(short blog)

Just one of those days. I finally get round to looking at submissions and I’m thinking PUBLISH A RECORD NUMBER. LET ALL COMMON SENSE FLY OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW. YES INDEED. It’s the kind of mood I’m in. Given that capitalism is about to collapse anyway. SHEEYIT…

I have to say this is the DAMN PROUDEST I’ve been in, in a long time. I haven’t felt encouraged in a long time. I have been beleaguered, poor and struggling for a while now. And lonely. Damn lonely. I don’t mean in the ‘Bull Durham’ ‘ah was lownleee’ way where a woman just wants some lurrve, I mean Bakhtin lonely, Che lonely, Troy Davis lonely, you know, just sitting in here working and believing, even though I know the cunts are coming at me soon with their spears, lances and kill-‘em-bitches torches. Believing all on my lonesome without any power or money or success to show off to the whores out there who only see success, who are terrified of any real action because they are blinded by their terror of being called ‘losers’… Believing, so the other lazy cunts out there will have something to believe in when their world finally starts to fall apart too and they won’t be able to blame the poor or the colored or some other ‘losers’ they can’t look down on anymore and will have to face the fact that they were getting buggered by the wealthy and the STATE all the fucking time (sad sacks)…

I haven’t written a blog in such a long time, I don’t even know what it means. I have (if you can believe it) been focusing on me. Baha! Yes indeed, cue laughter. No. That is crap. I have been working mostly, editing, coaxing, encouraging, mothering, you know all the shit that publishers and editors do. I created Revenge Ink. And like all viciously loyal mothers, serial killer or not, I will love my dead-dog-ugly offspring to the bitter end.

But yes, I have also been writing. In spits and spurts. A few stories. Trying. A paragraph here and there, on a thread of biled hatred or anger or just plain whiskey venom. There are days you get barf sick of people, stupid wretched fucked-up human beings, no matter how beautiful and perfect, and you need and will have, only yourself, the word and any brain-numbing liquid you can find. The more expensive, the better. I admire Bukowski. But I am a woman when it comes to liquor, I will only drink the best. And I will drink it in the right kind of glass, clean too. Spotless. Bourgogne if you please, and a damn good whisk(e)y. No cheap stuff for yours truly, no matter how hard it gets to pay the bills.

But there will be NO BITTER END. Not here folks. If you want to see someone give up and go all reasonable, savvy and whatnot, move on, find a sadder story somewhere else. Not here. I have been reading all your submissions, you wonderful sick isolated talented freaks, and I am loving them all. Well not all, obviously. Some will be rejected, only because I am a human being and will have my dislikes and likes. But I am damn proud of what I’ve been reading. It has whetted my deadened appetite for destruction, rebellion and shocking the bubon’d body public. It has inspired me back to some sort of love for life and myself. Because I have to say. I am feeling a great deal of self-love right now. You know, for creating this here refuge for the furiously talented. And the furious tout court. And that is the only true kind of love there is. The Hindu goddess is a monument to self-love. Without her absolute self-love there is no universe. The Hindu universe is not about love shared by two reasonable money-saving cocks in a happy suburb, it is about ruling the universe on your own because the source of all things is you, inside and outside, the disgusting with the divine. There is no other truth than this, no other indeed.

Right, back to the grindstone. Thought I’d reach out to you all. Since it’s been a while. And you have been loyal and caring. The world is a-changing folks. You’d better find a good reason for living soon, if what you have right now is only money. If it is. And you don’t find anything better, you’re fucked. You heard it here first!

TCHINN fecking TCHINN TCHINN!

Fact is, let’s be historical about it. No one achieved anything against a massified power structure without breaking things. In a society that is like this: (this is a fantastic blog entry, great facts and details, not to mention a brilliant moral argument) http://nathanieltapley.com/2011/08/10/an-open-letter-to-david-camerons-parents/comment-page-7/#comment-1258

…well in a society like this, ‘breaking things’ when it’s done by the powerful, comes with arguments about ‘he’s suffered enough’ or ‘he didn’t mean it, honest, he only stole that money because he’s um, been just awfully tired, um, maybe’… while the arguments against poor or colored people destroying/stealing stuff tends to be: SCUM! 

Well there’s a third way to go about this. We all stick together and realize our so-called elites, who haven’t a thing to them that qualifies them for ‘elite’ status except birth in a certain neighborhood (I mean even fat old Hank the 8th with his 6 wives fought wars in his youthful years and was a scholar of Latin and composed some literary stuff… Ask Cameron to fight a war and he’ll piss himself most likely…) – yes, we realize these guys have to be destabilized, harassed constantly and then finally kicked off their high horse with a bootheel that hurts. By the people. And yes, before your reflex action of ‘yes, but haven’t all revolutions failed?’ kicks in, no. They have not. Every notion of personal dignity, self-respect that we take today for granted (including the indignation at this kind of ransacking which would have been routine if you were a peasant in 14th century Europe), is a result of previous – often failed – idealistic action. There are no perfect systems. History is an accretion of progresses made and barbarisms conquered. Just because abuse leaves its mark, that doesn’t mean you have to sit and take it forever.

The point I want to make here is that this rioting, like it or not, will provide a kind of sonic boom, a sound barrier, that may well define all future popular action against a phenomenally sick and putrid system of government and corporate cronyism. Yes indeed. If you look at history, there is always a movement that sets the trend, that sets limits within which all future movements then unfold and deploy their energies.

It took many such riots at public executions, flayings and so on from the king and his folks, for instance, for the French revolution to gain its momentum. The reason the Bastille was a symbol of the monarchy was that there had been a fairly decent history of popping peasant/urban-poor bones, ripping out shoulders and generally letting penniless folks rot in shit-caked prison cells which had increasingly pissed le peuple off. Today there is no peuple. Civil society just doesn’t carry the poetic punch of le peuple. And that’s where anger comes in. Anger is not only contagious, it follows rules. It flows like a river, but it has banks, eddies, and a general current and direction. Like any psychological process, it spontaneously creates rules and boundaries for itself. Usually in public movements, it is the extremists who set those boundaries, with outrageous, (almost) incomprehensible anger. Then that anger, weirdly enough, becomes generalized, it is assimilated within the population and even those who didn’t at first understand, begin to. And the fact of showing anger becomes acceptable. Accepted. Necessary. Inevitable.

These riots are a show of anger. Destruction is part of showing anger, ransacking is a part of displaying power. Ransacks were a part of war conduct for a long time. Arguably, even the dropping of nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the Dresden bombing, were ransacks, since they occurred after it was clear the enemy was defeated.

Pride and its rituals are a part of power and its inevitable enactments. As Foucault points out, the highly public dismemberment of the prisoner in the old days was exactly one such display of power. The police that we are taught to fear are its modern version, their uniforms reminding us of the faceless immensity of the State that watches us and will punish us if (and when) we screw up. It is precisely this facelessness that rioters aim for. That they destroy regardless of whose business they’re wrecking is not baffling, it is fundamental to the enactment. It is a display of their power. It is the destruction of a massified visible structure that is usually beyond their control, a display of power over surroundings they do not usually have access to, except as passive consumers.

And of course, this is what pisses the good folk off the most. Displays of power are accessible only to the wealthy and privileged in our phenomenally indoctrinated societies. Ashton Kutcher can earn 700,000 dollars an episode for a dumb tv show he makes, but when any subset of the poor or working class asks for a raise in minimum wage or benefits, the arguments pour in about how industry isn’t about charity, how you should earn your daily wage by the sweat of your brow and so on. Right.

The fact that this argument is accepted by most of us shows how stuck we are in preposterous so-called principles no sane man who isn’t drunk, afraid or dreaming would accept.

We are stuck. We’re stuck in so many ways it’s impossible to delineate. But we are very soon going to have unstick ourselves. We’re going to have to learn to return to a simpler understanding of what life is, a more basic sense of our common humanity. And that’s where this sound barrier is going to prove vital.

Every rebellion, whether personal or public, requires one first insane, traumatic move. Then comes a time when reflection can set in. Criminality? Sure. But it is important to understand this criminality is fully a part of the act of rioting. It is even its essence. Just as corporate and government criminality are a part of their display of power. The article I’ve linked to above gives a clue as to why. It sets up a backdrop for the kind of context we live in. The facts detailed in it show the constant display of power that we put up with: powerful people telling us, WE do this but WE can. BECAUSE we’re powerful.

Well, it was only a matter of time before the boomerang came keening back. With a vengeance that has stunned a lot of people and caused the kind of dismay that says: oh man, I guess we’re going to have to do something like this to get everyone’s attention fairly soon. Do we really want to?

Yes you are, people. If you don’t want your pensions cut while Ashton continues to make his millions, if you don’t want your children’s educations to become unaffordable while your bankers live like mafia thugs, well you’d better listen to that sonic BOOM that’s just sounded, and realize, we’re in a whole new world. And there’s nothing that’s brave or new about it.

It’s a stink-filled sack of lies, corruption and domination. And the fight to overcome it must be accepted.

In ugliness lies beauty, in chaos sits life, in the hideous display of anger sits the grandeur of the inscrutable novelty of the present moment.

Cheers!

‎I found a quote in Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Hell’s Angels’ that says it all… Says it better than Foucault might. So here it is…

“American law enforcement procedures have never been designed to control large groups of citizens in rebellion, but to protect the social structure against specifically criminal acts, or persons. The underlying assumption has always been that the police and the citizenry form a natural alliance against evil and dangerous crooks, who should certainly be arrested on sight and shot if they resist.

There are indications however, that this ‘natural alliance’ might be going the way of the Maginot Line. More and more often the police are finding themselves in conflict with whole blocs of the citizenry, none of them criminals in the traditional sense of the word, but many as potentially dangerous – to the police – as any armed felon. This is particularly true in situations involving groups of Negroes and teenagers. The Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965 was a classic example of this new alignment. A whole community turned on the police with such a vengeance that the National Guard had to be called in. Yet few of the rioters were criminals – at least not until the riot began. It may be that America is developing a whole new category of essentially social criminals… people who threaten the police and the traditional social structure even when they are breaking no law… because they view The Law with contempt and the police with distrust, and this abiding resentment can explode without warning at the slightest provocation.”

That was Hunter S talking. Now it’s my turn.

It isn’t just American law enforcement that is trained in this manner. They all are. Everywhere. Everywhere, while people prate on about democracy, the truth is, the population stands on one side and the State on the other. This doesn’t show in posh areas where people are fat and happy to be slaves of the corporations and the State, where people draw advantages from this moronic soul-sucking enslavement. But in areas where people get no benefits, where they see only the backend filth of modern capitalist democracy (motto: steal from the poor, give to the rich, make them all vote every now and then so they’ll think we care…), people still get angry, and they’re not afraid to express that anger, unlike the fattened, frightened liberals who hide inside the State’s pockets.

What I especially like is the description of the rioters in London by the authorities as ‘greedy and criminal’. As shockingly violent. PERMIT ME TO LAUGH!

This from a state that finances illegal invasions, massive land grabs, resource thefts, illegal prisons and occupations – all of which send its finances spiralling down world-threatening sewers of public debt – AND THEN resorts to further stealing from its own population by cutting off already meager social welfare programs to ‘fight said debt’ (which is in reality nothing but a huge f*cking subsidy for massive corporations – read banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, arms manufacturers et al)… I say, NO such state is justified in preaching moral behavior or ‘respect’ and ‘responsibility’ to rioting, looting youths. Such a state has lost its moral legitimacy to do so.

Do I justify theft and crime? No. But I don’t justify it in Iraq and Afghanistan EITHER! I don’t call it exporting democracy or some such other f*cking unbelievable bullsh*t!

So let’s face it folks. If these young ‘uns have learned that violence and theft are all that pay, it is because the West has a grand, celebrated tradition of such high-handed brutality. Remember colonialism? (Which is now talked about like it was a grand philanthropic project of  drinking tea and chatting about culture?) Remember slavery? The genocidal destruction of the native peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America in order that their land be stolen? Remember Manifest Destiny? Or maybe you recall the wars in which all those European and colonial poor fought in order to receive nothing but more menial jobs upon their return? Or perhaps you remember grand gestures of state generosity like the massive slaughter of men, women and children to avenge the Paris Commune? No? Well I do. So yes. Greed and criminality? Sure. Shocking? No, not so much. This being the history of the modern West and the mainstay of its current ‘foreign policy’, greed and criminality aren’t shocking at all. If anything, they are perfectly logical. That such things don’t happen more often is a testament to the faithful and dogged work done by the media and the publishers, the manufacturers of discourse and consent, in making you believe the State still cares. And that being able to wear miniskirts constitutes freedom and voting once every few years equals democracy. 

But anger is an energy*. And like George Carlin said (and I paraphrase), since the Owners of society put property above life, things above humanity, damaging property and stealing things amounts to hitting at the State. So, like him, I don’t give a crap about people stealing private property and things. I care much more about the chronic theft of people’s freedom and self-respect while corporations get fat and disgustingly, obscenely rich. I care much more about governments that give tax money to the rich, then steal the hard-won social welfare that is due to the people who have worked for it and who have in fact financed the lives of the rich and famous.

Fact is, the State can routinely use the police against you, while it demands that YOU remain peaceful. This is barbarism, but it goes unnoticed because we’re all hypnotized into believing this is democracy. Should protest be peaceful? I have no idea. I guess it would have to depend on whether your protest is noticed, heeded, or not. If not, and we are in two camps anyway, things will tend to take on a life of their own. And by that time, it’s going to be too late.

And in any case. This is not protest here. This is a lesson learned. Centuries of the same lesson learned. Subconsciously of course (where all true lessons are learned). Dialogue is useless. And you are only respected by the Western state if you steal, kill, rape and brutalize.

Of course… Stealing from those who steal from you every day also does tend to feel good. But none of you need worry. At the end of the day, many of these people will be found, identified and jailed. And State power will probably prevail again.

But not for very long. Because not ALL of us are fooled. And things are getting worse. Much worse. So even if I’m not out in the street – because I don’t give a shit about mobile phones or sneakers or whatever - I know the truth.

I know that none of these preaching authorities have ANY right to call ANYONE greedy or criminal. To do so, they would have to get out of Iraq for one thing. And Afghanistan. AND swear not to rape their populations even further to solve a debt they have wracked up with colossal, unprecedented levels of greed.

It’s what I call the Africa-environment syndrome: we all want to be free to destroy our environment if it means more jobs, more money, more gadgets for us! But if a poor African kills a gorilla for a few bucks, he’s a BAD BAD BRUTAL GORILLA-KILLING BACKWARD PUDDY TAT!  Blame the small guy. While you hide your crime behind grand moral principles. It always pays.

But luckily, not everyone believes this garbage anymore. Hallelujah.

* taken from song by PIL, Rise.

I met Gil Scott Heron in the 90s when i worked as an interpreter… After the show, he invited my friends, colleagues and me to his show at a jazz club. A big heart, a true poet, a gentle brother. And i know a lot of people talk about ‘Western democracy and freedom’ like Western history never happened, these comedians would have us believe that the West is some sort of saintly operation of good samaritans who didn’t murder, steal and destroy… But i know, we know, and we will never forget. I like this video, WORD to the dude or dudesse who put it up. AIM, Black Power, Che, Bobby Sands… Life is and always will be about heroes. Everything else is crap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p43YYovonS0

Wasteland 2

I’ve been there. Where the fool offers you a glass of water for your unslaked thirst. It’s called beauty. But a kind of sensual beauty, a maddening passion for the world as it is. Precisely as it is, not perfected, not bettered, but exactly as it is, with its stinks, horrors and uglinesses. This is to emerge from the Wasteland. When King Arthur finally emerged from the Wasteland, it is said he no longer knew anything, not even himself. And it was the Fool asked him, what is it you want? And the only thing he could think of was to say, I am thirsty. And the Fool chuckled, offered him water and said well then, drink.

It’s a deceptively stupid end to the Wasteland, but this is indeed what it is to emerge. A fantastic, raw, explosive awakening full of hideous sensual violent dolor. The great thing about the Wasteland is while you are in it, as you suffer the pressures of building your life, you are so close to losing your mind and slashing your nerves, you have little energy for the sensual dangers of life. The door to self-forgetting of the erotic, dionysian, intoxicating kinds remains harshly but protectively closed while you are in the Wasteland. You forget entirely what happiness feels like, you forget beauty, love, sensual pleasure, you become still and inert as a piece of dead wood in obeisance to the roaring thrash of the struggle that hurtles and drowns out everything else, everything you thought you were. In the Wasteland, you know only freedom. You know fatigue. You know the superlative bottomlessness of your own resistance. The cold proud burn of the solitary crags is what keeps you alive, its power and strength feed your flagging spirit. You become invincible but your spirit is as hard and impenetrable as a rock.

Then one day, you feel it. The tiniest click. The smallest subtlest shift. Nothing external has altered. You have no money, no sudden successes, no great and flaming hero here to rescue you. You have forgotten yourself, your old life, your name, your identity, your old loves, flames, pains and raptures. You are empty, like a dervish that has spun around once too many. Suddenly, you turn and you see only the Fool, an idiot who chuckles as he asks you a simple, idiotic question, that you are unable to answer. And you murmur the first thing that enters your dried out mind and you say Thirst. It is an anti-climactic response after all the wild dreams of paradise you have spun for yourself in the dark caverns of loss and doom. Thirst is mere crumbs and pebbles against the golden promises of endless light that have kept you alive all this time. But the Fool signals a return to the body. And so to the body you return, but not as before, not in fear, doubt and spiritual penury. You return to the body as the seat of your own power, the throne of your kingdom to rule over as you please, this is the body you took, that you love, that you reclaim as the source of all you know as pleasure, enjoyment, the grandeur of all that the universe has to offer as LIFE.

I had forgotten what it was, this feeling of being torn open. What the Sufis call ‘dard,’ the heart-rending pain of rapturous beauty. This is ecstasy as the mystics describe it. It is not part of the daylight world of prayer and hymn-singing that is a communal and poorer aspect of collective, handicapped religion, this is the height of spirit as it rules in the dark corners where pleasure is suffused with pain, rapture with torture, ugliness always with beauty. People think the awakening of the inner spirit brings you to some sort of heaven realm, where suffering ends, where death is non-existent, where there is only a sort of angelic beauty, devoid of the heaviness of gravity or the graceless pallor of early mornings, when the filth and disease of life and mortality sink in after night-times of eternity spent in the arms of self-forgetting. This is not so. The awakening of the spirit is magnificent, furious and full of blood. You begin to dig it all. You begin to see death not as an exception but as the core, you see that sadness, that all suffering are a tearing away of stillness, a stillness that is unbearable to the constantly moving, rushing, hurtling nature of raw spirit. In the Monotheist tradition, God is stillness, good and reason. The Hindu word for the non-dual, unnamable substrate of all things is Brahman, from the root Brh, to gurgle, to burst forth. It is as formless as it is benevolent, as munificent as it is full of childlike playful laughter. It is the premise of suffering that changes, the threat of death that is no longer a threat but a willed release, of the end of all sadness, not because you negate it, but because you begin to see that to feel purely, richly, dolorously IS the goal of being, not its off-putting side-effect. Thus it all becomes densely, exquisitely, eye-scorchingly beautiful. The nature of life is beauty, not an esthetic or perfect geometry, but the magnificence of a world transformed by love. When love is everything, it all becomes beautiful in a way that cannot be described. And this is what awaits you at the end of the Wasteland.

All that remains for you then, is to enjoy it!

The Wasteland: Part 1

You notice one thing right off about the world. The ones who do crazy shit are rarely women. People get both charmed and slightly unnerved when they meet me, probably for this reason. Women rarely like the writers I like: Céline, Miller and Bukowski. These writers are deemed misogynistic. Same goes from film-makers like Lars Von Trier whose film Anti-Christ I absolutely hands down adored.

Most women in the public domain are too hung up on their own twats and need for love to surmount this passion for virtue. They seek out traces of misogyny everywhere because they want at all times to be allowed in, admitted, admired, they want it to be easy. This is why you find attics full of women ‘actors’ (because no one’s an actress anymore) complaining about not getting the right kinds of roles written for them, but you find almost none who’ll put their money where their mouth is and produce the films they want to see. Too many women fall into this trap of wanting so badly to be loved or admired or supported, that they rarely quit the security of the hearth to enter the Wasteland.

The Wasteland is the place you get lost in when you throw all caution to the winds for what you want or believe in. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be achieved that is of any true human value without passing through the Wasteland. TS Eliot wrote his poem about it, but it existed long before he deigned to do so. Women aren’t supposed to feel strongly about anything, hence they rarely ever enter the Wasteland. If they do, they are made to think they shouldn’t be in there, they are made to feel the Wasteland will make them manly, old maids, not attractive enough, that the drinking, unhealthy eating, loneliness and swearing that often accompanies life in the Wasteland will make them less feminine, fatter and less prone to finding a man. In this, women are not alone. Most human beings today, male or female, have become utterly incapable of imagining the lives they want, let alone going after them. This is because they all know deep down that the life they want will involve giving up the cozy and warm life they have, where someone else does all the thinking for them. And yet, very often you find women who do strange, crazy, wild shit. I saw a documentary about a woman who lives alone in the Alaskan wilderness, she has her own plane, flies up her own supplies. She doesn’t give a crap about being manly, she prefers living where the bears walk through her front yard. She’s not afraid either. As a result, she has learned to fly in conditions no one else will touch. Rare kind of woman but by no means non-existent.

Historically, women weren’t ‘allowed’ in, they had to fight scramble and push their way in. They did it ironically, by being ‘non-feminine.’ Brown people too, called savages for a long time and until not so long ago, had to prove their mettle by fighting back. In Victorian India, there were fierce, gargantuan intellects who punched through the official narrative about India to create a counter-narrative about their people and their intellectual-cultural traditions. Tagore, Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, Aurobindo and Gandhi were among those. They didn’t merely bitch about not being let in. They tore, kicked and bruised their way in. And to do this, they all had to embrace the Wasteland at some point in their lives. If it hadn’t been for them, India would be extinct. Instead of being the strange, unique, slightly West-fellating mess that it is, it would be a wonderful, rational landscape that had long since given up its identity in favor of the official white man’s narrative. This is also true of the African American people. Everywhere you find that active rebellion has changed perceptions. And everywhere that active rebellion has involved some time spent in the Wasteland.

Simone de Beauvoir did more by writing her novels like a man than she ever did by publishing The Second Sex. No one ever talks about her novels, but you read de Beauvoir’s fiction and you marvel at how manly her writing is. How tough, uncompromising, intellectual the style is, that you can almost smell the locker room sweat on the pages. Sartre had it easy. He was a man and born in the right milieu and didn’t have to scramble like she did. Which is why he wrote like a soft-fleshed girly girl. De Beauvoir was brilliant but fought like a bear, which is why Sartre called her le castor, French for beaver. No, it’s not what you think, it didn’t mean that in French. He called her that because she was ceaseless in her struggle. It wasn’t a physical struggle, it was an intellectual one. A creative one. And when you read her novels, you can see she lived in the Wasteland. She didn’t depend on some man to make it easy for her, she bludgeoned her way through with her brain, her virile style, her lack of patience with the whole ‘femininity’ thing. Not only did she have a powerful grasp of intellectual issues, de Beauvoir wrote like a bloke. It was why the men around her both admired her and bristled. It’s why her novels continue to be ignored in favor of her writings on Feminism.

It’s by shoving your way into the business of publishing or bar-room brawling or movie producing, whatever it may be that you want to do, it’s by telling the story your way, that you change your life and therefore, have an impact on the world. Jane Austen is raised high as the clouds (be warned, I can’t stand the poor woman) because she insisted women had more to them than mere ‘accomplishments.’ But she herself had no husband, made little money with her books and died young with only her sister for company. This was a Wasteland of sorts. But this is forgotten. We even have movies about her today where she is played by some pretty Hollywood ditz, where her physical plainness and lack of life drama are rejected in favor of a story about a posh, lovelorn Bo Peep who needs a man to love her but becomes a writer because she can’t find that love on her own terms. Even worse, she is shown in her own lifetime to become an entirely anachronistic literary star.

But in real life, it doesn’t work that way. You have to pay a price for your beliefs, and that price is in varying forms and degrees, the Wasteland. You have to learn to sacrifice things, you have to give of yourself, you have to accept the horrible loneliness of the life you wish to lead. But the popular narrative, especially as consumed by flighty women, doesn’t seem to let you in on that. It encourages women to be moronic, gentle, dependent on love and softness. It encourages them to make compromises, it makes them feel awful if they don’t. But the Wasteland is real. It is hard to endure, and yes, it alters you. It also makes you invincible, you cannot fail once you’ve got through it. It makes you strong, in a way women aren’t supposed to be in the Western tradition. I sometimes feel like an ogre, and the feeling isn’t entirely imagined. I was never one to fit into the fashionable straitjackets designed for women, but now it is even harder. Every time I go out, I have to deal with this Shreklike creature that sits inside me, the offspring born of my time in the Wasteland. I feel gigantic, brutal, reckless and gruff. I know I swear, talk in excessively categorical terms and am quick to make decisions about people, and that it can turn a lot of people off.

I have come to accept it. I don’t know if I like it all the time, but I know no other way. I always was a tomboy, but now I am also a maternalist. I flaunt my power when I need to, I don’t hide it. I can’t say I am entirely comfortable with all this, but the Wasteland has its own rules. Its own consequences. You can’t fight the Empire and expect to come out of it in a taffeta gown and Cinderella slippers. You either go for the grail or you don’t. But you can’t get the grail and look pretty while you’re sipping sacrificial blood out of it.

Give, feel compassion, but kick the occasional ass when you have to. That’s my motto. It isn’t conducive to femininity, but it sure beats weeping about some swine who doesn’t love you, respect you, or keeps casting you as a helpless fairy without the cojones you know you have.

Want people to see them cojones? Well, flaunt them and let the devil take the hindmost!

An ad we had taken out next week (for the book you see here) in a leading magazine in London was cancelled last minute because that unholy asswipe Tony Blair is launching his book, and the magazine didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.

Ironically when I first received notification of this cancellation, I felt disbelief along with a sense of I told you so. I have always known the liberal media is shite when it comes down to it. They don’t and can’t carry their weight, it isn’t even their fault, they have been slurping it up for so long at the teat of the prince of darkness – modern capitalist politics – that they can’t do much better than this. I was stumped, amazed, furious and spent my weekend in a daze of anger and uproarious emotional tumult as a result of it, but strangely enough, I still don’t blame the magazine. Well I do of course. But much more than that, I blame Tony Blair. One more thing to hate him for: getting in my way, getting in the way of me selling my books.

The modern news media is descended from two institutions. One, the royal gazettes that informed you when the king farted or when the queen’s water broke; and two, the revolutionary people’s papers that spread rumor, scandal and information about the injustices the bourgeois and finally the urban working classes were suffering at the hands of an utterly callous, shit-sucking upper (read aristocratic, at the time) class. The greatest of ironies is that the ruling classes finally co-opted the newspaper phenomenon that had brought them to power. They did it when they realized how amazingly powerful it was. They learned there and then, from their very own rise to power and defeat of the ancien régime, of the importance of controlling discourse, something the aristocracy and the church had known for centuries, but sort of automatically, never having tested this knowledge since they believed their power was beyond reach.

So there were almost 80 newspaper-type publications in Paris during the Revolution (the big one, in 1789) but when Napoleon came to power, he closed most of them and pared them down to three or so, all of which were carefully employed in spreading the word about how utterly awesome he was. And that’s where we stand today. In the great steps of the Enlightenment, which spread a great deal of light even as it spread domination. Nobody planned, understood and institutionalized domination, down to its last details, like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, all in the name of taste, education and well, enlightenment.

So again, here we stand. I’m struggling to establish ‘perfect competition’ (Ha!) by publishing books that the big guys won’t touch. I am trying to bring books back to the center of life (double Ha!) so that art can once again reign where entertainment bites it in the knick-knacks. Entertainment makes you bored and dull, it destroys your neurons and your desire to think or live. Art makes you feel, it makes you come alive, it hurts and gnaws at you, it makes you human. It makes you angry. But the world can make you angry too.

In the last two days, try as I might to ignore him, Tony Blair has succeeded in making me angry. Clearly the climate he installed where he was practically royalty, has not gone away. You can gleefully celebrate the demise of the Blair-Bush mutt-monarchy all you want, but it is still here, and it is here, because a large number of us are so glutted on entertainment we can’t find any reason to get rid of anything, not even the ticks that suck our blood. It is also here because the structures that brought those two men to power and which allowed them to escape the full penalty of the law are happy and thriving. Which is to say, the attitude of ‘fearing power’ or ‘not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention’ is still around. These men created a climate that McCarthy would have been jealous of and Goering applauded. And you see a little of it in this example of my ad being bumped off (or postponed to a time when Blair and his book will be forgotten) by the magazine.

I am furious. I am furious that I am small enough to be bumped off so politely and without recourse. That it is seen as simply a polite matter of ‘we hope you understand tish tish’… I am furious that the reason has nothing to do with the ad itself or even the book, but a person I have nothing to do with, a person who has already caused great damage to much of the world, without NOW getting in the way of my life too. I speak of course of Tony Blair.

And I am furious and amazed that it is all done in the name of something comprehensible, banal and even civilized, in that horrible way the powerful have of pushing you out of the way with a smile and a nudge, all in the name of some highbrow snobbery they expect you, the little guy, to understand. Like I were standing in the room with my stinking goat and the lady of the house were saying, no dear, we can’t have the goat in here, you do understand don’t you…

Well no, I don’t. I have no choice in the matter and that only makes me more furious. Again, I am not so much furious at the magazine, I am furious at the fact that they don’t see what they’re doing. They don’t seem to see or mind that they’re simply following the rules Blair installed, they’re fearfully and resignedly sucking ass. This isn’t Gestapo censorship, for sure. It’s merely the kind of polite exclusion that uses ‘taste’ and ‘elegance’ as its justifications. It is how the powerless are and have been routinely kept out of mainstream discourse. The editors of this magazine are doing exactly what so-called democracy and all that hype about the free press are supposed to militate against: they are succumbing to polite resignation over a bald-faced embracing of rebellion with all its delightful chaos. And yet, the book I’m publishing is highly civilized. It is not cheap, tabloid garbage. It is intellectual, well-written, sophisticated, gentle, it reflects on a great many subtle issues, including personal morality and public responsibility. I’m trying to install actual debate in the mainstream rather than settle for sycophancy in the mainstream and rebellion on its margins; but it would appear this is not something whose time has come yet.

It is as if they’re telling me, your rebelliousness is fine on other issues but here, it’s just too much. To advertise books is fine, but to advertise books that might ‘make waves’ isn’t. This is what I’m being told. Amazingly enough, the editors of the magazine don’t even realize they’re doing it. But somehow or the other, they will regret it. It is never a good idea to suck ass, no matter how elegantly you do it. Because the stink of stale shit is never too far away.

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…