiding characteristics my study of you has revealed. On the other hand, you wish to be amongst the herd, to hide your business and distort the essence of things until they become a worthless mask of mud. No, I do not delude myself with the hope of miraculous change; I know how inflexible you are, and where the roots of your convictions reach. I am certain that your destructive spirit would again assassinate Trotsky and burn Giordano Bruno another ten thousand times. You would drop more napalm over the Vietnamese and quash the counter-revolutionaries of every country that was not sympathetic to your imperialist psychosis. You would preserve the hunger, illness and misery of millions of third world children, and prevent the discovery of a cure for cancer, for even the common cold is a huge source of business for you. And after all this you would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for medicine and human rights! What a pain in the arse! Such corruption dominates all sectors of human knowledge. We stand impotent, unable to stop this parade of usurers, this social epidemic that propagates at the speed of light.
I hold no illusions for your future, especially considering the historical dimensions of your social and political values, of your castrating morality and your Judeo-Christian ethics. I hold no hope of relating to you across this unfathomable abyss. I am the ‘tramp’ that lies soaking up the spring sun, while you are the senator that moves flanked by bodyguards, slaves and traders, who sell bromated bread and meat with brucellosis. I eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy. You are hungry even after you eat, and can sleep only when drunk. I live! You exist!
Oh, populace! No woman has ever managed an actual orgasm with you. Your alpha male sexual behaviour always crumbles into premature ejaculation, fits of jealousy and a need to monopolise the flesh and desires of your wife. You cannot risk her straying into the company of other men because you know she would abandon you or, at least, cheat on you. Poor husband! Poor wife! Poor sons and daughters! Whilst you pursue money, your sexuality, creativity and rebelliousness fall into the abyss. As you embrace your neuroses, everyone fears you and prostrates themselves before you. You eat tinned foods and drink spirits to abide yourself. Your body bears the scars of your ‘secret’ sickness and fury.
I try to recall the exact day I began to scrutinise you. I think it was that day when you forced me to kiss our bishop's ring, or maybe it was the day you expelled me from school after you caught me reading erotic poetry. Yes, that must have been the day I turned my psychological eye onto you. Or it could have been the day that you and your uniformed imbeciles tortured me. You and those other retards that wore military uniforms, not for love of their country but for survival. Later I saw you, sad and anaemic, begging in the town-centre. I looked at those impoverished hands – the same hands that had wielded a stick and whipped my feet – with a certain nausea. I had no compulsion to avenge myself on you, you miserable little soldier, despite feeling the moral right to crush you underfoot like a dirty cockroach. For history and time have already done the job for me. Yes, my old scars certainly compound my interest in you, in your corporal expressions, in the way you walk, in your adapting posture as you stand before an ‘inferior’ or a ‘superior’, in the way you present yourself as a representative of the law or a member of the intelligentsia.
You fake hundreds of reforms, but you never stopped being an alienated little ‘hippie’, an eastern mystic, a disciple of Mussolini, a marriage advisor, or a secret agent. When you were not reporting you crowded into stadiums, applauding fellow savages with IQs of eighty or less. You sold ideologies and revolutions as if they were washing-machines and air-conditioners, but in private you were the same piece of shit. In your quest to become an intellectual you became myopic, a pedant, obsessed with books. Between your theory and your practice lies a Dantean abyss. You nod your head to degrading lies, "oh yes, yes", and smile dishonestly while your children undergo domestication in prison schools run by incompetent and neurotic teachers. You became ‘super organised’, a public slave, unable to live beyond the assumptions and rules that render impractical all manifestations of your madness. Money is your god, your asexual cherub, the only love that stops you from putting a bullet through your brain… Your life is constant self-destruction, a bestial massacre of all sentient life. You deify and idealise your work because you never understood – as Koestler said – that work is an addictive drug that hypnotises us into believing we are doing something useful. Your work keeps you anonymous and methodically seduces your consciousness.
Often I am spontaneously moved to speak to you, but you almost never understand me. You seem frightened and defensive, surrounded by anguish and Mephistophelic guilt. You begin to fidget, light up another cigarette. You can never relax and just let life flow freely through you. Your voice changes and you fabricate an excuse to run off. You suffer, yet in essence you consider yourself a decadent being… All this for nothing!
You invite me into your home, then immediately urge me to eat and drink. You turn on the radio and television, anything that will prevent us actually discussing or creating anything. Suddenly you brag about your ‘braveries’ and sexual ‘conquests’ (are you drunk?), about the balance of your inheritance, your ailments, and other fantastic stories. You talk non-stop with no interest in the lives of others. You are the centre of this ancient Babel of babbling illiterates.
I am increasingly convinced of your commitment to exploitation, to seek universal domination, to buy your way into the company of intellectuals, churchmen and politicians, and to bury your humble origins once-and-for-all. I am one of the few people not like you, and I am astonished at your macabre feats against the world. In these terrible times, it is left to me and my few fellows to dissect your festering corpse.
You find many ways to raise your profile: visiting a Buddhist Temple, kidnapping an ambassador, reporting a Tupamaru Leader. You join the police, write a bestseller, invest millions in the stock market. But in each and every action you expose a mortal self-hatred, a painful scar of unjustifiable guilt and a sadness without remedy! And then? And then, Mr. Populace? Some clichés hold true: before you can love others you must first love yourself. The dumb moral love that you drill into the heads of your children, students, and religious sheep, does not really exist. But I do understand you. Life exists almost solely for mourning and pain. And once again Cioran comes to my aide:
"If we advance in everyday torture it is because nothing stops that march, with the exception of our pain; the pain of others seems explainable and susceptible of being surmountable. We believe that they suffer because they do not have enough will, value or lucidity. All suffering, besides our own, seems to us to be ridiculously intelligible, without which, mourning would be the only constant in the versatility of our feelings. But let’s not use mourning for ourselves. If we can understand and love the infinity of agonies that drags them around us, making all other lives dead and occult, we would need as many hearts as suffering beings. And if we had one memory miraculously updated to keep current the total of our heavy fines, we would succumb under such a load. Life is only possible by the deficiency of our imagination and of our memory."
Yesterday you gave a speech at a gathering of scientists, but it was clear that none of your words, affirmations or insinuations flowed freely or impartially. You fought to preserve traditional values, to keep a certain ‘social stability’, to perpetuate delusion and mediocrity. You are so short-sighted, compulsive and fundamentally deficient that when someone in the audience asked you to demonstrate your idea, your response attacked all alternatives and all new knowledge. Even so, you are conscious that knowledge is nothing but a shameful fallacy. You do not believe me? Alright, fine, but please: no more of that bullshit about how we are sociologically super-evolved, how no poetry has been produced in the last two thousand years, how religion has illuminated many a troubled heart in recent years, or how some Pope or other has performed more miracles than the contemporaries of Messalina. No more drivel about how we are overcoming racism, how the third millennium will herald a new dawn and how the world will once again be a sacred tabernacle; blah, blah, blah. Please, no more of this puerile talk, or I shall publicly challenge you to demonstrate it scientifically. I shall remind you of all the times you claimed similar nonsense as you spun around in a house of witchcraft, drank yourself to paralysis at a bar, and rendered your services to illegal institutions.
Please refrain from rubbing my nose in the eighty volumes of Lenin, the five thousand pages of Freud, Darwin’s diaries, or the complete works of Rajneesh! The world is not to be diagnosed by a poem of Borges or the posthumously published letters of Pedro Nava. Show me your thesis demonstrated in the flesh, in the favelas, in the mansions, in the lunatic asylums, and in the brothels. Life is not in books, however sophisticated the editions and however erudite the writers. You could read the twenty thousand fantasies of a mercenary and still not know how to greet one in person. You will study a thousand times the tenets of Marxism and even then you will be shocked by a Marxist, whether they act with all their subtlety, or with all the thickness of fascism.
You see, intellectually you could be one person, but emotionally you are another. Your actions and judgments are motivated by distant affections and not by current intellectual values. Reactionary? Bourgeois? Hegelian? Son of a bitch? Me? Yes, perhaps I am a little of each, for I will not be held responsible for a history that is not of my making, less so for a future that does not depend on me. The ideas of R. Lang seem pertinent here: we are all – more or less – assassins and prostitutes, whatever the social class, religion or society that we belong to. Now, do not suppose that this state of deterioration is natural to men, or that the joke of venial sin is cynical
enough to explain. No, there was no supernatural determinism, no extraterrestrial interest to fuck humanity. Your reality was determined by the behavior of our degenerate ancestors and by the perpetuation of this stupidity by our contemporaries. Do not suppose that I feed my condemnation on some kind of obsession for ‘normality’, that I have post-human ideals, or that I am subtly spreading the liberal moral law. Oh no, that would be your biggest mistake! I do not intend to make rules for anyone’s life, nor to establish ‘certainty’ or ‘truths’. I am simply here, formulating my petty and gargantuan concerns and – as the sunrise begins to illuminate my desk here – I attempt no more than a pamphlet, conscious as I am that literature requires technique and obsession, even when you like to say that literature is an ‘art’ and art is bound to the holy Trinity. I tell you, I have no sympathy with technique, no obsession for subjectivity. I do not believe in your words, except when they are used to open the ears, eyes and consciousness of humanity. I always choose a simple pamphlet over a literary piece that consumes the life and testicles of the author, in order to elicit a laugh or cry from the hysterical bourgeois who cannot sleep without it.
I imagine you finishing this book with a sigh of relief, as my corpse floats off down the Amazon. Or perhaps you are wondering what I look like, the places I frequent, and where my boat is anchored. You will find out nothing about me. Even when I was by your side you never saw me, but instead saw the man you wished me to be. You have been blind since Troy, through the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and right up to your current political speeches. I will not sacrifice my days to a soul-destroying occupation, and so you accuse me of subverting the social order, of corrupting the youth with my anarchist theories. I cannot stomach your ridiculous religiosity, so you constantly seek to improve your conditioning techniques; you create ‘courses’ and ‘meetings’ that are, essentially, the very same ‘courses’ and ‘meetings’ held during the Inquisition. I dispose of your company, so you foster a mortal hatred and avert your eyes when you see me. Deep down you fret that I am in league with the devil, that my name is a cypher or a pseudonym of Faust, that I could set your arse ablaze if I so desired. Alas no, for if that were true your arse would have been reduced to cinders long ago.
I admit I sometimes idealise you living to another rhythm. You have different concepts in your memory, another conception of family, of religion, of real-estate, of schools and of ecological issues. I ask myself: why do you not emancipate yourself from these social farces? Somehow you still have not discovered that all ideology is useless, unless you are emancipated from yourself. You have always wanted to look like a mystic, to transform stones into bread; fish into whales; paper into diamonds. You want to be a mystic at all costs, because your life is supported by fanciful distortions of prohibited childhood fetishes. You do not know how to act naturally, so you make money and titles through those you manipulate. You are like a Kenyan postman that needs five lashes before he sets out.
It is no exaggeration to say – and a brief historical consideration will confirm this - that you have prohibited everything that threatens your social being, everything that you could not understand, and were not suitable for. In synthesis, your so called ‘moral codes’, ‘commandments’, and so on, are nothing but inventions based on nothing more than your own neurasthenia.
In Morocco, I heard you shouting out the teachings of the Koran. In my childhood, I saw you repeatedly opening the Bible at the same page and reciting the same apocalyptic jokes. In Munich, your daughter tried to tempt me to join the Hare Krishnas. In an alley in Vienna, you wore a black hat and taught that the Talmud is the only sacred book. In Mexico, you gave a long speech about the benefits of cannabis. In Barcelona, you organised a Nietzsche study group, hoping to meet swingers and see your wife fucked by another man. In Brazil you burned tobacco, threw holy water around every corner of your home, and stuck a talisman down your panties to ward off unwanted pregnancies. You throw I Ching hexagrams like a seasoned Samurai, herald umeboshi as saviours of the world, and boil the roots of ginseng for their divine particles. What a hilarious storyteller you will one day become! Such a fabulous talent for inventing bullshit! You find a new job and within a week you are in a new cult, in raptures over the new unquestionable maxims and customs imposed upon you. There’s no need for you to justify yourself to me. I have nothing to do with your life. Besides, I have seen you running between churches seeking out your mystical, pretentious and illiterate friends. And when you are not religious – what a catastrophe – you are a Maoist, a Mussolinist, a second-hand car dealer or a Marxist. Always the same myopic vision. Why do you not know how to be something free? Why do you invest all your life in some future hope? Have not you heard that hope is the virtue of slaves? Once more, listen to what Cioran has to say:
"The idea of ‘nothing’ is not appropriated to a laborious humanity. The busy ones do not have time nor will to shake off the dust; resigning themselves to the hardness or the stupidity of luck, they wait. Hope is a virtue of slaves. They are the vain, the presumptuous, the madams that fear white hair, wrinkles and anguish, filling their everyday idleness with the image of their skeleton; spoiling themselves. Your thoughts glide between the mirror and the cemetery, and find in the threatening signs in your face, such serious truths as those of religions. All metaphysics starts with anguish of the body which then starts to be universal; in such a way that the inquiries for frivolity prefigure the authentically tormented spirit. The artificial idler, obsessed by the spectrum of old age, is closer to Pascal, to Bossuet or to Chateaubriand than the wise man that is uneasy with himself. The vanity has something of genius: there you have the great pride that does not relate well to death and falls like a personal offence. Even Buddha, superior to all wise men, were nothing but a presumption in the divine scale. He discovered death, his own death and, hurt, renounced everything and imposed his renunciation to others. By that token, the most terrible and useless sufferings are born by a hurt pride, which, to challenge the "nothingness", transforms itself, by revenge, in Law."
I see you finish reading your book and you settle, calm and satisfied. You are incapable of saying "no" to anything. I know exactly what you are thinking, as I introduce you to the woman I live ‘in sin’ with, as you throw a coin to a blind beggar, and as you blame chaos for cosmic determinism. With this determinism as your final scientific invention, you avoid the true causes of your cowardice and misery.
Yesterday I visited the antique market where you run a stall and almost vomited over the crap you were selling. I do not know how anyone can touch that filth without getting stomach pangs! Little golden crosses that once belonged to the senile old ladies of the Empire, ancient liquor holders, rings stolen from corpses, sweat-stained silver, artistic forgeries, rusted watches, haunted glassware, funeral candlesticks. You have assembled a mortuary and mistaken it for an art gallery! Still the customers come: mostly nouveau riche couples with fat guts, feigning a fascination for that funereal crap, unconscious of what draws them there. I have been following you for the past hour through this morbid and stinking environment, listening to your criticisms and spasms, convinced that this ashtray belonged to Napoleon and that pair of panties was worn by Cleopatra. You are confused and lost in this crowd, wearing ridiculous self-satirising Parisian fashions that emphasise your bloated gut and your rhinoceros hips. I am right behind you as you perfume yourself, attempting to disguise the odour of stale sperm that emanates from between your legs, the residue of a dried up sexual routine.
You buy and sell with the same ritual; you make your old man look ridiculous as you feign the life of an actress, prostitute or empress. You know how to tame these old men, know exactly where to touch them to secure employment, holidays and vanities. You fuck these elders out of obligation or pity, or to get them to buy you a new living room set, always conscious that they have one foot in the grave and you shall soon be a widow – free at last! – with a place of honour in any brothel. Oh, populace! Oh decadent bourgeois! Oh race of lying imposters and idiotic contemporaries! What amazes me is not your stupidity, your primitive behaviour, nor the repression that your body exteriorises. What amazes me is that you know that you have the power; you have exhausted the methods of individual liberation and you are able to define what is good or bad for the country, what is printed or not printed, and what is normal or pathological. Your intelligence and lucidity are inversely proportional to the capital that you accumulate. I entertain the thought that the meaning of your life is the act of consumption… the results are this flaccid belly and these chimpanzee buttocks. How hard it will be to get rid of your concepts, your pretentions and all your pathetic institutionalised values. It may take another thousand years for you to be eliminated.
I know what's behind your sudden cough, your visits to the bathroom, your lotus position and your French perfume. I know the subject of your secret meetings, the meaning of your little tap on my shoulder and your presence at a popular protest. Remember that this is my moral, but if it does not please you I have other morals.
You play with your children and show them respect, at least when you know someone is watching. But at home you leave them to scream in the cradle and beat them, constantly regretting ever having had them. When you are not an explicit child torturer you cooperate with this cowardice by your deceit, by your silence and your belief that all children are little ‘devils’. The newspapers report your violence and the photos show your hand holding the whip, sadistically beating children, adolescents and teenagers. Let's not even discuss pedophilia! As old Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just statistics. I know that tomorrow you would rebuild Dachau and Auschwitz, send another Cortez to America, destroy Paraguay again, send your child barefoot to the Malvinas and suffocate rebellions like in Kronstadt. You were not satiated by the trains full of corpses, the violated women, the starving children, the gypsies and the Jews used as human guinea pigs. To you they are just ‘human excrement’, nothing more than the label with which you identify them: black, Jew, free thinker, man of value, founder of the true religion, and so on. Read the report of B. Naumann on the gypsies in the concentration camps:
"The majority of the musicians were gypsies. It was frightening to see the gypsies play their marches at the same time that the exhausted prisoners took their dead or dying comrades to the camp, or listened to their music along with the sound of the prisoners being lashed. I also remember one New Years Eve. All of a sudden a gypsy violin sound slipped out of one of the remote sheds as if a happier time and climate were arriving, melodies of the Hungarian spare wheel, melodies of Vienna and Budapest, songs of home… But later, Boger and others went to the sheds and dragged out the gypsy children who were hiding there. Then they took them by the legs and crushed them against the wall".
I quote L. Fischer to you, knowing that you never had a mental capacity to understand him:
"the highest mental degree of culture is the aptitude to live in peace with people that are different from us".
But history seems useless, and all the ‘perverse’ events that mark out your days remain forgotten in your unconscious. You publish books about democracy, communism, the lateral movement of a scorpion’s antennae, the libido of the Ukrainian lizard, the absolute goodness of God, and a thousand other inanities. You are concerned only with your literary style and not with the content of what you disseminate. The literary world is a bottomless well of narcissism and grammatical idiocy. This is true. In matters of psychoanalysis you call for a return to Freud, in political issues, a return to the Greeks; so perhaps for literature we should go back to Marinetti. Obviously, I know your intellectual and linguistic reservations in relation to Filippo Marinetti, I know that you will pretend to be shocked and that you will repeat a thousand times the story of the Segunda Associazione degli Arditi, and shout to the four winds that Marinetti was arrested with Mussolini, Bolzon and Vecchi. You will resist all innovations, because your essence is shaped and saturated with panic. Even knowing the partiality of your interpretations, I would like to contradict your academic and grammatical character with some futuristic lashes. See what the notorious Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaims:
1. We must destroy syntax by placing nouns at random as they are born.
2. We must use the verb in the infinitive, so that it will conform elastically to the noun and will not subordinate it to the "I" that is the writer who sees or imagines. Only the infinitive verb can convey the sense of life's continuity and the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it.
3. We must abolish the adjective so that the naked noun can retain its essential colour. The adjective, carrying in it a principle of nuance, is incompatible with our dynamic vision, because it implies a pause, a mediation.
4. We must abolish the adverb that holds words together. The adverb maintains a fastidious unity of tone in the sentence.
5. Every noun should have its double —that is, a noun should be followed, without any conjunctive phrase, by the noun to which it is tied by analogy. Example: man-torpedo, woman-harbour, square-funnel, door-faucet.
6. No more punctuation. Once adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctive phrases are suppressed, punctuation is naturally annulled in the carried continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd pauses of commas and periods. To emphasise certain movements and show their directions, we will use mathematical signs, x, +, and musical symbols.
7. Destroy the "I" in literature — that is, all psychology. Man, utterly ruined by libraries and museums, ruled by a fearful logic and wisdom, is of absolutely no interest anymore. So abolish him in literature. Replace him with matter, whose essence must be grasped by flashes of intuition, something physicists and chemists can never do. Replace the psychology of man, now spent, with a lyrical obsession for matter.
I can imagine your smile, you lard-arsed Lord of the International Academy of Letters, you proof-reading journalist. I know what your smile implies, that it is naught but a neurotic defense against anything that would question a comma of your ‘solid’, ‘unquestionable’ grammaticism.
All indications lead me inexorably toward the conclusion that your only true passions are geared towards slavery, that all your cells are honed in this same direction. Yet I resist closing with this perspective. In spite of the clarity of your personality, I fight daily with my nihilist demons, quarreling over the myth of your character. However, I read that 87% of the people in Sao Paulo and 95% of North Americans believe in ‘god’, all living by a supernatural ‘being’ that, in some way, has watched over and controlled the movement of this bile and bacteria throughout the galaxies. Thus the realisation returns; that I do not wish to have anything to do with this little nest of deluded vipers, that the battle is definitely lost. Yes, when I read information like this, I rediscover myself as a Nietzschean fool, a libertarian rat, a bramble that persists in growing under the ardent sun of the Sahara.
It is the vain hope of the religious that this world of slaves and thieves will one day transform into a little paradise of freedom and pleasure inhabited by ‘pure souls’. By way of prayers, penitence and bodily denial, they shall reclaim heaven, relocate Eden somewhere beyond the stars, and negotiate a safe and sacred place where they can freely perform in their desired position as servants of the Lord! Well, if that day comes, I shall haughtily resign from myself from existence. I would choose, every time, a high dive into nothingness over a life amongst your eunuchs and masochists, your apathetic accomplices. As D. Cooper said, the world suffers immensely from the belief that Jesus Christ died to save their souls. It would be so much better to see the historical Jesus furiously masturbating in order to save himself from the cross. The crucifix is no orgasm. You refuse to see that our ‘being’ is neither ‘lord’ nor ‘slave’, that we are born not to follow the commandments of a charlatan but to make our own commandments. For that we must pay the highest tribute, be willing to do anything… Anything! Then one day the species – without any stupid heroism – can determine its own path, its own history, can define its own adventures, rhythms, dreams, desires and vicissitudes.
I foresaw your argument against my "anti-religious" and "anti-social" behaviour, supported by the mystical-delirious dogmas of Rodhan, of Saint Augustine or the latest words from the Vatican. You poor Genesis men, full of parables and symbolisms, retarded descendents of Adam and Eve, who presented us with the beauty of sexuality and disobedience.
Anybody with a shred of intelligence would find a herd of buffalo more interesting than you, with your halo of ‘sanctity’ and your stench of mausoleums. I see you preaching hysterically in the plazas and markets, begging for votes, imploring the people to "open their hearts and minds" to your master. I pull up alongside you, mesmerised by your gestures and facial contortions. I listen closely to the barbarities that you swear to be the truth, and the secret desires that slip out between your words... I solidify my misanthropy and my desire never to associate with you again, neither in ‘hell’ nor ‘paradise’. Should your simian soul ever migrate to another place, I will avoid it with all my being, as I am sure that you would transform it into something as mediocre and vulgar as this world.
It is futile to write in your social column that this is a ‘perverse’ book, that the author seeks to sabotage all Christian values and projects, that he stirs up satanic forces, protected by the devil, Lucifer or Gadaffi. Why go into your raptures again, when another response might allow you to have a remarkable revelation? Oh, populace! Now you could admit that the secret cemeteries, the torture, the genocide and the infanticide in Latin-America were a part of your work. You are a Christian fanatic, a selfish exploiter of feelings and weaknesses! You could wake up to reality, use that "miserable machine" of information to - as Feuerbach suggested - transform the "friends of God" into friends of men, the fanatics into freethinkers, the devout into workers, the dreamer into an explorer, and the mystic, a self confessed ‘half animal half angel’, into a complete man. I cannot understand how theology did not make way for anthropology.
On Sundays you prowl the streets of Paris and Sao Paulo in search of used stamps, and dive into old papers like a moth, using your magnifying glass. You collector! No, that is too noble title for what you are, for collectors are like children, obsessive fools, frustrated usurers, stagnant in history. When you are not seeking antiques, you are standing pretentiously in dark corners of the Louvre, taking reproductions of Van Gogh and Dali under your arm so the rabble might mistake you for a man of culture, emancipation and sensibility. You accuse the living artist of schizophrenia and effeminacy, but when he dies – prematurely, with his blood on your hands – yours is the first chequebook at the auction. Yesterday you purchased the underwear of Charlie Chaplin for a sum that could provide basic sanitation for your entire city. Tomorrow you will buy the pubic hair of the President of the United States for a similar small fortune. You disgust me! You buy everything for display. Tertullian grumbles within me: "I believe it because it is absurd!"
You open clinics, hospitals and laboratories. You wield your scalpel and carry out unnecessary and absurd surgeries with a sole objective: to enrich yourself. To pay for these treatments your patients give you their homes, their sons, their books, and their women. Any decent social revolution would question your meagre white-coated mafia; it is reactionary and criminal, a symbol of fascism and of social stupidity. There are but a few professionals in medicine that deserve respect, the rest are substantiated by corpses, by organisms lacking vitality.
Oh! Mediaeval doctor without conscience, you have shamed old Hippocrates! Clandestine abortionist, using the fringes of the law to fuck your patients! You are always supported by the greatest farce: "ethics". What is ethics, other than the grey veil that covers and disguises your corrupt and incompetent acts? All of your class unite around it and are mutually protected in the style of Al Capone. Your medical license opens every door. The people's ignorance is so extensive that you are always applauded and praised; your wages rise, along with invitations to fuck women of your kind. Evidently, you refuse nothing. You are a semi-bourgeois infant with regal dreams; you believe nobody knows you intimately, that nobody can guess what lies within that mixture of vicar, farmer, druggist and mystic. And you are right, for we are few that understand the gestures with which you make a custom of suffering, lies and villainy. The old Càmara Cascudo (in his "Small Manual of the Sick Apprentice") gives a good description of your personality and brotherhood, calling it "the winding and crawling fauna of the industrialists of greed".
"Supporters of an endless cure, bright, skeptical, disillusioned by morals, their own and those of others, harassed workers of the medical depression, teeming termites of elegant clinical practice, all with ideals set from the waist down. Doctors in service of their own stomach, callipygian Hygeia, are the totems of that clan of shameless, hollow, insatiable, and professional bastards; solemn, repugnant and tame. Rarely and fortuitously you collapse in the night from that subconscious subordinate, you have a vague flash of a redeeming image, an altruistic, philanthropic, accessional plane, but is an occasional and brief light, clarifying, for a split second, the sordid and confused bestiary of self interest."
Oh, populace! Can you explain why you carry so much servility and fear within you? Do you know why you always say "yes", even when deep down you feel the urge to vomit? Why do your caresses constantly betray the urge to lash out?
Don't you know you are heading towards a heart attack, collapse and premature death? Why not give up your ‘worthy’ system of values once and for all, and recognise that your cyclical little life resembles that of your great grandfather, and that your great grandson’s life will resemble yours? Why do you fear to approach the monster and pull out his heart, despite knowing where he sleeps? Why do you obey the rules of your prison, knowing that outside the walls you will find the sun, the herbs, the lions, and all the delights of this world within easy reach of those who need them? I suspect that such cowardice, like fascism, becomes cellular, visceral, almost genetic.
You rip a deep wound into the chest of black people, you wish to exterminate the gypsies, you deny territory to the Palestinians and the Kurds, and you hold a thousand lives over the abyss of hunger, bureaucracy, slavery, and absolute misery. You claim that the sea belongs to you, that the fish are yours, that the sky is more open to you than it is to the birds. You demand fidelity from your women and domesticity from your men, with all the sadness that that signifies. Sincerely, I cannot understand you; I cannot go beyond the barrier between the primitive and the paranoid, between the troglodyte that you represent and the socialised automaton that you embody. All I know is that time, history and true policies will break you apart, demolishing the ambivalence of your desires; your convictions dividing your routine, contradicting your passions and transforming you into an iceberg in flames.
Unable to change a single word of the rules of your social institution, I bought myself a compass and set out to wander the roads of distant continents, driven by the hope of one day finding practical, lucid, liberated, reasonable and natural atheist men and women. I fantasised I'd meet someone who was beyond bestial charlatanism, morbid moralities, mystical cowardice, and the academic plague that proliferates amongst people. With only a few exceptions, I found petty navigators of life, pretentious scholars, wayward boys and old pederasts, repressed children, and middle-aged women still fucking to cure their phobias. I heard that the Brazilians exiled during the military dictatorship were risky, prudent and even men of genius... yet I have encountered them a thousand times in Pigalle street, by the Red Light Districts and in China Town, running after Senegalese prostitutes, searching for money lenders and for a messianic leader. If they weren't carrying Mao's Red Book under their arm, then it was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I read a hundred books on social revolution, political parties, ideologies and regimes. I compared the concerns of political prisoners to those of the famished, alienated and stupefied individual, and found that everything was equal, regardless of what party or clown was in command. The industrial middle-class always lives in symbiosis with the landowner middle-class, and the workers and peasants are always used as passive voters and the sparkplugs of cannons. There on the steps of parliament were the same ‘colonels’, brandishing the whips of Order and Leadership; old professionals of politics, all with a corrupt and dubious past, which the well-behaved workers dare not speak of. "He who speaks too much dies from the mouth" says the Mafia. And you, when you're not shitting yourself for fear of challenging them, are doing everything you can to occupy a place amongst those who have massacred you for centuries. These are the main reasons for your tolerance and inertia.
You exiled me several times; for having no money in my pocket, for sleeping with your daughter, for wandering and sleeping under the sun of your homeland, and for writing about your chronic stupidity and your miserable bureaucracy. Your eyes raged with hate when you realised that I was moved by the world, by a clear perception and perfect health. You hated me because you saw my freedom as the symbol of your slavery. You hated the sight of me wandering in your parks, with all my days free to watch the flowers awakening, the birds feeding, and the irrational march of your people.
I was alert for the State of the Vatican and you were there in your thousands, fighting to conceive an inconceivable ‘God’. Surrounded by the gold, wealth and luxury of those priests and the Pope, you knelt down like a coward, submissive and humble as a sheep, wearing the macabre silver-cross of a tortured Christ. Are you not ashamed to be an outcast? Are you not ashamed of polluting your children with that servile doctrine, with that rosary of idiotic grief? Can you not see that even you are more valuable than a mule, however stupid and villainous you may be? Paradoxes! Paradoxes! Paradoxes! You are the most banal of all paradoxes.
Yesterday, I read your little article about atheism and, despite all your Franciscan erudition, you displayed a completely closed mind, domesticated and driven only by faith. You pretend to be scientific, to work for truth, when truly you are repeating and reproducing a sick and delirious ‘philosophy’ with values fixed beyond the stars; you cannot tolerate the contradictions of existence. You have invented gods, messiahs and saviours throughout the centuries, as if your allotted time would pass more calmly, with less uncertainty... You endlessly repeat the same divine rot, the same ideological stupidities, the same brutalised shouts of abandonment and helplessness. By not understanding a crumb of the universe, you spend your life on your knees, postulating the existence of an imaginary being and paying off the installments for your own burial.
When will you discover that you are your own God and your own Devil? That your ‘God’ is the fist that fights, the sex that restores, the hunger that stimulates you to live, the creativity that distinguishes you, the hand that opens the blue curtains to a sunny March morning? When will you stop that obsessive spiel that keeps you spinning around like a poisoned cockroach, repeating hysterical clichés about the "beginning" and the "end of times"?
Do you know that you are the beginning and the end of everything? Yes, everything begins with your birth and everything will finish with your death. The days, the years and the future stupidities with which man will elevate himself unto a sacred level, all this depends upon you. Within you sleeps the absolutism and the relativism of all things. The time has come to settle the accounts and establish your own laws, to reckon with your own oversights and your own impudent cowardice. You must abandon the weight of shame under which you live; believe more in yourself than in the paranoid fragments that were drilled into your head when you were too young to know better. Observe the believers around you; always sighing, red eyes turned up to the heavens, hands together, stoical and miserly, begging pardon for sins that they have never committed. To whom, besides yourself, do you owe explanation for your acts? If you still do not know the origin and the meaning of life, then dive deep into your own life and uncover it. Do not adopt the pathetic face and weak voice of a condemned man. Lay down upon a wet stone in the jungle and listen to the constancy of the waters, the inconstancy of the winds and the sibylline breath of the viper that plots to poison you. Step with care amongst the herbs and leaves of the forests, let the vine and the thorns penetrate your virginity, your anaemic meat. Open yourself for the first time to the voices of the world, populace! For there is your God, your Devil and your Self. There is the enigmatic and mysterious trilogy, Self-God-Devil, engaging in an endless exchange of roles and privileges. You will soon discover that only the Self is real and the other two accomplices are nothing but empty ghosts, shifting shades that illustrate the distant night of men.
Oh, populace! If you could only set in motion the spiral of your true emotions, flicker your eyelids and end your disaster, raise your chin up and see the stars, those lustful stars that dance and flirt in space while you crawl like a worm. If you could see the agile hand of your women reaping the sweetness of time, the brave truth of the vagabond who bursts into joyous laughter at a tree, or your baby son's little penis that already wishes to piss in technicolour over the laws of the civilised world! If you could interrupt your cycle of pain, the cruel march triggered by your fragile feelings and the greed of the dreams that consume you! But it seems you cannot. It seems that a black hole has formed over your life and is sucking you blind. Already you are unable to touch, to experience, the simple essence of life. When happiness does flutter your way, it slips between your fingers like a drop of nectar in the desert. Rebel against yourself populace! Let out that choking scream that you have held down in your throat for centuries! Assume command of your unique and unquestionable journey! Blow up that emotional prison and those schizoid ethics, and see your body become a graceful dancer, and your conscience begin to disarm the traps that torment you.
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