Part Six

 
They cannot require that we swallow and taste the unpleasant pastel of human meat. They cannot require that our nostrils aspire with pleasure to the emanations of post-mortem. They cannot expect heroism from apathy or to disaffect the heart that is more fatally manifested with each day. One day we will have to admit that we react in a very courteous and moving way. The shrillest pamphlets do not sufficiently cover the disgust and scorn of general hypocrisy!


Hugo Ball



Once I witnessed your fury as your soldiers invaded a university; all in the name of one of many Latin dictatorships; all in the name of the corrupt and fascist politics that you carry with your look of hatefulness, a helmet strapped to your ears, an immaculate uniform and a pistol in your right hand, smashing everything before you. Wherever you go you leave a trail of blood and disorder, and an echo of your cold, bastardised war cry. In this you always excelled yourself. You sold honour to foreigners and embezzled the country’s wealth, tortured adolescents, threw many thousands of combatants into the sea, violated international law, and assumed the role of a brazen homicidal maniac. You were supported by the middle-classes, the landowners, the church and the universities. Society – cowardly and illiterate – either kept quiet or raised with you en masse, bearing the cross and the rifle against the right to think differently, against the passion of life, against truth, and against the mental health of youth.

     Then you nominated your wife, sons, friends and relatives, informers, and gunmen, to assume key positions in this nation that you believed to be yours. You encouraged base torture and corruption, intellectual decadence and the sacrifice of an entire generation. Still your swollen and drunken face showed no sign of shame, as you continued the struggle to perpetuate your mandate... Remember populace, you ridiculous little corporal. Do you remember the youths whose bodies you perforated with bayonets in your barracks’ cellar? Do you remember that adolescent girl whose vagina you wired to the electricity supply? Do you remember that publisher you bound and confined to a wooden box, and then simulated throwing out of a helicopter? Do you remember the mother your soldiers tied up, making her watch as you tortured her eight month old son? Do you remember the kidneys that you poisoned, the lungs and eyes that you pierced, the infamous torture equipment that you had installed in that abandoned garage? Of course you remember. It is futile for you to now present your piggy face and claim you were only “following orders”, that you “worked faithfully for the government and the homeland”, that you did not know what you were doing, that your victims were all delinquents, anarchists, communists, foreigners and child-eaters. You cannot hide your past – even kerosene would not clean those bloodstains from your hands. Your body language and your petrified face reveal the murderer that you were…and that you are. All those secret burials will one day suffocate your life. The sea in which you drowned hundreds of workers, students and intellectuals will swallow you in a great tsunami and spit your skeleton out into hell. Oh! I confess that it nauseates me on this sunny Saturday afternoon, just to think that you endure, that you have the right to reproduce like hyenas. It nauseates me that you infest all sectors of life, from hospitals to the Royal Academies, and that your senseless bombs continue to shatter lives and dreams... All is validated in your sickness, your desire for power, and the hungry animal that writhes within your chest.

     Flags are raised and knocked down. Governments rise and fall. Armies, ideologies, ministers and kings surrender and dance to the wild forces of nature and time. Everything explodes and implodes in vain and the cycle of sacrifice is repeated indefinitely. Still you do not realise that you will end up in a tiny pit of clay, deep in the ground. Before that day, you may want to ask yourself the question that Prometheus put to his brother: “What is there for us in heaven and on earth? Who cares for the judgments of men and gods?”

     This would be a good time for you to recognise that all your crimes were all in vain, and that nobody can assist you in achieving your delirious dreams. Forget cybernetics, psychology, sociology and your symptomatic medicine. You are alone. You have been alone since the moment you escaped the womb, and alone you shall forever remain. Forever…a fool with fantasies of community, family and universal fraternity. You surround yourself with admirers and slaves, but you remain a terrible distance from others. You cannot even escape yourself! You have built your home inside your own chest. Wake up populace! Throw yourself into the sea. Get out of the road so that others may move forward. You continue to live as a parasite and an executioner, dissolving all your ‘good actions’, disabling your discoveries, never enjoying the fortune you have deposited in foreign banks. None of these things will save you in your time of despair. You will return to your heroin, your religion or your Parabellum. All will ultimately be lost when you inevitably fall to your knees in depression and cowardice and ask: “Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

     Look back and see clearly; until now your whole life has been substantiated by nothingness and fraud. Your women are strict, repressed, asexual, sick slaves to all of life’s trivialities. See the expressions you offer your children and the intrigue that you weave for your lovers. See how they fight to seduce you and belong to you, you young family man, you worker and honest fool. The world recedes when you look into the mirror, seeing a beautiful Apollo. The women hunt you down, not from affection or lust, but from the promise of capital, and the right to a life that you otherwise deny them. It is curious how they dominate you! How they annihilate you! How they make you crawl under the weight of depression! A slight parting of the legs or a flash of cleavage and you want to marry them. However much you rate your scholarship, however much you reckon yourself a Don Juan or a Casanova, when faced with a common prostitute you are nothing but an ass. They know your weak spots, your fears, your open and bleeding wounds... And they know how and where to touch them with a piercing precision.

     For as long as you live I shall remain a sceptic. I will never hold a chicken, an umbrella or a piece of land with your name on it. You will always regard me as a drifter, marching in pace with the wind as I spy upon your ignominious march to the gallows. I sleep in nocturnal humidity, warm myself in sunlit avenues and by tattered poems of Hanshan... And I always carry my manifesto under my arm. I will not die without having first revealed you to yourself, and then denounced you to the world. I will not die before embarrassing you with your own steely reflection. I shall emblazon a retrospective of your crimes upon your forehead, and you will see all the destroyed trees, the poisoned rivers, the infertile fields, the senseless youth and the mass slavery... You will beat your chest and admit your blame and your crimes. You legal property thief, you defender of scoundrels. You will beat your tired chest and assume responsibility for the thousands of infants that you caught in your ‘judicial traps’ and for the fathers you separated from their own sons.

     It seems that nothing can be done to stop you, absolutely nothing, since you have the church, justice, the rabble and the entire middle-classes on your side. Your Sunday masks are Theosophy, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, politics, football and cabaret... I watch you with curiosity and my thoughts drift far away, and then return carrying the old curse of Plato: “If revenge does not catch up with you in this world, it will catch up with you in hell or some place even more horrible”. You will pay for all the dubious roads you have traversed; you will wander in the ravines and rest in the solitude of the desert, your face held between your hands and a cactus across your throat. You will awaken to the disgrace of having invested your life in morbid sadism against any manifestation of love. 

     The destruction of your character began a long time ago, at the moment that you were born; surrounded by automata dressed in white, less concerned with you than with how much the birth would cost them. Since birth you have been taught how to lie and pretend, and how to serve, under penalty of punishment. In adult life, you have so earnestly come to believe in your own lies that neither logic nor the whip could pull you out of it. In your intellectual life you have always oscillated from one extreme to another, just like old Mussolini. Marxism or Fascism? Idealism or Materialism? Determinism or Dialectics? Sensualism or Intellectualism? Atheism or Mysticism... God or Satan... Promiscuity or Asceticism? Life or Death? Absolute Decay or Resurrection? You never understood that Manichaeism is nothing but an idiotic vision of life. Sophistry, lies and cowardice are written on a table in a hotel or castle. Melancholic rhetoric confuses the decadent spirits and injects a virus of fear into the veins of civilisations. You spent all your adolescence ‘choosing’ a profession, looking for clues as to which flock would serve you better. A veterinarian, a professor, a priest, an architect, a rabbi, a pimp? All the while, the solemn voice of a nomad, a vagabond, a gypsy, sang within you. You chose the future calling of your senile relatives, of a dying society. And today you have a chain of hotels, schools, clinics, supermarkets. Today you are as fat as a pig and your arse sweats like an Australian monkey. You pray every morning to your god, clearly not the god of the primitives, but more like a symbol of the stock exchange. You fell into the social trap of craving success at any cost and you pass this disease onto your children without the slightest regret. Remember the words of Duce: “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere”? Fascism seems to have ended as a social movement and become instead a biological-cellular fact that flows through your semen and saliva. Your existence is such a ridiculous comedy! All your gestures are fertilised in pain! All your claims carry the brand of your slavery and, while you work obsessively to accumulate wealth, you openly permit the annihilation of your sexuality, in slavery to your profit-starved bosses.

     You are obliged to lie, to wear the costume of a fool and to pucker your arsehole in the name of community. Meanwhile, a vagabond indulges himself in the Greek sun, far away from your ghoulish clutches. Another itinerant drifts along the roads of India, laughing and singing with beggars, watched by the melancholy eyes of goats, ruminating on gravel and on your choreography and ‘gestalt’. While you pay your eighth instalment to secure a place for your gravestone in the most luxurious cemetery of the State, hundreds of Palestinian combatants rot in the topsoil. While you hire detectives to monitor the intimacies of your woman, your antithesis drives her crazy with passion as she awakes with him to birdsong and the horns of a pirate ship in the Caribbean. Flowers, mushrooms, sheep, houses as white as pure snow, a woman of the world, the snail-shaped pubis of an adolescent and a few dollars tied in a little leather purse. Perhaps there is only this life, the sole reason for existence. For you to taste it you would have to break through the barriers of time, break through that wall of ice that separates you from yourself.

     Once upon a time, in a far distant continent, as the snow fell in a silent whitewash, someone knocked upon your door and asked for a plate of food, or a sip of coffee. You gesticulated “no” from the window, the face of a ‘respectable citizen’ and the gesture of a eunuch Christ. At another opportune moment you were in the Port of Alcântara, killing seagulls for pleasure and preventing me from embarking in the Giulio Cesare. I slept with your wife in Alentejo, while you were in San Francisco crawling at the feet of a group of Zionists and dreaming that you might one day return to your “dear Portugal”, cured of your misery, with pockets full of dollars. You trade your woman and child for a promise held within cheap metal, never knowing when you will be able to raise yourself from this stupefaction. Your wife also wonders when you will stop thinking like a madman, the man who cried; “Kill me while I am still faithful.” When will you finally leap out of the window of that prison you inhabit, and understand that you have been immortal and eternal since the moment you decided to obey the law of reason? Nietzsche, in his mortal fight against your kind, has already written:

“I discovered that to old humanity, to the old animalism, the night of the times in its totality and the past of any sensible being continues to write in me, to love and hate through me... I awake suddenly amidst this dream, but I awake with the consciousness of having dreamed and that I should continue to dream in order not to perish: as should the sleepwalker to keep from falling. What is the appearance now, for me? Surely it will not be the contrary of being... What can I say of anything other than the attributes of its appearance? Appearance for me is life and action itself, the life that makes sufficient fun of itself, that shows it is only appearance, a will-o'-the-wisp, a dance of elves and nothing more. Like so many dreamers I also “know” that the dance is the same as that of others; that the “expert” serves to prolong terrestrial dances, that he is part of existence and the sublime spirit of the sequence, the sublime coordination of all knowledge, perhaps the most supreme means for maintaining the generality of reverie, the understanding of all dreamers and thus the duration of the dream”.

     Then you are quiet, not from wisdom, but from panic. But I know that you will forget everything that you have read here within five minutes. A gulp of spirits is all it takes, or a prayer, or a milligram of heroin, then everything is relegated to the ‘forgotten’. Isn’t that so? Well, you should know that silence and shyness are the two most powerful weapons of the counter-revolution. Shame, modesty, humility: all these weaknesses of character subtly promote the counter-revolutionary spirit. Perhaps it is my fascination with your amnesia that leads me to dedicate so much of my life to getting to know you, to mingling with your castes, to eating your totemic flummery, to listening to your commemorations and funerals, to feeling your breath, your desires, and your megalomania.

     You write fiction, invent stories, jokes, and detective novels for consumption by a bored and stupid middle-class public that have time and money to waste, and cannot sleep without that sort of Valium. Even though you think you are an intellectual, a scholar or cultural antenna, you are nothing but an employee, an idle diplomat who writes to elicit a laugh or a cry from people who possess nothing inside. Essentially, you are akin to the ladies of the night, although I am sure that you are the cause of much greater evil in this world. You remove your hat, scratch your arse and ask me, “What, after all, is a prostitute?” And I reply with a paragraph of a young French philosopher:

“The same thing as a worker, as a member of staff of the post-office, however with the following nuance: she earns a living much more easily and her radical cynicism prevents her from believing in the divinity of the genitals. The psychiatrist would have it that she is a nymphomaniac or a psychopath; the Tartuffe would claim that it was in her skin; the charitable sister would desire to fill the affectionate lack that had taken her to degradation; the Maoist would seek to cure her by sending her to work in the fields; and the Trotskyite would send her to the factory. In actuality, her only “illness” is atheism: she has lost faith in the genitals.” (B. F.)

     You opened your eyes, breathed deeply, and carefully withdrew from my brutality.

     In your writings you inquire gently and feign genius. Incredibly, the sleepy public falls into your trap. The neurotic crowd cry when faced with the Holocaust, laugh at Chaplin and shit themselves at Dante's Hell. Oh, the middle classes are so surreal, they cannot even fart naturally! Merchants, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, disciples, thieves, bureaucrats, smugglers...the most tormented classes. Robespierre, Hitler, Mussolini, Frank, Salazar, Trujillo, Pilate, Herod, Somoza, Fulgêncio, the Inquisition... All, in their affinity, are beneficiaries and representatives of this class of vipers without identity. All become furious at the certainty that they are nothing, absolutely nothing! It is curious that even dictatorships and churches remain unconcerned by your intellectual junk. You may one day realise that the only intellectual writing tolerated by an authoritarian regime and by the church is indisputably reactionary, demagogic and hypocritical.

     I see you leaving your home in the morning, wearing a French jacket and a beard, a book by Rose Luxembourg under your arm, observing your reflection in shop windows; a professional of the Moulin Rouge. You are certain that truth is all yours, that you shall fill that vacancy at the Royal Academy of Sciences and that the vast majority of this illiterate society will remove their hats and revere your wisdom.

     I lived with you for a few days and watched your hero-obsession. I can only believe in the Breviary of Cioran where he affirms that there:

“...exists more smoothness in addiction that in virtue, more humanity in depravation than in severity. A man that reigns and believes in nothing is the model of a heaven of decadence, of a sovereign solution to history. It was the opportunists who saved the people; the heroes ruined them. It is necessary to feel a contemporary, not of the revolution of Bonaparte, but of Fouché and of Talleyrand.”

     There is little hope that you will move away from your hermetic societies, anonymous companies, schizoid religions and secret services that you follow with utter dedication. It is doubtful that you could transcend this ridiculous role as a domesticated male, or forsake the taboos under which you agonise in horror. It seems that you will never again know how to live without the shadow of a leader, without the fist of a usurer, or without your bi-weekly sadomasochistic liaisons.

     When will you rise up and wipe the boot marks of your oppressor from your face? When will you teach your children to question life and the dogmas, lies and farces that the states and schools forcibly inject into their veins? When will you seek to raise an autonomous, creative, critical, and rebellious infant, instead of those poor creatures you domesticate, with Ritalin and the whip, those servants that populate your schools? When will you see that the only thing that differentiates you from the noble and rich is the amount of money that you do not possess, and that all that differentiates you from the misers, beggars and marginalised minions is the farce that you sustain? Oh, your silence and your stoic smile are an affront to life... You symbolise the most abject shame that the world has ever known!

     Sometimes I think your case could be organic, but then I perceive that what you lack is discernment, will, wisdom and shame; that you undoubtedly represent the wasted potential of this world. A useless petrified shadow in a world full of enchantment! Of irreverent passions! Of high peaks to climb! Your drawer is flooded with barbiturates, somniferous and narcotic, and your intestines haven't functioned since your last night out. If you would permit me, I shall reveal to you a secret that even the vultures of medicine do not know; all of the great murderers of history suffered from constipation. You poor rat! You poor potbelly! With your chain of rented apartments, you suck the blood of the industrious poor and subservient peoples... You are rotten inside. It is useless to raise your voice in the Senate or Parliament, in the Union or the Synagogue, in the Tennis Academy or the International Meeting of Spiritualist Youth, to accuse me of generalising, of exaggerating, of sending my “frustrations” out into the world...Of being a nihilist, of being useless to human progress, of pissing over taboos and moral dogmas, of proclaiming licentiousness and nomadism, of being apolitical, an atheist, a communist, a rebel, a selfish individualist, an anarchist or – shock horror! – a psychoanalyst.

     Your gestures are useless. I have seen you many times on this same stage, talking that morbid, fanatical, ‘revolutionary’ talk. You convince nobody, apart from arse-lickers and the devout masses, the hysterically blessed, who fortify dictatorships and empires.

     One thing is certain: with your arsenal of idiocies and ‘normalisms’ you dominated the world. Congratulations, populace! The world belongs to you, with all that was born and developed in it, from the invisible bacteria that fester in a wound, to the sensuality of the Indians of the north. You knew when the time was ripe for sowing and you harvested the fruit of your seeds, and so you have the right to distort the lives and ways of people. Congratulations charismatic leader, manager of properties built upon the slavery of anonymous millions! Congratulations for being an untouchable, and perpetuating the final act of our miserable lie that is commercial society...

     Now, populace, now the individual human is completely alienated, fragile and stupefied. Nobody doubts this. But he is not ignorant to the deception in the wings, in the dressing-room, and in the cells of your temple.

     In your actions and words it is clear that the great tragedy of your life is your relationship with women. You have banished passion, replacing it with a neurotic flame of sexuality, hysteria and endless competitiveness. Consciously or not, you have made your wife your biggest enemy, and today she mocks you, disowns you, and drives you to premature insanity. Let us be clear: you deserve it. These long-oppressed women steal your money, your sleep, and your peace of mind. In exchange, you are permitted to penetrate their vaginas and anuses from time to time, to ejaculate into their bowels and make them your wives, to fulfil the most ridiculous of commandments. Your soul is typical of Tartuffe. What irony! You need to ‘discharge’ this emotional and muscular tension so much that is destroying you.

     I hear you ‘philosophise’ about women, as convinced of your concepts as the church was about the constitution of the universe. Other times I hear you discussing the ideal woman: healthy, jazz lover, assumed sexuality, atheist, simple, cultured... Come now populace, it is obvious that a woman of that profile would abhor you…  


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