Here’s a thought: maybe there’s no peace in this miserable world because we’re all trying to control our impulses all the time.

I have a simple rule I follow, I do exactly as I please. Interestingly, however, this policy isn’t easy to live by, because first of all, you can no longer bitch whine and complain about other sh*ts making your life miserable, and second, you have to follow that deceptively facile impulse all the way. It is because of these inherent difficulties that very few people do as they please, and why generally, people find it easier to follow other people’s orders and complain about them.

The first thing that happens when you do as you please is you necessarily become unemployed. To be employable is to agree to do what you don’t want to. Now many of you might say that’s easy for me to say, I don’t have children, maybe I know people who help me with money, bla bla bla. Sure, but that doesn’t change how hard it is. I have chosen the life I live, I live only and entirely because I wish to do as I please. I have no children, I own very little, I hardly ever go out, I live like a snail whose slime is running out, I have a stack of debts piling up that would scare any living mortal that didn’t have the insane conviction about all of this that I do.

It isn’t easy. It is isolating, dull and often nerve-wrackingly monotonous. I have now for a long time gone without new clothes, new shoes and all the crap that goes with being female in this dastardly excuse for a civilization. I do go out and yes, when I do, I spend extravagantly, which is again, doing as I please and not at all conducive to ‘living on my limited means.’ But I do count these sorties on one palm of my smallish hands. Also, I have learned to let other people pay, which is something my proud nature once found extraordinarily hard to do.

In other words, doing as you please amounts to living wildly, impulsively, and (apparently) irresponsibly. But here it is, to be responsible to yourself is much harder than to be responsible to other people. It is extraordinarily difficult because first, you are taught it is morally wrong and so every bone in your body rebels against it, second, you have no guarantees and only yourself to fall back on. It doesn’t look like those holiday brochures where you’re on a bloody hammock all day. BUT, when you live this way, you are led inward to your highest treasure: yourself. You are led to the greatest and most sacred truth of all: that you are free, and in your freedom lies the world’s salvation.

The second thing you find when you do as you please, is that your friends show very little sympathy. The sympathy most people share with each other who live utterly enslaved existences in exchange for wages and houses and all the crap they buy (to justify their enslavement and teach their children enslavement) is the sympathy offered by one prisoner to another. A man who refuses the prison cell is immediately the object of generalized contempt. This isn’t because people are assholes, although a large number of people teach themselves to be assholes since they are subjected to assholery all their lives; it isn’t even because they can’t be like you and so they envy you for it, although there is some of that too. Mainly, it is because you have exited the world of their shared sympathies. Since we were all taught sometime in the 18th century that the nation state was a worthy inevitability and that life in strict social classes within this state was also a worthy universality to aspire to, we have all learned to live within our means, which is to say, we have increasingly and totalizingly become OBEDIENT. The price for this obedience is our sanity, self-respect and our entire lives, which is to say our freedom, but the reward is our prosperity, comfort and security. And since we live in an occupied territory (our lives, bodies and impulses), security has gradually replaced fulfilment, freedom and all other values in our minds as a priority. This is what keeps your friends on the straight and narrow: this obsession with security. Which is why, when you exit this obsession with security, you become a pariah.

If you have exited this prison, even if it means living a beggarly existence, you begin to taste freedom in a society that despises, fears and denies it even exists (freedom, that is). Now, you are solely to blame for your own predicament, and interestingly, people show little sympathy for your difficulties when you are solely to blame for them. They sympathize more if you are merely be pitied. That is, when other people do things to you. I respect those who seek out freedom at all costs. This is why I give money to bums, while most of the people around me do not. This is why I know people with chronic diseases or problems find that they constantly must walk a razor’s edge to keep getting sympathy, because if you are once cursed, once excluded, you are required to work hard to keep getting people to love you…

The problem is an old one, nicely represented in the folktale of the ant and the cicada… I am a cicada. I dance through the summer and I sleep through the winter. And if no one will help me, I will dance to my death! But I will not be a drone. That much I know.

And yet, to go inward is the only way to make it going outward. You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself. Why on earth would you want to ‘save the planet’ when you are terrified of being free of all that destroys it? If you can’t imagine life without your job and the safe structure it provides, you cannot do anything for the bloody planet. Eating organic and saving plastic are not going to do it. The end of life as you know it, is the only way out. The earth, the universe, life: they demand music, dance and drama. They demand caprice, whimsy and personal volition. This is why the old world had gods, while we have machines. Unfortunately, a society driven by rationality, productivity and obedience, where life is a prison occupied by a large army of timid robots (who in turn are obsessed with security, the poor saps) is so powerfully dull, even the earth declares us a lost cause. The earth is bored. The universe is bored. The human race will be destroyed, simply because it doesn’t even know why life is good. Why it’s worth living. If you’re dead even before you’ve died, why on earth would anyone save you? Even the earth wants you dead. And you won’t care. Why would you?

If I as a child had been told my school was burning down, I would not have run to save it. You don’t wish to save that which you despise. We are not unwittingly causing our demise. We have become such a bored, tired race of dull, consuming, apathetic leeches, we just don’t care about life anymore. Life sucks so bad, we don’t mind if it all goes to hell.

So here’s what I propose. I actually believe we are more united when we are disparate, more similar when we are less alike and more caring when we are absolutely free to do as we please. I also believe we are more happy that way even if we struggle more. Peace comes from equivalent, strong people respecting each other’s strength. This is not the same as the 80’s policy of deterrence, which only encourages envy and emulation; this is genuine respect. Deterrence is not respect, it is disguised domination.

Let me give you an example. Recently, I watched a documentary about the Kamayura Indians of the Brazilian Amazon (yes, I watch a lot of documentaries, I’m poor remember?). They had an extraordinary ritual for remembering the dead and commemorating peace between their villages. They cut down four large logs, painted and decorated them, then put them in the ground in the center of one village for a few days. During those days, the women celebrated the ritual of death by the making of salt, and the men wrestled. The men who attended these wrestling matches came from all the neighboring villages. The point was never to get angry or disdainful, and if you did, an elder intervened and fixed things. When everyone had wrestled and either won or lost, the final outcome was the creation of close ties of mutual respect and camaraderie between the villages and the cathartic acting out of mutual aggression so that a more organized and irrational form of egoistic violence (WAR!) could be avoided.

All ancient cultures had similar ritualized events of joy, creativity and violence. Where each individual could play out their abilities and desire for aggression. There were no winners or losers, but there were masters and aspirants. Even our public sporting events are somewhat similar, as are our fairs and carnivals. The playing out of egoistic aggression in play becomes a substitute for actual war. It would work even today, if we weren’t such a repressed, un-free truckload of idiot barbarians.

But let’s come back to the Kamayura Indians and their fairly remarkable ritual. Two things strike me immediately. First, the banality of salt is here sacralized. Second, there is the counter-intuitive logic of violence avoiding violence. Salt, a banal thing nowadays, acquires ritual significance here, and it is only the old women who know how to do it, while wrestling among the men prevents war. Now I’m not one of those who believes you can simply transplant rituals like these into today’s world, that’s balls. But I do believe there is something here which we would do well to learn. Or re-learn.

First, the salt. Well, to me, the ritual sacredness of salt is again, the counter-intuitive thing at work. What seems innocuous isn’t. What seems to be common is not. Salt makes food easier to eat, it therefore not only represents the first stages of human civilization, it also represents a strangely playful and mystical pact between us and nature. Nature as biology and nature as pleasure: our bodies need salt and our tongues enjoy it. In other words, we are told by nature that a spoonful of pleasure makes the food go down. We become through the ritual of salt, creatures of need and of desire, of process and of whimsy, of logic and of art, of the free, organic come and go of that sacred, ancient game between life as utility and life as fun. All this is being said here through the ritual of salt. It is nature’s way of relaying to us her secret circular way: free-wheeling pleasure as creativity, creativity as process, process as necessity, necessity as whimsy, whimsy as pleasure (and back again). This is the full and magnificent circle of life, represented by the female and her own particular knowledge. But you can’t know this is if your life is either process or pleasure. If your life is strictly divided into days for work and days for leisure. If both your pleasure and your work depend on someone else’s desire and never your own. If you don’t know what the hell your life is about, or what significance your life has beyond the damn few pennies you bring home at the end of a gruelling, soul-killing month at work. You will not comprehend the ritual if you have totally and absolutely killed the free-playing spontaneous child within yourself.

But let’s go now to the second part of the ritual. What seems to increase hostility tends to avoid war. What seems to celebrate violence does not. This one is harder. Ostensibly, the wrestling ought to increase competitiveness and ego conflict. But what if this were not the case? We live in a deeply self-denying culture, where only the few, beautiful, rich and successful (the winners) are valued. We live in huge cast-iron hierarchies we never question, from school right down to our jobs. The obedience we learn at school is later played out a million times as we learn to accept conditions we otherwise should not (if obedience had not been schooled into us as children.) We can’t do the work we like, we can’t finance our lives, businesses or projects easily. We can’t live where and how we want, work when we choose, work without some prick breathing down our necks. Everywhere, the individual is under pressure from various institutions he feels smaller than and inferior to: banks, local government and its laws, the police, immigration authorities, tax authorities, landlords, and the enormous and largely invisible hierarchy of social class and class privilege. It’s a subtle interplay between us and a range of people we feel powerless against. And yet, we go on. We are even happy some of the time. Why? How? Because we are accustomed to it all. We are accustomed to escape defined as pleasure. This is why Friday night is everyone’s idea of a good time. We talk arrogantly about ancient Egypt and its so-called slaves (what a laugh!) but we live in abject slavery to a vast machinery of institutions and individuals whose authority we not only never question, we rarely even see it. If anything, we seem to need it. If you lived in a world where you were required to be free and think for yourself, most of you would panic. And that’s a fact!

So let’s take a more concrete example. Let’s say one day of every month, you got to take on your bosses, your teachers, the police, your banker, your tax officer, your in-laws. You got to take on all those who you thought were total and utter hopeless wankers. You got to tell your bankers they couldn’t get a loan, you got to arrest your local cop, you got to audit your tax man and take his hard-earned cash, you got to sit on a bench and judge a judge, you got to stick a tube up your arrogant doctor’s ass. Think about how that would change your relationship with them, and more importantly, theirs with you! What if one day of every month, you got to go into exclusive stores while rich people couldn’t, you got to pay your cab fare with a cabinet minister’s money, you got to kick whichever local bully you despised righteously up the hiney and without intervention. THIS is what is being played out in those Kamayura wrestling matches. We are not talking about the kind of violence we modern brain-slaves are used to: the kind of violence which perpetuates power, where the powerful remain safe, and where only the sad little losers are sent up against each other, doomed to fail. This is not a fixed contest like we live with everyday, where the police, judges, rich and powerful always win. This is not wrestling codified according to class. This is not the rich Romans watching while the gladiators tear each other to pieces. This is the gladiators fighting the senators. This is wrestling to erase class. It is the kind of violence we can only dream of, or watch in our sad, pathetic dreamings of super-heroes and vigilante Russel Crowes. But think of it. Think of a society in which power was constantly questioned. Where there was no facile superiority. In the Kamayura wrestling matches, anyone takes on everyone. And everyone must fight. The masters are respected but they are never beyond being slammed to the ground by a novice. And that’s what guarantees peace. Peace between villages, peace among the many warriors of one single village. This is violence that teaches respect. Chaos that breeds order. Banality that inculcates a feeling for sacred uniqueness. You give what you get, you get what you give. Self-interest for self-sacrifice. You take it and you dish it out.

This is when you realize how utterly fallen we are as a race even as we constantly prate on about our superiority to all other peoples and epochs. Not one of our institutions encourages such equality, not one encourages such camaraderie, cooperation, togetherness and friendship. And this is why even our play looks like war. We are so terribly tragically frustrated as individuals, we can only hang on to a little schadenfreude during our reality-show watching to give us pleasure. It’s all we have. Do you want to save this planet? I sure as hell don’t…

So to come back to doing as you please… From what I have experienced, doing as you please is the most rebellious act you can commit. It derails the whole idea of the Enlightenment, according to which the elites do as they please, while the rest of us live in a soup of ‘rationality’ which stems not from our own individual recipes but from some inordinately complicated set of principles enshrined somewhere, usually in a set of documents held up by a highly repressive nation-state. To do as you please means to live of yourself, by yourself, through yourself and in and out of yourself. To do as you please is therefore the most radical notion of all. It is not anti-social, rather, in a superbly counter-intuitive way, it is in fact the highest notion of society that can exist. If we cannot imagine such a society, it doesn’t mean it cannot exist. It simply means we lack the vision to see it. True society is formed of individuals, not of clone drones, which is what we are trained to be in our schools, jobs and all the rest of it. Just as marriage, the highest kind, requires that both individuals continue to grow as individuals if they are to continue to evolve as a married couple, just as violence can avoid war, just as banality affords a glimpse of uniqueness.

A Latin-American writer called Eduardo Galeano wrote a book called Patas Arriba, or Upside Down. That’s what we are. We think we’re free but we’re not. We don’t see that we are slaves but we are. Power and repression being ubiquitous, we think they’re invisible. While freedom seems so unattainable, we scoff at anyone who speaks of it as an ‘idealist.’ But power and freedom are like air. Whichever kind you breathe defines how healthy you are. You breathe repression everyday and everyday you die a little. But you begin to breathe freedom and your body comes alive with joy.

So try it, just think about it, and feel the fear grip your entrails. And then think about living this way. The world will be saved and (re)built in a day, hell, even if Rome wasn’t…

Yes, it’s been a ludicrously long time since I last wrote here. A hairy burning infernal kind of time, full of phantoms, monsters and eaters of death. Engorged with maddened effort, frenzied frustrations, killer obstacles and so forth. All in a day’s work you might say for an obsessive, soul-of-an-anarchist person like myself but no matter what you think, it’s despicably hard. Fighting alone for something as vague and confused as individual freedom, starting with art and the freedom to sell it, is idiotically difficult. Mostly because no one gives a crap or recognizes that it isn’t a f*cking luxury activity but something that is vitally important, even if its value isn’t immediately apparent. Fact is, a lack of individual pride and freedom is something that slowly kills you if you don’t have it. It is at the heart and source of all the despicable poisons that are killing us as an otherwise magnificent, beautiful, wonderfully inventive species.

(It is precisely this inventive beauty of the human soul that Revenge Ink is ALL about celebrating.)

Let me tell you an interesting story that I picked up from a National Geographic documentary about alligators in Florida. Now if Nat Geo as they now call themselves are saying modern man is involved in the death of his ‘environment’ you know we’re truly f*cked. You know we are doomed.

Anyway, the story is that hundreds of gators were dying in this lake. Lake Griffin I believe. It took scientists six years of research and more almost-killing of experimental gators to figure out what the problem was. A fatal deficiency of Vitamin B1 or Thiamine, it turned out. Caused by a fish that contained an enzyme that neutralized Thiamine in the gators’ bodies. The gators had been eating this fish before, but recently, with excess pollution and human toxicity, the lake bred only these Vit B killer fish while ALL other plant and animal life died, yes, ALL other plant and animal life, so the gators were eating nothing else and pretty much OD-ing on these killer fish.

Apparently Thiamine or Vitamin B1 is responsible for cell regeneration in the body which is the real face of what we naïvely call ‘energy.’ In other words, you lose thiamine in your body and you can’t move anymore, you can’t eat, nor metabolize your food, your cells just keep on dying and you can’t do shit. Gradually, your body dies in a slow atrophy of extreme lethargy. So the gators were eating these fish, the fish were killing the gators’ natural reserves of Thiamine and the gators were simply slowing down and ending up dead.

In case you didn’t notice, there is a superlatively perfect readymade mythic metaphor here. Individual freedom is like Thiamine. And the Vit B killer fish is that nasty poisoning part of us that survives, our brains and souls toxically polluted by enslavement, in a poisoned environment of callous habitual greed, aka modern corporate life. The thiamine-killing enzyme in us is the corporate consumer life we live, that consumes everything, even our own desire to grow as human beings and to create anything, until we are gutted and fattened on toxic filth and begin to breed death around us without even knowing it. Just like the killer fish, as half-dead enslaved individuals, we now kill life around us without a care.

Unfortunately, the gator here is us too. It represents our deepest side, our inner life, our most profound humanity; our continued happiness, well-being and health. It represents our potential to live, in a word. It represents our future as extant beings. The gator is that part of us which refuses to be tamed, it is our capacity to live as free human beings, it is the most ecstastic part of us that is now gradually being inertia’d and apathy’d to death by the killer fish in us: our braindead enslavement to the system. Most unfortunately of all, the gator is the predator in us, the deepest ‘eater’ of the joys and pleasures of life, it is the one within us who loves and values life, who savors it even when we’re not looking.

So why is it important to refuse to be a slave? Because as a slave you bring about your own death and the deaths of others. As a mentally shackled slave to corporate greed, you do horrible, wretched destructive things. And you do them most alarmingly, to yourself. You do them unwittingly, in a lethargic slew of apathy, callousness and a vertiginous loss of personal drive (much like the dying gator). You destroy yourself as you destroy your ‘environment.’ You become chronically frustrated, bored and dribble over with envy, hatred and anger that go nowhere. You need tabloids, reality shows and a stream of competitive violence to make up for your pallid frustrations. You might hate your job but lack the energy or drive to change it. Or you may feel constantly like you’re chasing a carrot you will never catch. You despise your life, or maybe not, perhaps you are just chronically bored and ‘need a vacation’ often, you cannot survive without distractions: sex, TV, booze, drugs, pills, more sex, anything that will come along and keep you from one moment with your true self… And of course, you tell yourself this is how all people have always lived. That this is even better than how people lived before, in the ‘old’ world. And you breed philosophies of anxiety, frustration, a joyless Kierkegaardian universe that say life was always this worthless, throughout eternity. Your heart is hard, the vacations don’t make it better, they only make it worse, you resign yourself to a lonely death and eventual lovelessness, and still you tell yourself there is nothing to be done about it, this is how it is, it can’t be any different. Getting older becomes a dull struggle, life is a hum of anxiety, fears, most of all the desperate desire to please: your boss, your family, some dumb f*ck or the other. Meanwhile, in ‘doing your job’ you do nothing for your soul, you destroy life and most of all, you destroy yourself and your children by working for asshole corporations which destroy life in a slow and determined way. You meanwhile, become a creature of competition: some days you win, most days you don’t. And over time, the sheer uselessness of your life grinds down your body, your brain, your cares, that shrivel to the tiniest boundary of family, you, your children who don’t give a crap, your aging, sickened body… Until you get old and the real shit hits the fan.

But no. To live like this is not to live at all. It is only because we live in this steady atrophy as a mass of inveterate slaves, idiots and callous cowards, that life has been reduced to such resigned putrification. Our narcissism is a temporary drug against the steady and slow death of our souls, but nothing will chase away the eventual awakening, pungent with regret, that will hit you one day: oh my god, where did my life go? Was this all I could do?

Well, a genuine freedom of the soul puts an end to all this. It regenerates the mind and body, and even if you struggle like a gator in the wild, which I have certainly been doing for a while now, you feel a vital link to an inner source of refreshing energy which regulates the generation of new cells in your body. You are healed. You may be depressed or sad every now and then, but it is never as bad or desperate as when you worked for the assholes. Life is fundamentally different. The search for meaning is no longer an obsession since life itself has taken over. The philosophies of resignation are blown away under the sheer onslaught of bursting joyful thrilling life. The sheer uncontrollable unpredictable (even shitty) magnificence of it fills your being and the search for why and what and where to, all those over-wrought wranglings disappear. You know. You are alive. You are not selfish but self-informed. Freedom brings liveliness where there was inertia, compassion where there was callousness, communion where there was alienation. You are now in touch with your spiritual Thiamine and no matter how hard life hits you with its choicest weapons, you know you are at the center of your being and cannot ever be budged. NOTHING beats this sensation. It is worth living for, it is certainly worth dying for.

Living for money, for your family, for this or that. It all goes out the window. You live merely because it is all here and nowhere else. Questions cease, doubts are erased, there is only the heart beating and the everyday, the absolute raw necessity of it, but it is no longer a dull whirl. It is no longer a desperate search for something to fill the moments that come at you, no longer a scurrying through those moments, it is a powerful fullness at all times. But you pay for it.

Everything is paid for. Just as our wealth is paid for with enslaved soul-death, so our freedom is paid for with the sacrifice of our fears, doubts and over-justified anxieties. Fire is the core image of all mythology. The ancient Upanishadic Hindus had an interesting concept of fire. It was the refuge of all sacrifice, it was the ‘gator’ in us, its burning of everything was a symbol for the eater of life in us, our delicious appetite for deathless life and endless joy and unhindered freedom and pleasure. The idea then was to sacrifice even your knowledge into this fire. What is meant by this is not to give up knowledge, but to let go even of the meandering, useless thought-crunching that goes into a life lived without heart. The point is to throw it all into the fire of immediate life, the fire of pure and unhindered but terrifying freedom. Only this leads you to a fantastic thrilling experience of life, something that the soul-killing 9-to-5 of corporate life cannot ever give you.

Anyway to finish the story, the Florida govt stepped in and cleaned up the lake. The Thiamine-consuming gator-killers stopped breeding, the gators didn’t die anymore. I’ve been in my own lake too. I’ve been killing my own poison fish that were killing my inner spiritual Thiamine. And I too have ceased to feel the death of the soul within me. When I worked as an interpreter (a story told in my novel Ugly Duckling, WHICH YOU CAN BUY HERE :D), I made a lot of money but my soul was dead. Now I have little money but my soul breathes an air purer than that of the Himalayas. My soul is free. And believe me, nothing, nothing can beat this!

The fox must provide for himself but god provides for the lion, said william blake. couldn’t have said it better myself. when you stop trying too hard, things get super-fantastically GROOVY…

The Guardian, in a transparent effort to promote Elmore Leonard has got some writers to put down their ten rules for writing. Some of them, like Richard Ford (whom I worked for years ago when I was an interpreter) and Geoff Dyer (whom I met at a dinner party back in his Paris writing days) (yes, pointless details writers are supposed to leave out) are marginally funny and well, at least they’re honest and somewhat free of soapy porno-ish self-love. But the rest, especially the ones from the established (read, bore you clean to death) writers, are unbelievable, dripping as they are with pomposity, unabashed self-celebration and the kind of total lack of irony that I thought never got you published with the big guys. Moral of the story, be modest and ironic only when you’re in a classroom, when you’re teaching ambiguity, irony and subtlety to the worshipful gits taking your writer’s workshop. But once you are yourself a published writer, throw these tense, anally retentive, public-school obsessions right out the window and give yourself over to decadent, stupendously onanistic hogtripe that only the most rule-obsessed pre-teens will read and follow.

Still, since no one asked me, I will here list my ten rules for writing:

1. Don’t follow any f*cker’s rules for anything, live and write as thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law.
2. If anyone does tell you what to do, tell him or her to piss off (unless it’s me telling you to edit your novel).
3. You decide what’s best, that way you will be left alone (bliss).
4. Fear nothing, least of all obscurity, poverty ah yes, the ‘consequences.’
5. Scrap rule number 5 (sorry, stolen from Monty Python).
6. Read Bukowski’s The Captain has is out to Lunch etc… I love that guy, even if you don’t.
7. Writing is no big deal, nothing is, people are dying because no one gives a sh*t about anything.
8. Throw all mainstream trash into the trash, save yourselves.
9. The word ‘writing’ as these folks use it is a crock, putting words on paper is a personal quiet sacred mysterious act and always will be.

10.  Misanthropy is good, there are too many lies out there for me to give it up yet.

I know, no one will ever ask me to write down my rules. And even if they asked me, I would refuse. Artists who have rules for other people are self-serving and false, I say it here and feel free to remind me of it in future.

Have a good week.

Sean Penn rocks. I like the man’s face, his films, his politics and above all his utterly reckless disdain for the filthy money-grubber celebrity machine that sucks the blood of any genuinely creative spirit that happens to make its home in the base gutters of Hollywood.

I like the fact that people like him and Charlie Sheen triumph over the small world of American politics and feel-good entertainment (like there’s a difference). I like anyone who’s ready to piss the public off quite honestly, since there’s no worse enslavement than that of an artist to a public that’s been fattened on the belle matière fécale* produced by the rancid world of mass entertainment. What’s hilarious to me is that this public thinks it’s being real original and class-conflictual when it hates celebrities. The real fact is that if your taste has been entirely fabricated by the mass media, you have long since ceased to be an individual and your petty envies, hatreds or judgments directed at celebrities (all part of a cannibalistic desire to consume them in the absence of your own self-worth anyway) are only another aspect of that sordid manufacture. The media uses celebrities to sell you their sh*t, then it brings them down to sell you more of their sh*t. You as the public are eating sh*t one way or the other. You never mattered and you never will.

That’s the real thing about the paparazzi. Your gluttony, the gluttony of most famous idiots, the gluttony of the mass media. I too used to think that a famous person needs to put up with paparazzi. No such thing of course. The real fact is that you can’t be an artist without having to sell your soul one way or another. And it’s a f*cking difficult thing, but if you want to get money to do what you want to do, then you are forced to promote yourself. Tabloids aren’t about this, they are about something else. They aren’t about fame, they are about the need to manufacture and control fame. The media is a monster-offspring of the larger state and bourgeois apparatus that fabricates and controls culture, and celebrities are part of that controlled fabrication. If you act like the media is sh*t, the media will take revenge. If it can’t control you, it will consider you a renegade and do all it can to destroy you. Those who are friendly with the media are those who are ok with this, because they aren’t about art, they are about fame in the basest possible sense. Those who are not ok with it, are probably of the insane opinion that art has absolutely nothing to do with fame, social acceptance or even gratitude. That it has ONLY and EVER to do with freedom. The freedom to create, to disseminate and to have people see your work (not necessarily like it). This is why you’ll never find a true artist saying something despicably trite like ‘I love my fans, I owe it all to my fans.’

Hank Bukowski never said it, no true artist ever will.

Needless to say, neither I nor Revenge Ink are about manufacturing anything. We have all the time in the world as far as I’m concerned. We will sell our books aggressively but we will never pander. If marketing is pandering, I simply won’t do it. I don’t even enjoy the whole social networking thing. I started Facebook but have tired of it, I started tweeting but have had enough of that too. My point is, if you like our books you’ll buy them. If they’re good, they will make their way to you, of course I’m no idiot, I do what I have to promotion-wise, but basically this is my view. Anything beyond what I am prepared to do is invasion, disturbance and deserves a kicking like good old Sean gave that camera-toting sh*thead.

So in case Sean Penn reads this, I dig you man. I dig that you went to Cuba, wrote about Chavez and I dig the movies you make, especially Into the Wild that I still can’t watch because it tears me up so profoundly. And of course you knew Hank. Now if that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what the f*ck is. Thank the gods there are some like you around, if not we’d have no one to cheer for!

*beautiful fecal matter, from Rabelais, Gargantua (O belle matière fécale qui devait boursoufler en elle.)

It’s sad, it’s fantastic, I’m writing again. I’m working on a novel, a second one, in case you were confused and hadn’t bought or read my first, UGLY DUCKLING (big crime in my book!). It feels wonderful but the cycles of creativity are hard to bear. A friend of mine used to say to me, oh no wonder you’re in a crap mood, you’re writing again! It was a variant of the ‘oh you have your period’ jibe, but unfortunately true.

My novel-writing isn’t a fun thing. I mean it is when I start, it feels like being in love again, like being with a sacred lover. A sacred, secret, deep and extremely fulfilling lover. But then it starts to go downhill because such a jealous, exhausting lover, I hope you never have! Like I said in my last blog post, writing is a sculpting of the emotions. All art is strictly speaking the same, but writing and music are the most mystical. They don’t use solid materials. They use abstract units of meaning, even if words require paper and books, and music requires a recording medium (now). But in actual terms, writing and music use no materials for their creation. They go straight to the heart, soul, brain, nervous system. Music is perhaps the most mystical of the arts. But words themselves are mystical if you think about it. Why certain sounds to express meaning? A constantly shifting use of sounds among different peoples? Words themselves, in this sense, being formed of sounds, are a subset of music. And therefore profoundly, undeniably, inescapably mystical.

At least that’s how I see it. In today’s shit-bucket world, good writing is all about rules and highly schooled gibberish. But I don’t like that kind of writing. Perfect form doesn’t move me. I like writing that reaches beyond the intellect and the rules of form and literary crapola, and enters the heart in a rapturous, unmediated, gut-munch sort of way. I like it messy, I like words that feel unique, immediate, unrehearsed, and even if they are rehearsed, I like it when they feel they are made of raw human flesh, when they aren’t fantastically perfect and artificial. Such writing has emotional weight as far as I’m concerned, it carries mystical possibilities. Bukowski moves me for this reason. John Updike does not.

The way I write is, if not mystical, definitely mysterious. It builds up, to paraphrase Bukowski, and then gob-smashes down on me like a giant wave. WHOOSH! But unlike Hank for whom it was a pleasure, with me writing is not. Well not entirely. I am deeply happy when I’m writing at long last. It feels like I’m alive again, like I was dead all this time that I wasn’t writing. So it isn’t work either, I don’t mean that. But when I write, I control little of what’s going on. I feel like I’m in a trance or something (although I’m not) and that the book is writing itself (although it isn’t). Of course it isn’t. But it sure feels like it is. I have to run almost, like a child who’s being dragged along the street by a mother who’s too tall and so the kid has to rush and run constantly to keep up. It’s exhausting. Debilitating, depressing. The images arrive, the words, in a rush of blindness, they don’t wait, the mood descends, the movement is there. It must be followed. And followed NOW, relentlessly, without time or space for rest. It’s like a rhythm that must be kept up with, snip snap, clip clap, no time for sitting, reflecting, looking out at the trees. I do not form, set down or create. Gopal, my brother, writes like that. I do not. I write like a bedeviled fool, like I’m possessed by demons, a despicably divine madness. And this is why my emotions do the f*cking shimmy when I start to write a book. It sounds crazy when you put it like that. Write a book. It sounds impossibly huge. Unfeasable. Last year, when I was accepting manuscripts from authors and doing no writing myself, not a word (except something resembling a diary), I marveled that anyone would be fool enough, insane enough, to waste their lives writing a book. It seemed absurdly time-consuming, I admired anyone who could do it. And I wondered how I had been able to do it, me! And why, why on earth! Like other people, I even used the word ‘discipline’ about writing. Man, I thought, these people who stayed home for days on end and sat in front of their computer and wrote this stuff. But how?

When I write, it has nothing to do with discipline. It is a type of enslaved dementia. If I have a sense of clear controled words that I am typing, when I do have a sense of that, the writing is crap, banal, laborious. So over the last few years, I have learned not to write when I’m in that state. When it doesn’t ‘come,’ I don’t write. This can be depressing too. When I’m not writing, and the mood can disappear for days, I feel like I’ve been dumped by that ruthless (but divine) demon lover. And I get wrenchingly depressed. It is good to have a boy around at such times, or booze, friends, restaurant dates, but life doesn’t work that way. I hope not to go through that this time. This time I have Revenge Ink (yeah right). No really, I hope this time, to be good about it all (?!).

For all these reasons, there is the slight wearing thin of my emotional state when I write. I write when I’m in the mood, but I tend to work to exhaustion. Outside of the world of what I’m writing, I become alone and moody. It’s ups and downs all the way. I have to admit, this time, my inner imaginative world has yet to fully come alive. I am too distracted with Revenge Ink. But I am buzzing around it, I write and scratch and carve. Even if the world doesn’t fully show itself and only peeps out dimly from behind the Bodhi bushes, I hack at it because I have no choice. I tell myself it is showing itself gradually and even for that I must be grateful. Because even this feels fantastic. It is an unbelievable act of grace to be able to write. To be bestowed this gift, this inner beautiful world. Even if it is the world of my already lived life.

When I’m not writing, I am equanimous, well ok, not quite, but I am even-keeled. Self-contained. I am pleased to potter about, I pass the time, I watch TV, I do this and that. But when I’m writing, time begins to hang heavy, things go cock-eyed, I feel like I’m hanging off a cliff of some sort. And I don’t like it.

But here I am. Damned bloody grateful for the new book that is installing itself in my soul, and f*cking delighted to accept the shit with the bliss, the beatitude, the sheer incredible honor of writing. I thank the stars. Or my own inner spirit. For having chosen this life.

Amen!

Well I got over that anger thing. Yes, anger is an energy but for that very reason you want to use it as fuel and no more. Anger can never be an end in itself. Of course I’m often angry. I have no problem with anger. I don’t see it as a negative energy. All energies and emotions must be creative, that’s the cornerstone of the artist’s purpose and action. Turning emotion into vital force which in turns fuels creative work. When I exhaust myself writing, I don’t get tired, I become depressed. Which is to say, I exhaust my emotional energies, depression then being the emotional equivalent of physical or mental fatigue.

But enough about me for a second. I’d like to say a few words about my authors here. They’re f*cking awesome, every single one of them. My authors are brave people, they’re unusual, spirited (each in their own way), massively creative and talented, and are taking a chance publishing with me and I find that absolutely incredible. I feel proud of all of them a bit like a mother would be proud of her offspring, except that I had nothing to do with any of them before this moment and have the luxury of being totally independent of their creative and life processes before and after Revenge Ink. Ironically I feel proud of them because they chose to publish with Revenge Ink. Sounds ridiculous and egotistical I know, but I’ll explain. One of them told me today he was proud to be associated with what I’m trying to do with Revenge Ink. Well, I’d like to say I’m proud to be associated with people like him and in fact all my authors (and readers). I’m proud I have been able to attract this kind of talent and the kind of people who have the same desire as me to provide a counterpoint to the big-guy publishers. The vision contained within Revenge Ink is not uniquely mine, I created Revenge Ink with the hope (and something of a gamble) that this vision would one day be recognized as being universal, that the desire to return to authentic, risky, truly open-ended Art and away from a constant obsession with totally predictable profit-based outcomes would be supported not only by authors but by readers as well.

So a thousand huzzahs to each of my authors. And now to the readers who must do their part.

Reading is not a passive activity. Just like buying, loving or being part of a citizenry should not be passive activities. Life must be an act of war, a vital struggle, which is why the great heroes of all the world’s epics were warriors. Why even the most sacred text of India, the Bhagavad Gita is a conversation between two warriors.

You might laugh, but I don’t see reading as just sitting down with a book. As a writer and the creator of Revenge Ink, I believe reading is, must be, a potent revolutionary act. A nod to the royal ‘I’. To art as subjective experience and discernment, not as consumption of a heavily advertised, totally forgettable product.

Reading is (should be) a potent, subjective, creative act in response to another subjective, creative act, that of writing, daringly undertaken by the author. In ancient artistic traditions, which survive in Europe only among the gypsies and to some degree in India, audiences show their artistic discernment and appreciation through gestures and shouts of approval. The only modern version of this is the rock concert, marred as the phenomenon is by the presence of massive machines of advertising, promotion and the overall manufacture of taste. The traditional Indian musician/poet presents his or art before an informed audience and the latter in an exchange requiring mutual respect, a sense of personal sacrifice (on both sides) and tremendous sophistication, appreciates, approves, understands. Unfortunately, for us, art and reading are such pre-fabricated acts, so closely related to taste as a factor of social class and education, that we cannot truly consider ourselves an ‘audience’ anymore. Just as we can’t be called ‘citizens’ in a climate of opinion-cloning. We are idiots caught up in a phony  duel between publisher and critic, art dealer and art appraiser, always someone else, someone ‘qualified’ who deigns to like, dislike, evaluate and judge on our behalf.

There is no space in the Western capitalist non-culture where the audience might be given its due, where it might express its knowledge and approval. The meaning, value and significance of a ‘work’ are pre-digested and ‘taught’ instead to this ‘audience’ by a bunch of tight-assed pedantic gits we call critics. Their political equivalent being the so-called journalist. But critics are to individual subjectivity what the Pope is to a sexual fantasy. A cold shower in other words (unless you’re quite specially sick!).

We think of reading as leisure, pleasure, fun, education, all kinds of crap, but we don’t think of it as an act of vital force. Subjectivity has become inconsequential and distrusted in this shitty modern world we live in, and without subjectivity, reading has no meaning (and becomes no more than the buying of a product). The ancient world is all about individuality. The legendary Celtic warriors who never ‘united’ with each other, the great Chiefs of Native America, they were all members of a culture that put subjectivity above all else. Sure, these warriors may have been eventually defeated by the Romans, the Americans and finally, the modern-day worship of Kapital, but so what? The force of de-individualized objectivity (the horde, the herd, the mob) to me is no proof of the pointlessness or inutility of subjectivity. Subjectivity, no matter how high the price you pay for it, is the only thing that makes us human. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey says it better than I do. And it is THIS assertion of the power of unique (and universal) subjectivity that more than anything is the fundamental ideal behind the creation of Revenge Ink. I demand that authors be unique individuals. And I demand this of readers as well.

Reading must cease to become consumption. Life, thought, citizenship, all these things must cease to be consumption. We must assert our creative individuality in our lives and reading should be an essential aspect of such an assertion. Reading is a mystical act, and mystical acts are counter-intuitive. While intuitive causality says one plus one makes two, counter-intuitive causality says one plus one equals zero. This is why, to read someone else is to return to yourself, to be alone with a book is to be connected deeply with other beings, absorbing someone else’s thoughts is to learn to think for yourself. Subjectivity as universality: the revolutionary message of Revenge Ink. But only if you do it for yourself, not because some dipshit critic said you had to do it in your local paper (and that includes me!).

So readers, I look to you. You must once again become worthy of being called an audience (as opposed to being a vast sludge-pool of passive, ad-swallowing birdlings). Your tastes and opinions must be your own. Your reading must move me as my authors move you, your strong support acting as counterpoint to their fiercely independent creativity.

Genuine democracy cannot but be built on a prickly but radiant grouping of individuals, thinkers, readers, passionately fired judges of the powerful. In ancient Greece and India, kings were required to dismember themselves every eight years (as part of a ritual sacrifice) in deference to their people. Their power was a literal construct of popular support and as such could be questioned by anybody, from anywhere. Kapitalism requires the dismemberment of our individuality. Democracy is thus a braindead, heartless, soulless pabulum. We have the power to change that.

So read our books and get on it now!

It must mean something right? Day after day I work on this company, I work on new titles, do everything I have to, pay out money for advertising, pay out money endlessly for this that and the other. It never stops. And me? What do I get? What’s in it for me? Well so far, squat, that’s what. So yes, you bet, I’ve decided to whine a little.

Now I know people have it horribly rough. Every year there are massive floods in India, the land of my birth. And every year people there go through horrors I can’t even imagine. How thankless must it be for them? Of course that never helps. Well it does a little, it helps you gain perspective but it doesn’t make you feel better. One person having it rough doesn’t make up for others having it rough. If we could all have it less rough it would be so much finer.

I was at a café this evening and saw all that food. There’s enough I thought. Enough food for everyone. Ah but no, said another voice. You only get it if you pay. And once again, in an instant, it struck me what a despicable world we live in, if just that fact, of having money means you can live like a pasha while not having it, for millions of others, means to live like starving rats. It wouldn’t matter if some ate decently and a few ate richly, I wouldn’t mind that. That would be ok. But this shit is despicable. The rich eating like there’s no tomorrow. And the rest like there’s no point to there being a tomorrow. Especially since those latter folk are the ones digging the natural resources out of the earth with their nails and teeth, the very resources we then buy so blithely at the supermarket for a price that defies all competition (which usually means a whole range of smaller producers were kicked out of business so this supermarket could offer you that price).

Everywhere the big guy, the stiff with the stuff, the hack with the stack, the shit with the bit gets away with murder. And everyday we put up with it. Maybe we feel we have to. I was like that. For years I struggled against this feeling of non-choice. The silent asphyxiating oppression of apathy combined with boredom that gives you nothing but stale air to breathe, the air of your own coffin. Then I quit. I decided to fight. But look where I am. I work like a worm but make no money. NOBODY’S BUYING THE BOOKS PEOPLE, WHERE THE F*CK ARE YOU ALL??? WILL NOBODY PUT THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTH IS?

Sorry, I’m calm now.

I tell you it’s how I felt today. I felt nothing but spitting disgust and hatred for the human race. I thought everyday they all just go to work like a bunch of mindless dogs, snails, worms with no courage, no backbone, no desire to save themselves. Now if you don’t even want to, know how to, dare to, save yourself, how on earth can you f*cking save anyone else? Ask me, I know how hard it is to save yourself. Your single lonely self. And here I am fighting for other people, authors no less. I tell you, it is as hard as lava rocks. And yes, I do believe saving yourself will save the world. I absolutely believe that if everyone just stopped serving, working for, slaving for and believing the pigs, the whole system would come crashing down. It’s really that horribly simple.

What if all of us simply quit our jobs and did what we wanted and supported each other somehow? I’m sure it could work. But we’re too nervy, screwed up and disenchanted, downright petrified with lazy apathy to do it. We’re also all too afraid and indoctrinated. We look for mass movements. No let him do it. Let’s wait for a leader, a movement, a clearly identified path. Everything’s got to be a mass thing. Perfectly laid out. It doesn’t work that way. Revenge Ink wasn’t laid out before I did it. Nor was my novel. You show me one single experience in life that works out like you’d planned it, IF you had a plan to begin with. The problem with mass things is, mass things don’t reinforce our faith in ourselves. And we cannot destroy this mass thing called capitalism which isolates, desolates and annihilates the individual, with another massified thing which cancels out our individuality. What we need now is to neutralize the evil by relocating our individuality. This means taking leaps of faith and finding our own paths FIRST. Besides, even if we wanted a mass resistance, there aren’t it would seem, enough bravehearts for the battle!

Still, I have my writing. And this means a great thing. My writing now isn’t the escape it used to be. It is an act of war. An act of love and blood-filled vitality. The great thing about Revenge Ink is that it has turned Art into War and that is utterly groovy as far as I’m concerned. And the truth is, the more I fight, the more fantastically happy I become, the more resilient and radiant I feel, the more I love art and writing, the more I want to fight and watch the whole damn shindig come crashing down as good old Henry Valentine Miller would say. So will you help? Or will you stand by the sidelines and watch? Either way I’m not going to back down, never f*cking ever, I will fight till I win. And that’s a goddam promise!

(And yes, this was a shitty day. How ever did you guess?)

I recently experienced death again. No, not mine, fear not, but that of someone near me, at close quarters again. My life changed originally with the passing of my father, a wonderful sensuous large-hearted softness of a man, and a tremendously important presence in my life. I lost him almost two decades ago, and experienced the various stages of the detachment of his presence in the form of a series of dreams. His passing was of determining value for me, it formed me as I am today, fierce, independent and yet, fundamentally a creature of the blood and heart, essentially other-worldly and uncaring for the dust of materialism.

This time, it’s my uncle, my spiritual and artistic Guru in fundamental ways. He was a grand, lion-spirited musician, Dinkar Kaikini was his name, he lived in Mumbai, India, and no, he wasn’t as famous as he should have, might have been. It’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about since he left us last weekend. And he continues to impact me with the meanings of his life. In ways I didn’t realize although I was aware of what he meant to me even when he was alive.

Life limits you ironically, it binds you to the body and its errors. My fears or worries at not performing music as he taught it to me, the idea that art is a physical life-bound achievement, that fame must come to the artist, this is what has been released with his passing. It is as if I am seeing at last, what I have always sensed. That we are spirits first and foremost. That everything we do, feel and become is a long, joyful continuum of consciousness winding through life and what we call death. Death in this vision is not death at all, but in fact a form of spirit-being, unmediated and clear, without the limiting forces of the body. It is profoundest joy but without the delicious sensations of the throbbing, bleeding body. Art needs the body. Creation demands it. Being though, is constant.

So what is the use of the body? None. The body has no use. It is an act of joy, an undertaking of sensual pleasure. To believe it has ‘utility’ is to be as wrong as saying food exists so that toilets can exist. Art has no utility either in this vision. In fact, ironically, the only thing that does have utility is suffering. Sorrow has no real presence in the continuum of being, save as a technique of transcendence, of liberation. And by liberation I don’t mean ‘Nirvana’ which is abstract and inaccessible, I mean the sensation of profound freedom such as we all feel on a Friday evening, and that comes brutally to an end on Monday morning.

I have seen it before but now I see it clearly. Life is a continuity of the spirit-being in what we call death. One plays off the other, a bit like our moments of escape play into our moments of involvement. Friday evening feels fantastic because Monday morning is oppressive. And the Monday morning exists so we may begin to wonder what the hell is the point of all this oppression, am I really doing what feeds my soul? Or is this misery just an act of fearful, imprisoned habit? Can my entire life be a Friday evening?

I say it can. Mine is. No reason yours can’t be.

To believe art can change the world, that it can make you famous, that it can do anything at all, is to see the world as a place of idiotic outcomes and material equations. It is to do away with the sheer thrill of being, of the joy of freedom we all know we feel on that fleeting Friday evening. And until you seek out this freedom, oppression in some form or fashion will be your lot.

Politically too, the world is suffering profound and horrible oppressions. Right now, the US is ‘occupying’ Haiti under the guise of ‘bringing it aid.’ If only the US had left Haiti alone and free over the last 200 years, nobody there would need American help. We know what’s good for you: which is the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Bourgeois, the West, the Church and the Paternalist Employer, is nothing but oppression. Pure, stinking simple. And the only way for us to rid the world of this oppressive state of affairs politically, is to rid ourselves of capitalist lies about utility personally. It is to fight individually and endlessly for our own freedom. There are no public solutions. The political is the spiritual. The freedom of each spirit is the freedom of all.

So how can you save the world? Can you be a hero? Sure. Simply demand that Friday evening be the prop and stuff of your every living moment. That simple. And that profound.

My uncle escaped into the freedom of his spirit. He understood that fame, recognition, none of it meant as much as freedom. As the engorged plenitude of the sensual living free moment. This was his first and final choice as an artist. To create for pleasure is the artist’s sole activity, to escape oppression his relentless need. There are no other goals beyond this freedom and this pleasure. Life has no use beyond this freedom and this pleasure. If you haven’t got that, start over. I have. Several times. Nothing to it.

The spirit IS being. And being is no philosophical dryness, it is the sheer thrill of a drink, a first love, the first few lines of your new book, it is the thrill of life itself. But only in freedom. You will never experience this thrill (except as a desperate unlived need) on your way to work. Or at the bank. Live only for your freedom, your joy, your own divine and unique self. Everything else is oppression.

The thrill of this, since my uncle died, has engulfed me. So much so, that I have trouble breathing.

See you soon.

No doubt about it. You have to make a choice. You have to choose between the expedient and the true. And the true always feels better. Even if it’s tougher to live with.

It’s strange. Things are starting to go really well for Revenge Ink, but certain people only count success in terms of money and not a little money but a lot. They talk patronizingly to me and tell me but you have to do this and you have to do that. You can’t do this and you can’t do that. All I want to say is WHO DIED AND MADE YOU THE BIG CHEESE, ASSH*LE? Luckily I work with people who are like me, who have got what I’m about. You cannot imagine how lucky I am. And how hard that is to find.

I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell again. After years. And he talks about the Hero and the stages of his life. And he says everything must be given up. I don’t mean I am something extraordinary here as THE hero. We are all heroes and our journeys are always similar in this respect. We have to give sh*t up and at other times, stand firm and give nothing up. Knowing the difference is to work from within, from the heart, not from some dictated outward principle. It’s not intellectual, it’s a thing you get from the blood. The spiritual is nothing abstract. It begins with the raw bare simplicity of the blood. It ends with the simplest things. Kindness. Warmth. Tipping the waiter. But it always starts with something real simple, your desire, which sits in your blood and thumps up your heart when you know what you want is close at hand. Fear of not getting it, of f*cking up, losing everything, this kind of sh*t blocks you and then you’re stuck and unhappy and you have to LEARN how to be spiritual. You have to read books and listen to Gurus and stuff, but the bare-bones naked truth is, YOU KNOW. Fact is you don’t need to learn to be spiritual. You just have to have the balls to look within. To go from your own lies to your own truth, the ease of one, the difficulty of the other, and then, when you’ve tasted from the gutters of hell, from the difficulty to joy. This is the path of evolution, whichever point you start at. It sucks for a while but when it starts to work it really does.

I want to thank all those who’ve been supportive because it feels like we really are making friends, getting through to people and it feels f*cking fantastic. Ironically, people in your personal life tend to get confused and wander off when this happens, I mean men. Men aren’t comfortable with a strong successful woman, even when they know me. Even when they like this about me as it pertains to them. But yeah, I hear you. Screw them. (No kidding!)

But today was a good day. I was out today. Zooming through the city on my Piaggio Zip. Like one of my authors said recently, Zips are cool. They sure are. I zigged and zagged through the cars and man it felt good to speed up on an open road in the unforgiving cold. The freedom was exhilarating. This is the freedom I feel when I think about Revenge Ink. Ecstatic, breathtaking. And some dipsh*t thinks he can tell me that’s no good? Why? Because I’m not buying cars with my profits? Well, do what you want f*ckhead, but stay out of my way. This is sh*t you don’t get it if you’re giving it to the Man. You may think I’m lucky to have it, but luck has nothing to do with it. Persistence and a slight penchant for excess combined with an almost perilous recklessness. That’s what I have. But man, wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So there it is. Have a good one and see you soon!