Being a repetition

Mandelstam said that to live and act is but to stammer.
In fact I got cognizance of this sentence through Deleuze's Abécédaire (the most enlightning Youtube video there will ever be, just saying). Deleuze quotes Mandelstam and even worse than repeating Mandelstam I am repeating a repetition, quoting Deleuze quoting Mandelstam quoting something/someone else.
To live is to stammer, and the world is but an attempt to repeat in a frantic pulse the first attempt to articulate. Naught can come from that because articulation is basically impossible, and we cannot dare think of attempting to discover the first pulse. Though, we repeat, and in that, try to understand what came first.
One in the multitude of my readers recognized her style in my writings, and therefore discovered that I was feeding on her own writings. It is absolutely true, and I don't regret it a single second. I only hope that the hordes of writers and thinkers I plagiarise daily will not raise from their tombs, come to me and ask me to acknowledge this fact in my posts. So, I raise my glass to the living, who deserve an eternal gratitude for having helped me articulate my thoughts in English, and a wider recognition of their craftmanship (I forget many of course, in- and voluntarily, unwilling to publicly placard and discredit all the culprits for the words you see): Harmony Siganporia, Mathew Francis, and Shiv Visvanathan. The time when I'll write about them will come, maybe.

Now, repetition, as I have already stated, is the best way to deal with the world in your thinking and writing, at least until a certain point. One does not understand ideas, style, or rythm, until s/he has made it hers/his, and only then is allowed to part from those and criticize it, I truly believe in this. This is exactly why we go through every kind of stages in our life, on a personnal, political, spiritual, intellectual level. We are lost and no exit can be found if we do not wish to follow for some time anothers' path, who is lost too, but has made some progress in discovering the walls (by discovering I mean violently hitting them with their heads, this goes without saying) of the cave we live in.

Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide,

Où l'Espérance, comme une chauve-souris,

S'en va battant les murs de son aile timide

Et se cognant la tête à des plafonds pourris

(Charles Baudelaire, Spleen, in Les fleurs du mal)

I am tempted to translate the latter but I would be ashamed to fall into a patent repetition, so here.
It is only possible to write once you have realised you are stammering, repeating, and adding only fioriturae to what was already told. Mandelstam is exorcising his own stammering, and his own life in his line, as I do in every single word you see, and exorcising one's life remains the only point of writing and, before that, reading. Our aim is to exorcise the world and live in full awareness, but being the very goal that one can never achieve, it takes the body of repetition and uses it to struggle everyday against the shadows, always nearer, always darker.
Is it a wonder I would write such words a few days before my falling into a new quarter of century. Notice how I did not conclude the latter with a question mark.

I used to try and be different than anyone else, avoiding bands others would listen to, taking the exact opposite side from my interlocutor's, fleeing common places (the figure of speech and litterally), but realised too, following the advise of one of my dearest friends (see the viciousness of it all, it comes from the outside, always, while we are struggling to scream, we cannot but swallow), that it was a ridiculous posture to reject everything that one person had already done, and trust me comrade, from this day I entered a new stage in my life, in which instead of finding the chains of repetition and outside impulses on my lifestyle, I found freedom, the freedom to choose one repetition or the other, and the freedom from this little game in which, opposing is already playing and acting according to the norm, be it acting as a negative (in the photographic meaning) of the situation I despised.

Writing is clever plagiarism (and I don't quote who said that for I don't remember). André Gorz, in Le Traitre, evokes his first attempts at writing, and tells us that he did nothing but imitate, plagiarise, from Flaubert to Sartre, from theater to poetry, and in this movement, he could find how he writes. Proust found his words after writing in the style of Stendhal, after whose reading he could not dare writing. I think one can find worse ancestors than those two, no?

The bourgeois illusion of the artist living in an ivory tower, digging only in her/his own mind, being unique, is still tenaciously anchored in our imaginations, and even if the whole twentieth century has seen artists and movements explain it with the full range of colours (here also litterally sometimes), we do not want to part from that image that informs our very lives. Maybe it is time we try harder. It is the collection of our inspirations that make us who we are, differentiating anyone from any other, in other words, no matter how hard you try you will still be unique. Isn't it a relief? You're welcome.

Frankenstein's monster

Amidst the horrors that assault me daily, three descents into what could be subtitled "The fall of the house of Reason" have emerged as patent manifestations of a phenomenon giving its name to this post. Many events deserve attention in these troubled days, but, is it the voice missing, the shame too deep, the horror of it all, and the silence imposed in such distress? I still, till this day, cannot raise a word to evoke the viciousness (but here is a word, already undermining, lying, catharsis-ing what can't, what shan't) of men, everyday, in India and everywhere else in the world, assaulting (here, told you, there is NO word) women. So I'll stop there and sing the fall of the house of Reason, Sense, Life, Thinking, add what you will, though both stories are more linked than you think, as you will see following my steps.
Indeed, what else but screaming out in sheer tears and laughter in front of the jeopardising of the Erasmus program in Europe, the community digging into whatever budget to regain some confidence from the drunken sailors of Wall Street? What else but partake in the crying of the many, but too few, that have remained human, and helplessly sob in front of the closing down of one of the most precious bibliotheques in Europe, the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples, due to economic difficulties (sic)? Become who else but a Muslim widow, a Dalit scavenger, an oppressed writer, a petty shop keeper struggling to survive, a city beggar, in front of the ineluctible rise of a man I still do not wish to name but from whose victims you may have recognised, to the highest stage of the scene in a country I long for, in every meanings there are, India.

And they were all there, the ploughers, the millers, the smiths, the warriors, the merchants, the bards, but on the stage erected in the meadow, were the philosophers
And the philosophers sung the trees, the sun, and the sea, and they swore to devote their life to see and make see, to collect and sow the strings of the song of all the things
They asked but for a shelter, a temple made of straw and twigs, a sword to follow them on their path when collecting, bread and wine for their work to continue
They did not ask for the ears and hearts of the citizens, for those were stunned by the song they just heared, as freed from their invisible chains, flying above the dirt, surrounded by the warmth of a never setting sun
And the citizens all swore, to give them shelter and sword and food, for the song to go on, they built a temple of wood on the hill, for the philosophers feared the marmor the others wished to offer, they fed the philosophers with bread for they would refuse geese and fresh trouts, only one man would protect them for they would ask the troops to go home to their loved ones, war being always too near
The merchants swore to ensure they would never lack
So the guild grew hungry for everything that could be needed by the philosophers, doing so they met travellers and went in foreign villages, the game caught them, and hides, jewels, spices, were still too little for them to be sure they could sustain the philosophers, they would crook and steal the traveller, corrupt the man of law, starve the peasant, for the men on the hill to ensure the future
The thinkers grew concerned, they were reduced to trying to help the miserable citizens under the yoke of the merchants, tried to come to reason with those but could not
The merchants would still would use whatever trick a mind can come up with and what the pathetic remnants of their moral would not disapprove of, in order to be positively sure the philosophers would not lack anything for a thousand years and more
They would trade their sons and daughters, sell the jewels found in the tomb of their ancestors, in order to... In order to what one asks, He praises the philosophers for their lights, but seriously says he, can we allow certain citizens not to pay the taxes? Can we feed unproductive cows? Can we afford to send a soldier with them to the end of the lands and back?  And we allow them to spit at our face in their discourses, What do they do? They sing says one, and everyone stares at their feet
The morrow, merchants send their messengers to the house on the hill, with lists and bills. They ask for the due
The philosophers sing
The guards come the next day and claim the due
The others sing
The merchants finally come, the philosophers sing with all their might, no merchant is spared and sees the atrocities he has commiteed, the deaths he is to respond for, the guards are called to push the thinkers inside, the locker is put on their door
Still they sing, and none in the village can sleep, and none can stay away from what he or she has done, and nights become deserts, water tastes sour, even wine is but vinegar
For all but for the low ones, the beggars, the peasants, the nurses, the orphans, the victims who recognise their oppressors and shout for revenge, as if the song had awaken them
The troop is sent to the top of the hill, and warns the thinkers
And they sing
And the merchants twist in horror and fear
And they sing
One merchant takes a flambeau and throws it on the little house. First frightened, the others then imitate the first. The fire rises, the heat grows, the roof starts and collapses
And they sing

The tragedy taking place now is none but this. The goal being sacrificed to what was to be the mean. In other words, philosophy, knowledge, democracy, harmony, love, is being taken over by economy, security, comfort, and other sides that were to be by-products and tools for the formers to spread. Sounds like reducing the issue to a manychean struggle of good against evil? Too biased? Don't you know I am not imagining but merely counting here? I know, both are the same, but here I speak what I see, and therefore if truth cannot be, a testimony holds the most amount of truth you will hear, so listen and stay still for now, smart ass.

Nehru's India was to grow on the youth, on knowledge, on democracy, following the pulse of the heart that had made the nation rise against the colonizers, retaining the beauty of the song that had resonated throughout a country of millions and had forced a mighty Kingdom to take its paw back. In order to build this nation, resources and infrastructures were needed, therefore the industry and economy were of use, as the legs that would make the body stand up. The goal was to make everybody rise, the mean, that the luckiest ones would pull the arms of the unlucky and get them out of the pit. Again, I do not evoke the pit as poverty or starvation, though it could be, but lack of dignity and means to live every possible path one would choose to. In the move, the lucky ones got luckier, and the industrialists and bankers grew fat, hungrier, disregarding the goal to see the mean. And as growth would come and money would flow, it became obvious that new goals were to be reached: the increase of this wealth and the prevention from any change in the social hierarchy, meaning pushing those who were not needed down the pit. But it was a hard task, and they had to throw some goats in the pit for the unlucky ones to feed and fight for, for them not to even notice they lay at the down of a pit. The wealthy therefore entered politics, and found that the best way to let business flourish was to drive the anger of the people towards another side, a communal side. It would let the citizen out of the economic issues dealt with by technocrats, while ensuring any revolt would eventually turn against itself. Instead of talking about dignity and democracy, they would say traditions, Bharat, and foreigners. The process, initiated with the consolidation of democracy thanks to development has therefore turned into development taking place on the corpse of democracy and dreams born after independance in the people's consciences. Frankenstein's monster has risen its ugly face, and apparently, we are under its yoke.

It is fascinating to look at India because the process has taken only 60 years and is therefore quite obvious, but the same can be stated for almost every community of people in the world. It is no wonder that World War II resistants would rise in the France of 2012, blaming the government for jeopardizing the healthcare and pensions system that had been created just after the war. Nicolas Sarkozy stated it straight, claiming his will to destroy the remnants of the Conseil National de la Résistance Program that was drawn during the war to ensure democracy and dignity to the people (basically, the welfare system as we have known it in France). The tree eventually wants to cut its own roots, get free and economically liberalize the fuck out of everything. It is an image I have often used but the snake is biting its own tail. When the European Union wants to get rid of a "financial weight" like the Erasmus program, what else is it? It is in the exchanges between students, cultures, and people that Europe has been built, and, frankly, it is the only point of it all, so now you wanna come and stop these exchanges because they cost money, well, sorry, but yes, I will shout again and again, in tears: the snake is biting its tail. And all the more when it comes to travels, allowing only money and products to cross borders while humans are more and more prevented from doing so, which is the best sign of the decadence we are entering in, but this time guys, we are bringing everybody with us, not like Athens or Rome, something huge, just wait and see. Or we could know a world in which people could travel freely, while it would be forbidden to transfer even one cent or one box of bananas from a country to another. You read it here first.

Seriously, you can do what you will within your economic little game, but don't you touch what is outside of it! It is here a notion of sacred that rejoices ecology or social issues: capitalism is desacralising what ought to be sacred (nature, human dignity, philosophy), and in this movement is forgetting its purpose (allowing everyone to live in dignity) and its roots (simple illustration: where would we be without philosophy and litterature? Hasn't it built the world we live in? Even more: if we want to become vicious scoundrels and think like they do, aren't liteature and philosophy bringing profits at the end of the day? Yerk, I almost puked linking both). Sacred also rejoices the monster's image, Frankenstein having broken the sacred and therefore angered the Gods. Well, we needed stories, but God is naught but the world, humanity a part of it, so we were warning and talking about sacred and Gods, you were a little childish so we had to tell tales, but it was for your own good, got it?

Stop looking at singers, poets, philosophers, painters, sculptors and such, like you would look at funny useless savant monkeys, once and for all, you would not live without them, if you did, you would have no purpose whatsoever, and you are only allowed to frolic with your paise because you sustain them. I'm talking to you Frankenstein's monster, for I know there is a remnant of humanity in your fat greasy face, and I am sorry for the people who made you do those disgusting things like importing oil and entering new markets, I, personnally, would have never brought you to life.

Le Voyageur

Qui est parvenu ne serait-ce que dans une certaine mesure à la liberté de la raison, ne peut rien se sentir d'autre sur terre que Voyageur. Pour un voyage toutefois qui ne tend pas vers un but dernier car il n'y en a pas. Mais enfin, il regardera les yeux ouverts à tout ce qui se passe en vérité dans le monde. Aussi ne devra-t-il pas attacher trop fortement son cœur à rien de particulier. Il faut qu'il y ait aussi en lui une part vagabonde dont le plaisir soit dans le changement et le passage.

Sans doute, cet homme connaîtra les nuits mauvaises où prit de lassitude, il trouvera fermée la porte de la ville qui devait lui offrir le repos. Peut-être qu'en outre, comme en Orient, le désert s'étendra jusqu'à cette porte, que des bêtes de proie y feront entendre leur hurlement, tantôt lointain, tantôt rapproché, qu'un vent violent se lèvera, que des brigands lui déroberont ses bêtes de somme. Alors, sans doute, la nuit terrifiante sera pour lui un autre désert, tombant sur le désert, et il se sentira le cœur las de tous les voyages.

Dès que le soleil matinal se lève, ardent comme une divinité polaire, que la ville s'ouvre, il verra peut-être sur les visages de ses habitants plus de désert encore, plus de saleté et de fourberie et d'insécurité que devant les portes. Et le jour, à quelque chose près, sera pire que la nuit. Il se peut bien que tel soit à quelque moment le sort du Voyageur.

Mais pour le dédommager viennent ensuite les matins délicieux d'autres contrées, nés des mystères du premier matin. Il songe à ce qui peut donner au jour entre le dixième et le douzième coup de l'horloge, un visage si pur, si pénétré de lumière, de sereine clarté qui le transfigure.

Il cherche la philosophie d'avant midi.

He, who has reached, be it in a small extent, the freedom of the mind, cannot experience the Earth but as a Wanderer, though wandering on a path that does not lead to a final destination because there is none. But, he will consider with eyes open what truly takes place in this world. Hence, he shall not dedicate too much of his heart to anything in particular. He will thence have to find in himself a nomadic side that tastes what changes and passes.

It is certain that such a man will live hard nights when he will find himself in desperation, without the closed door of the city where he was to find rest. Then, a desert may spread, like in the East, until the base of this very door, wolves’ howling would resonate whether afar or close, a ferocious wind would rise, bandits would rob his cattle. Then, surely, the horrific night will become another desert, covering the desert, and he will feel but weary for all wanderings.

As the morning sun rises, sharp as a polar deity, as the city opens, he may see on the faces of the citizens nothing but more desert, more dirt and treachery and danger than he saw without the walls. And overall, days will be worse than nights. Here may well lie, sometimes, the wanderer’s fate.

But on the other hand, delicious mornings in other lands will rise, born from the wonders of the first morning. He will wonder what makes day, within the tenth and the twelfth clock of the bell, appear with a face so pure, so filled with light, with calm truth, a face which transcends its old complexion.

He seeks the philosophy from before noon.

F. Nietzsche

(extrait de Humain, trop humain, T 1)

(exerpt from Human, all too human, T 1)

Version française : http://pochpower.org/le_voyageur_de_nietzsche_0

And they became I

Thinking is a struggle. First, and unsurprisingly, a struggle against the self, needing every single bit of breath one can give to insuflate and build ideas that are, if not new, articulated in simpler words. It is also, and I join here Gilles Deleuze's conclusions, a struggle against stupidity and those who seek the death of philosophy, who can bloody well be philosophers and "fine spirits". I do not wish to think and amuse myself, this is a crucial idea, I am fighting, every single second of my life, against a stupidity that can be the one of the times, of the world, of someone, of everyone, but, more importantly, of myself. And in myself I am not fighting natural or given behaviors, but constructed mindsets and laziness, that have been incorporated there by the outside world. Here, it is important to bring two other nuances: it does not mean that the truth is in me and the outside world is lying to me, the platonician inspiration and essence are not at stake in my discourse, nothing is there, something has to come up from nothing. You can argue that it is impossible, I would reply that here lies the complete mean and goal of philosophy beyond fighting non-thinking. From Descartes' doubt, stemming from a question (can I find any assumption that does not rely on any other assumption?Giving the: I know that I doubt, therefore I know that I think, therefore I know that I am an object that is thinking), to Sartre's Being and Nothingness (which point is precisely to show that the relation between the nothing and the something is the point of philosophy, namely create something out of nothing), the objective has been to unlearn, doubt, unthink in the process we are used to, to therefore think. I could quote the Buddha, Jesus Christ, some Renaissance thinkers there, and some Gandhi here, but the point is made, and frankly it does not appear as the most original idea you ever read, so let's move on.

Hence I unthink, and have been unthinking for quite some time. One does not understand a concept as the platonician "I know that I know not" until experiencing it in the deepest and the fullest of her or his own experience ("experiments with truth" I could say, these words being music and in the best form to make complicated ideas sing, which by the way I think is one of the most crucial teachings of the Man, that one has to make ideas sing, and that their strength lies in the form, if not that the form is all, poetry as the only language there is). One has to go all the way to the best understanding, or better "compréhension" (Latin giving the French word a physical notion, but also the idea that one needs to make a voice her or his before any kind of praise or critic of an idea). It is only when my mind, as if it was driven by inspiration, formulates "on its own" the terms of an idea that I can assume I have understood a part of it, the mirage of spontaneity being only the point when our mind reaches an understanding of concepts that were already heard, and why most of the time, every creator will realise that the idea s/he just got comes from something s/he has already seen drawn by other hands, or even come across a book that s/he could swear has never read but could have written, in this case it is only that the ideas have travelled by other means and have impregnated the world in which the creator lives that s/he could reformulate them from their reflections without seeing the primary source. But is not the experiment of one with such an understanding as important as its creation? I think it is. Therefore, the words, the form, matter (see? I just came back to Bapu on my own). Intelligence does not lie in avoiding such "repetitions" but recognising them, and therefore humility rejoices thinking.

Unthinking is struggling. But why do we want to struggle? One could say that my vision of philosophy is to fight windmills. It is not so. We are born, we could say "we were thrown into", a world excusively made of conflicts. How we deal with them is but life. For what is there but conflicts, from politics to logic (a thought, a theory, is at first a conflict, an alternative in which we choose to posit 2+2=4 as the correct one, and in such a move, reject any other proposition, hence put an end to an earlier conflict between 2+2=4 and every other proposition, even if we do not have to , and even cannot, go through all the other propositions which are infinite). Nowhere can be found absence of conflict, or something else than a conflict, and still we will go through them, try and solve them, creating new conflicts, closing ourselves in a cyclical time of two steps, from peception of the conflict to trial to solve it. Everything nothing, being and nothingness, true false... We realise that the whole existence lies but in the alternative, and a choice that is only the passage to a new one.
So why cannot we stop this? What is the strength that pushes us to join Sisyphe on the steep of the mountain and be eternally in a state of unrest and disappointment?

I have an idea about this, but questions are more important than answers, because as we have seen, if we cannot get out of the cycle of alternative choice, question answer, the only way out is eventually a way in, to try and stop the process by pausing it and then slowing it down as much as we can (Kant, as every mind who has made a step in philosophy, started by telling his predecessor, Descartes, "you are going too fast"). So, why cannot we bear conflict, and yet never stop and create new ones?

We constantly divide conflicts into two categories which appear to us almost without any thinking. We are talking of "good conflicts", and "bad conflicts". An NGO trying to get rid of illiteracy in a rural part of the country is involved in a "good conflict", a robber killing a car driver to take hold of her/his car is involved in a "bad conflict" (I do expect that readers who have followed me until here are not monsters, and if they are, well, please bear with my examples and just admit for a minute the falling of each case in each category is seen as a generally followed one). The majority of us apply this distinction only by calling the latter "conflict", but never the former and likes. So far, so good. Now let's strike! A company is trying to increase its sales, is a conflict at several levels: in a non exhaustive way, we can list a conflict with other companies (competition), a conflict with the law (making the most profits without breaking it), a conflict with the workers (cost cutting and other such delicacies to maximise the profits), a conflict with the consumer (this idiot is still not buying our stuffs! We need to make him/her change his/her mind). Casualties could be enormous, from the misery of little entrepreneurs who have lost their local market to the bigger company, workers who have been fired or exploited, persons who have been made into consumers and whose free choice has been denied. Though, many will not see a "bad conflict" here, some may not see a conflict if they call as such only the conflicts they find "bad". The stroke has given us a new concept you see? Namely, legitimacy.

This legitimacy is defined by the means (and goals, but they fall into the former category, defining the means) of a conflict. We could almost say, there is no conflict but conditions of conflicts. Being a non static categorisation, the whole struggle will be for the one involved in the conflict to legitimate the conflict and its participation in it. To try and change this perception of the conflict, one will have to show a reality in which her or his involvement and means used in the conflict make sense. Building a reality or a world to make sense of our actions and environment is the most common behaviour one can witness, it occurs all the time, trust me. The destruction of the former world and the building of the new one is a constant process of change and reconstruction of history, namely creating a narrative in which what I do is right/obvious/the only choice there is. And so for every conflict we encounter, a narrative is tried and forced into our mind, so that we see such conflicts as non-conflicts. The whole purpose of conflict resolution lies therefore in the deconstruction, as in analysis, of the narratives that surround us, denotating conflicts and discourses we are parts of.

This is the major problem of the ones who try to make others admit a narrative, and therefore, this research of the narrative has to be disqualified by concepts that are their own narratives, in which the conflict participants have no say. It must appear as natural, that is independent from narratives, necessary, transcending the experience of life in every point, and mapping reality in a rigid geography. But, they remain narratives, and their deconstruction is therefore the only weapon one is left with. Though one can say that deconstruction needs a point of reference wich is the self, which is a narrative, which makes every attempt at deconstruction give a new narrative to deconstruct, and we become Sisyphe again. Well, yes. But, and this "but" is probably one of the reasons why I want to wake up every day, with trees and quiches and people, but we have to keep climbing the mountain and fall, because it is the way to destroy the legitimacy of illegitimate conflicts and by that, reduce the casualties as much as we can. We cannot stop the war against humanity, only take side.

We have seen that the whole process of the conflict is to create narratives and to make them look natural. Parsons (or Mead, can't find the reference in the perimeter my arms can reach) developped a theory in which our relation to the world is built by the discovery of the range of pronouns from I to You, S/He... Initially, I being the child, You being the mother, living in a bilateral relation of a self and an almighty parent. The S/He will be discovered later as the child learns that the behaviour of the mother and their relation is also dependent upon other persons, then They, to finally see the existence of an It, being the abstractions that rule the world in which the child lives. The point of every actor in a conflict is to make its discourse stem not from the S/He, but from the It, naturalising the narrative in which her/his behaviour is the right one. It is striking when we analyse the dominant discourse surrounding us, be it utilitarianism, communalism, science...
In a categorisation of History, we could assume that every era is characterised by a They (a ruling class) trying to disguise its narrative as an It (nature) to strengthen its domination and legitimate unequalities or conflicts. The characteristic of the dominant class being that it would be the part of the population who would understand the It, though most of the time, the ones who understand would produce a discourse that legitimates the ones who rule.

So we have the trio: ruling principle (It), interprets, and ruling class (They)
In primitive societies with nature and the deities, allegedly decoded and heard by the wizards, legitimating the chiefs
In antiquity: ideas, essence, gods, decoded by philosophers, for male urban citizens
Middle Age: God, priests, kings
Enlightment and post revolutionnary ear: Logic, scientifics, rationnal male wealthy citizens

It is a funny thing to notice that the French language does not have a pronoun for "it", preventing any coup by the simple non-existence of the neutral. The pronoun associated with he (il) and she (elle), being "on", litteraly "people", or an undetermined "we", with the connotation of rumour or word of mouth, making it all the more hard to believe every sentence beginning with such pronoun. It may be easier for a French speaker to claim that the king is naked, as we could see with the Revolution, but it also implies that the "It", though it might change easily for a French mind, alays holds the same strength on the society, the period following the revolution being but the creation of a domination by rationnality and therefore scientifics and other specialists, putting the crown on the capitalistic European man.

To explain the title of this post, I could say that the It is bound to be swallowed and digested by the commoner who will make it a part of her/his understanding of the world and act accordingly, the They became the I. This could be continued until now but it would be extremely arduous given the fact that truly yours himself swims in a sea of narratives and therefore would not be presomptuous enough to assume that he has decoded and categorised them. The past becomes the past when it appears as old fashioned, as in stupid. Though many narratives nowadays can be decoded, and this is what I meant when I was referring to a struggle in the beginning of this post, hence closing the circle (lucky for you, dear reader, I could have fallen back on my feet way later). We can understand that this fight lies in thinking because the devil is everywhere and especially in what appears as simplistic and given. So the more simplistic, the more suspicious is the motto I would like to spread, with, of course: deconstruction is the way, say I.

Stealing

And from the earth rose a song
That shook the depths of depths
To the skies of skies

They were brought on the seas
And the stealing began
Creating the disharmony
Of which ancient gods had warned

From jungle to jungle
From forests to plantations
And the gods' sceptres were usurped
And turned into whips

The monster of a thousand heads
Began the fight against the song
The great imbalance started to make them lean
To a side they had to flee

Covering men and land
The hand wanted more
Flags flourished, chimneys rose,
The hand grew hungrier

For land and men they fought
And their doom fed the heads
Eating more, wanting more
The stealing, the rape, had to go on

From beneath the soil
From above the edge of forests
The hand gathered food
And gave but misery back

And the songs of thanking and praising
Of love and fear for the world
Were fewer and fewer
What ancients would do, they would ravage

When they had stolen the land they stole the youth
When parents had perished they would lie to the child
When the booty was gone
The stealers turned to each other
And cannibalism was the law

When the soil was dry they looked above
To the stars where food is infinite
Feet and hands getting monstruously enormous


And from the earth rose a song
That shook the depths of depths
To the skies of skies

Unheard
Harmless
Vanishing in the wind and the sea


Everything is said yet I need to illustrate, in order not to be disdained as occult or arrogant. It all started with a discussion about the world, one in which you enter with full weaponry or just leave, one of the many discussions where mischievous ghosts and gouls come up at every turn of phrase dressed in words like "natural", "we were born like this", or "man is such, and has always been". I truly enjoy these dialogues most of the time, allowing me to try another delivery, with words as labor, to extract my poor counterpart from the matrix of the "common sense", which I dealt with in a previous post, the thousand faces monster that has found me and that I have recognised after all these years spent learning my enemy. My short life has been everything, but it was mainly a dance for two between the monster and me, education and work being but the steps I had to follow around it to finally get as close as I could, because straight way can only lead to succumbing to the seduction of the monster. I will tell you about those steps if we get a chance. But for now I want to tell you about an encounter that happened last week, one of many, but one in which I could smell and feel the demon thoroughly and precisely. So much I could see the exact moment when the first particle of fear started to change side. When the rictus of mockery it had always given me, without changing from a single inch, started turning into a grin of apprehension.

It all started with this memory of a German poem, learnt in classe préparatoire, depicting the world as a song, no, it all started with a book in which reason was abhorred, no, actually, it started in a car where "social construct" was repeated like the sufis repeat their words until the transe begins, or no, it all started in a classroom. In a classroom where the origins of marketing and accountings were discussed, where it was stated that the first product which needed such arts was human being.

Slavery started the process of marekting and accounting because it started the big imbalance. One needs to count and promote his/her (only adding the feminine for the sake of it, I doubt any slave dealer was a woman) production. Production being nothing else than a surplus, an overflooding that needs to be gotten rid of. In capitalism I mean the world we live in, where every mind is monopolised by a system, there can be no argument against the fact that since the seventeenth century capitalism has started to rule everything, and eventually produced the world we live in. I do not mean it as a school of thoughts or a discourse (though it is also all that) but as a matter of fact, as the situation, but not as the only possible situation, or the logical one, and this is where I want to lead you dearest reader.

It is a tale of imbalance and monstruosity, a thirst that never goes out, but mainly it is a tale of theft. Taking men and women from Africa to bring them into America was also a magical trick consisting in taking human beings and transforming them into numbers. For every shipping, it is a well known fact that only 70, 60, or 50 per cent of product will not make it to the other shore. How would numbers matter? The infamy is that they are, turning soul and body and mind into a numerical figure, into the percentage of probable deaths, into the number of guards and whips needed, into a price. This magic is commonly called stealing, that is depriving a thing from its value to take possession of it for free. The biggest imbalance that could ever be, the most hideous metamorphosis, of turning a man into a coin. After such a theft, and such a profit, the cliff was dug and needed more sacrifices. Words like growth, per capita income, importations, are legacies of this first event.

To fill the cliff, they threw more men, lands, even nations in it. They had to perpetuate the imbalance by depriving others. Colonisation took place, forced labour, exportation of goods, ethnocides of the native Americans, of so many others I am ashamed not to quote. When the world was filled and therefore the cliff was not receiving as much, they started eating each other. Wars created the imbalance needed. Destruction and crimes created a new gap that had to be filled with cement and food, and capitalism could go on. The fall of the last bareers and nations in front of capitalism, in the end of the last century, provided new markets to fill, new money to make. Now the exploitation of men and land throughout the world brings more back.
The imbalance perpetuates itself in the price you pay, for you do not pay for the land that has been dug, the people that have been expelled, the blood of the worker that has been poored, and what could pay for this anyway? You only pay for the cunning of the one who could organise such a magic trick, and of course you pay for them to make you believe there is no trick. You yourself pay evey day by giving a pound of flesh to capitalism, by working, and most of all, by believing that here lies hapiness, stealing away your energy, your years, your hapiness, and eventually even the thought of other possible ways to truly achieve hapiness.
Imagine someone robbing your neighbour's house and offering to sell you their tv for half the price you would pay at a store, would you buy it? Now imagine it is not your neighbours that have been robbed but the soil of Brazil, oranguntans in Sumatra, farmers in India, bees in Poland, would you buy the set? And when you are surrounded by signs praising the set, when it is sold in a friendly environment, with pictures of nature and smiling average joes, when your hapiness has been described as possessing such a set from your very birth, when any other form of hapiness is described as being against the common good, or namely human rights, when the theft is hidden or described as nature or how the things are supposed to be. May I introduce the wonderful, the magical, the one and only, capitalism. The inequity and imbalance have to go on, and that is precisely what the priests ask when they call for more growth, more productivity, more incomes. The only question that will remain is to know how long a snake can keep on eating its own tail?

The sacred and profane, the ceremonies of the ancients have been turned to stupidity and anachronicism. Indeed, who is righteous acting in the manner I describe when others turn to the world, the land, the animals, to thank them, to fear them, after they have taken what they need to eat and dress? The harmony that rituals and spirituality try and achieve is precisely the opposite of the concensus needed by capitalism, it is its perfect antithesis, and as such, has to appear as foolish and useless. Science has to decode everything and prove there is no mystery left standing, for us to go on in the way we have chosen and built, narrowing the scope of knowledge to what we can observe and understand, very little indeed. The fear of a storm, of dark woods, and of what lies in the attic when we are asleep are but clues that we are disdaining the sound of the world and barricading ourselves in rationality, while everything tells us not to do so.
But here too, we have found new myths, myths that we can cope with and contain, serial killers and man made disasters, so that we forget about the old ones, so that we are never tickled by the memory of the corpse under the bed we sleep on. I fear the werewolves in the moor, I fear the vampires in the hills, I fear the things from the sea in the little ports, I fear the succubes in the river, and I am grateful for this, for I fear the most to learn what my children will fear.

Marche ou crève

Being I hope as dear to her as she is to me, Ms Harmony S. shares work and ideas with me when she feels like it. This is how I got to meet in bungalows on the Sabarmati, villas on the Bombay seaside, two of her (you have to believe it when I say it) contemporaries, in the person of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Behramji Malabari. They happen to share an idea among others that was always one of the pivotal concepts in my life, j'ai nommé 'walking'. When you are in the company of such figures along with David Henri Thoreau, Walter Benjamin, and surrealists poets like André Breton or Louis Aragon, you are bound to find something worthy of a blog post at least, even when you are a worm surrounded by those stars (may I count the protagonist in the beginning of this post? Yes). Though all political, my mind has been set mainly on our two friends from Gujarat, the sense of walking being inherent to their struggle for the liberation of a nation of nearly a billion then. Impressive hey? Still, my question is a little more profound that the one that just precedes.

What were Malabari and Gandhi most afraid of if not themselves? They knew that oppression and violence have little, if not nothing, to do with sheer evilness, rather with losing consciousness, becoming deaf and blind. The world, the people, sing perpetually and you can perceive this song more or less briefly when witnessing an injustice, but as in a balloon, you lose tracks of this Song, of those prints, when you take off again, try and set your eyes on the horizon. It desperately and fatally escapes from you as soon as you do not hear the Song.
What is walking? The most basic unit of transportation. The closest way to the ground, for us tall primates, to people, to the Song. Boarding on anything is the best way to lose consciousness and replace your perceptions by the ones of the machine. You ARE a car when in a car, you ARE a train when in a train. Thinking what is car or trainwise.
It is a brilliant coincidence that at the same time as these walkers walked, Albert Einstein developed his theories, a part of which being that time depends on your speed, in other terms, that you become your speed, that is your mean of transportation.
Walking is the only (or at least the closest, you still have to take care of rocks, branches, and water) way not to be your mean of transportation.

Needs development, but I like this last sentence, thank you.

En réponse à "In which she thinks of Boulez and the War."

The quotation of Coleridge is one of the most relevant theft I have ever seen you wear, and as always it's impossible to give it this name as it was always born to be pinned by you. The post war periods of the twenty first century are so powerfully summed up in these words: artistic moves going at first outwards and deconstructing what was left by earlier ages by blowing it up (Dada, what else could be more explenatory?), then reconstructing, at first in a move against mechanic (surrealism), then against rationality (dialectic), a picture from the pieces left by civilisation, blown into littler pieces by the moves aforementioned (isn't the subtitle for Adorno's Minima Moralia "Life in pieces"?).
I would add that all this needs war as a fuel, marxism as a motor -in its existence as a tool to denounce and uncover the veil that has been thrown on life- , and therefore see war merely as the cruellest illustration of a catastrophe already enunciated and denounced. In war, we did not see the horror of anormality, but the crualty that normality is pregnant with. Life and mind were biased and divided in pieces way before the war, and the violent reaction of artists blowing up language and rationality, like Spanish anarchists did with the caserns and churches, appears as the only way to deal with a situation that has become the opposite of life, though it would be presomptuous to define what is life.
Hence one realizes that avant-garde and violence are to wed everywhere, all the time, and Coleridge states it straight. But remember that this association is only the answer that has to be given to a violence that goes way deeper and is so hard to defeat because it integrates and ruins those efforts made to overtake it. It is not surprising anymore to read about the spectators in the Royal Albert Hall texting their friends, husbands, and mistresses, chatting while you go through one of the most violent feelings you ever experienced. Just like we talk about Picassos and Manets by discussing their price, or even worst the fact that art must remain a mystery and esoteric. The relationship with art - even say "art" instead of "expression" participates in the tragedy, dividing the whole in parts that have to be evaluated separately and classified - has joined the consumption sphere, and the oeuvre is a mere pretext to judge myself and the other: "which opera did you see?" "Which painter do you love?" "I read this book, fantastic!" In art we value ourselves and others, drape oursleves in a cloth of more or less price, and what is the point of value if it is not to worth something else, be sold or exhanged.
That's why I love -and saying love I say it in a relationship excluding value, if such a thing is possible, but only my recognition of dealing with a human sister, an individual with who I can talk to and share- your piece and many of yours, in that they explore and therefore share a personnal view that is denied of arrière pensées. It is a gift that you write, that you are. Giving being the last shelter for those who want to explore a life that has not been blown into pieces, divided, and ossified in formaldehyd jars. Your struggle so painlessly -it seems to the stranger-, and yet so deeply and generously, to reveal a life that is worth living. This is what touches me so much in your parole. Hence even clumsiness or confusion, though scarcely observed in your writings, sound true and add diversity and perspectives instead of reducing the whole. May you think a little like that concerning my awful grammary and choice of words...