Part Five

“I proclaim the opposition of all the cosmic faculties to that blennorrhoea of a putrid sun that issues from the factories of philosophical thought, a fight to the death, with all the resources of DADAIST DISGUST. Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every hierarchy and social equation established for values by our valets: DADA; every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition of archaeology: DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future: DADA; the absolute and unquestionable belief in every god that is an immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant and unprejudiced leap from on harmony to another sphere; the trajectory of a word, a cry, thrown into the air like an acoustic disc; to respect all individualities in their folly of the moment – this is Dada…”

Tristan Tzara

By the content of your speeches, by the fanfare of your headlines, by the new constitution of your country, I am ever more convinced that you are not aware of your great part in perpetuating this sick ‘order’ of society, of inducing the sickness of humanity. It is through you that the ‘despots’ raise their fortresses, create axioms against life, and conjure doctrines and formulas to enslave our grandsons and great-grandsons. You are too blind to see that life has slipped through your fingers, that you have only had access to perishable matter, cosmic illusion and tombs of clay...  But you hold fast to your belief, “this is my fate”, affirming like a monkey that “this is my karma”, that “the humble will be exalted”, that “many are called, but few are chosen”, and so on. You were soon alienated by all these doctrines, never discerning that they were substantiated by the logic of “every man for himself”. Doubt everything, populace! Let yourself say “yes” or “no”, and do not fear to wound the philistines that surround you. The time has arrived to destroy the law of farce.  The need to comply and perpetuate the social and intellectual fraud of this itinerate casino is finished. Since everything comes to pass and everything shall always pass, pull the trigger of boldness and reinvent your life. Discover the formula of doing everything with arrogant harmony. Be yourself (if that still exists!). Turn your disguise inside out and make yourself superior to the traps that lie ahead. In this way even you will one day learn to love yourself, to walk with the stride of one who knows his destination, to release from your muscular armour the conditioned ‘goosestep’ of the Nazis. But please do not think that you will discover some “divine flame” within, or some vestige of the “enlightened man”, because those deliria will not serve the mind of the emancipated man. The only remnants of yourself that will endure – and I know this knowledge frightens you – are those of Neanderthal Man. Populace, you will rehabilitate the Neanderthal within, for only the Neanderthal will regain the pleasures of life, the knowledge to guide children, the gracefulness to fall in love, the deftness to overcome the natural obstacles of existence, and the lucidity to see the Universe as something that is beyond – way beyond – a petty stock market. Only in this way can you appreciate and understand the lifecycle of flowers, the furtive flight of owls, the weeping of a beggar and the rumble of waves on a winter’s night. Only in this way, my dear contemporary, will you find pleasurable work, regain the psychological and moral capacity to have leisure time, and abide together in quiet courage amidst the momentary banality of this world. There exists a path by which you can regain your health, a calm voice, open gestures and a consistent heartbeat; a path along which the ‘gods’ and masters who have filled the human mind with hell shall evaporate, like ether, from the world. You shall return to nomadic ways, denying all philosophies, travelling across continents without fear, without a stone to rest your head. Have you already conquered liberty? Very well! The avowal of this liberty is nothing but a new kind of loneliness... that is it. An incurable feeling of being even more lost, a castaway in a sea of hungry sharks, face to face with the finite, the most elevated stage of man. And it is there, in that place, that you should remember the famous words of Lao-Tse, as the guru recited to his guests:

“And do not raise yourself up on tiptoes, for you will not stand it for a long time! And do not take great steps, for you will not go too far!  And do not exhibit yourself, for you will not shine! And do not affirm yourself, for your merit will not be recognised! And do not praise yourself, for you will never be a leader!”    

     Doubtless I am wasting my time here at this desk with these tattered papers, for I am certain that you do not frequent bookstores, let alone read the pamphlets that portray you. I know the literature you favour and I know how your interpretive capacity is limited. Despite this life of surprises, mockeries and charms, everything you see is transformed into morbid tragedy, depression and disaster. Of course it is not your fault, populace! You did not ask to be born of a rich mother of the twentieth-century, or to be yanked out of a Caesarean section, or to be denied breastfeeding. Your only real fault is in not developing a will, not declaring war, not desiring to move beyond this tasteless joke.

     For over a decade you have written for a corrupt press that has censored your work. You pray to the ghosts of more than twenty centuries who have done nothing to alter a comma of your misfortune. You continue to venerate political corpses, oppress the spontaneity of youth, charge a fortune for consultations, take your children to religious schools, work towards non-existent progress, employ spies, cry out for a football team or for the leader of a State, burn forests, shit in rivers and spread political fear to all borders. You swallow medicine to calm your nerves, dish out anguish and blame your daughters, study your neighbours, lie and exhibit yourself before pseudo-magnates, and mindlessly bleat the most shameful of old paradoxes; “waste a life to earn a life”.  

     You never read a phrase of Kierkegaard. You have a paranoid fear of the so-called “communist”, the “fascist”, the “anarchist”, and your snoring instincts.  You still cultivate a gargantuan jealousy, a mortal envy, a primitive chauvinism and a chaotic feminism. You still cannot accept the freedom of people; you prohibit your partner from looking at other people or from giving themselves to another, for you know your own inferiority and insecurities, and if you do not cage your ‘bird’, it will surely abandon you.  You have an irrational fear of being abandoned and alone, with your clumsiness with women, your balding head and your belly hanging over your waist. You fear impotence, of flying at half-mast, of becoming effeminate... You fight tirelessly for an interminable erection so as to maintain your image of super-virility, but your fight fatally confines you to the very prison from which you struggle to escape. You are not self-sufficient, not a man of the world.  You buy shields and accumulate dollars, famous names and fortresses of stone to save you. But you take comfort that, at least in this, you are no different from or worse than your peers.  

“We disguise our fight, accumulate figures in our savings account to subtly reflect our heroic worthiness, buy a bigger house than our neighbour, a more expensive car, raise more intelligent sons. Deep inside, behind all social facts, vibrates the desire to obtain cosmic singularity, the need of not being forgotten in a world of nothingness.” (E. Becker)

     Maturity objectifies you and makes you more unbearable. You have barely ventured across the road, yet you criticise those who choose a life of travel. You pretend to have seen the Louvre, and been in the Lido, and run with the bulls through the plaza, as if your lies will somehow diminish the anguish of your insignificance. Yesterday I saw you at the local hall where they were showing a play by Ibsen. Today you tell me that you saw this play at a Parisian theatre. You do not realise that, with each lie you tell, you deny your own body. You do not realise that, when you spout your deliria and megalomania, your facial expression reveals you as a derelict man. You blush, your feet point inwards, you cough and your jaw tightens whenever you wear these masks; masks that do not fit your face or your true history. You can be sure that it is not for you that the eagles carry food in their beaks.  You are not cut out for the highest peaks or the depths of the abyss. Your fate grazes in the mediocrity of the vast plains or, at best, in the corrals of some modern estate.   

     I do not deny that I sometimes pity you, especially when I consider that you shall never know or experience human happiness, or even ephemeral moments of joy. On the contrary, as the goddess said of Prometheus:

“Rich will be your part in the “pain of the heart” in the land of men. Deprivation, disgust, dissatisfied desire and stifling anguish in the silence of nights. In eternal frustration your life shall run, day after day, year after year and you shall have neither rest nor respite, and you will be as happy as any animal that sleeps, loves and dies according to the laws of the nature.”

Oh populace, you shall never see the day of ‘glory’, the day of sensuality, when the goddess disrobes before you and your body opens to its desires; when her breasts are upon you, her genitals bonded with yours, her eyes on yours, your hearts beating together...causing you to howl with pleasure for the first time. You spend your days without lust, sensuality or sexuality and so you do not know what love is. Your body does not know the spasms of ecstasy, the tricks of passion, the revolutionary strikes of libido.  At best you were a ‘rabbit-in-coitus’, a woman in missionary, turning sex into a means to an end, always feeling ashamed, frustrated and ‘sinful’.  And so you whine that life is pure illusion, a sea of tears and tragedy, and that sex is dirty and obscene. You cannot understand that your tragedy lies in your system of values, in your irrational denial of the body, pleasure and life. Each day your spine curves a little further, your pelvis becomes more frozen, your hands more brutalised, your eyes more distrustful, your buttocks more flat and your cunt more dry, withered and withdrawn. Only the suicidal and paranoid are capable of neglecting their bodily functions, “spirit”, “soul” and the “mystic fluids” to this level. Only a civilisation seduced by the guillotine could follow doctrines and philosophies that promise “glory” and a “kingdom of heavem” in exchange for the renunciation of the present. Only madmen could support this fetid and mediocre comedy that you follow. You are a sad and misused herald of our time. 

     I often noticed your resemblance to that dog described by Carl Spitteler, licking its owner’s hands while he strangles its cubs. Submission is the morality of mules, and through it the world sinks into a swamp. It is clear that you were a ready-made, a born submissive; that you grew up a submissive, studied submissively and worked submissively; that you joined the army, got married and baptised your sons with total submission. And for your seasoned submissiveness you carry within your choreography the absurd signature of servility.

     Yesterday I saw you marching briskly up the street. Suddenly, mysteriously, you slowed down, as if a chronic apathy had accosted you. You let yourself be blown by the wind, you dragged your leg like an invalid, your eyes narrowed with insecurity, your hands clasped tightly onto a package and the arteries of your neck throbbed with sclerosis. As you passed the beggar, you recovered your posture of professional expedience, sought a coin from your jacket and flipped it towards him with a barely ‘noble’ gesture, careful not to make contact with those dirty soliciting hands. Then your chest expanded, you looked around and walked confidently on, confident that you would be re-elected as deputy, to perpetuate the status quo of lies, bribes and frauds.

     In these everyday moments you do not seem to realise how, by registering it in your name, you become a slave to the land; how, by serving those who eat five times a day, you become hungry; how the sick hell of your existence stems from neglect of your own body; how the “gods” abandoned you because you always prostrated yourself before them as an outcast, fragile and devout, bereft of any personal pride. Where did you hide your pride, populace? Without pride your life cannot progress, and soon you will transform into a salesperson, a lawyer or a profit-obsessed street merchant. Without pride you humiliate yourself, you throw yourself down to be trampled underfoot, under the boots of risky, ignorant, contemptible and psychotic men... Do not present that face of a Benedictine monk!  You know very well which kind of pride I refer to.  There are people who are proud to tell stories about themselves, stories that would shame the most primitive of reptiles. Let your pride be for love of the self!  Walk amongst men as if they are pyramids, with the fundamental knowledge that you are the sole lord of your acts and deeds. Belong to nobody and to nothing: no school, no religion, no party, no philosophy and no ways of this world. Pass through life smiling at the tropical sun, with indifference to the sordid whims and projects of men. Then you shall learn how to caress your wife, how to listen and understand the voice of your sons, how to think and act in rhythm with the world and how to cease whipping those who steer this eminent ship of insanity. Then you will be closer to your nature. But be careful out there. Watch that the masses do not mistake you for a new Messiah and begin following you like a fanatical sheep. And if that happens, recite them the words of old Zarathustra:

“I order you to leave me and to find you in yourselves; and only when every one of you has renounced me, despised me and trampled me, only then will I return to you and I will love you with a different kind of love!!!”

     Support yourself through the philosophies and thoughts of others, but do not believe in masters.  Chart your own journey. Do not be lead by that thirst for power that sleeps in the veins of cowards. Save yourself and represent all cultures.  Save yourself and you will respect them all. Save yourself and you will understand that we are an end, not a means. We are of this world, we live in it and we shall disappear from it. Our future is today; tomorrow is of interest only to the paranoid. Forward, companion! It is for you that birds are born featherless, that turtles lose themselves in the desert, that crows dive into the coffins of horses. Forward! Ironically, you are the one that drives the world. The philosophers, the investigators, the recluses, and even the geniuses depend on you. Within you is the nourishment, the laws and the weapons that sustain empires. Within your heart sleeps the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of humanity. By your spontaneous acts, all the abysmal pain of the people is solidified. You are responsible for your vain hopes; you are the sole architect of your fraud. When life is handed to you too easily and simply, you become unexpectedly ill, you become unbalanced in the narrative of your dream-world. Believe me, populace: everything that you fight for desperately, everything that you sacrifice yourself for, only to end up in despair, all of these things come easily to the liberated man. To the liberated man nothing is lacking, because the world was made for him. To the liberated man come exotic palaces, wheat fields and the roots of a lotus that sleeps at the bottom of a marshland. To the liberated man come crystalline rivers, great passions, lucid friends and the first moments of morning. Remember the insistence of the elder Tolstoy:

“My estate is that which belongs only to me, that with which I can do what I want, that which nobody can steal from me, that which will continue to be mine until the end of my days and that which I should use, increase and improve. The estate of every man is himself”.   

     The world belongs to free men or, if you prefer, to vagabonds, to wandering gypsies, to the sons of the wind that, with their tools, arrive at the origin of the whole. Son of the world! This you once were, and this you can be once more, populace!!! 

     Distinguish yourself from those around you as the baby eagle does; invent your own Mount Everest. For some day you will need to identify your father and your mother, to know who your friend is, and who your enemy. You will find yourself diving into a profound silence and, in that moment, you will instantly know the loneliness of centuries.