..it is needful to trace a parallel road in the
air, a second highway...
– Huysmans
We are dispossessed, we are trapped in
enchantment; it is called Normality. REVOLT?
DISENGAGEMENT & REPOSSESSION: THE EXORCISM OF THE
NORMAL
Attack is the best form of defence: all inherited
categories of existence and society must be dissolved by the ultimate weapon: THE IMAGINATION. Will, generated by
hate and disgust, is not enough, but fused with the creative matrix of the
imagination it is invincible. ‘With a shudder, we cross what the occultists
call dangerous territory’ – Andre
Breton: Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) in Breton (1972) p40
Repossess your mind/transform yourself. You are
reality: you are the past and the future.
AGAINST MYSTICISM
Assert the sovereign necessity of self-creation
against the self-annihilation of mysticism in all its form. Do not depart from
this sacred mission: the destruction of worship.
Worship is the ultimate de-humanization of
yourself. The fight against mysticism must be relentless; after it has been
crushed ceaseless vigilance will be required to ensure the impotence of belief
in all its forms: orthodox, esoteric, spiritual, political: the Nirvana
Syndrome, the Curse Program Virus (Burroughs), the EP or the Emotional Plague
(Reich).
Repudiate all Platonic and NeoPlatonic doctrines,
which seek to colonize the unconscious and even the symbol. Remain implacably
against all magic and religion with elevated spiritual objectives, against all
mystical dogmas of unification with others, with god, with society or Das Volk. Repudiate all metaphysical
absolutes, meanings and purposes, all so-called ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ laws and
interventions of ‘grace’. We must bring about the TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF WORSHIP, even self-worship.
RADICAL DISENGAGEMENT
The origin of Guerrilla Poetics:
‘Our troops operate in the area of dream and myth
under guerrilla conditions. This area is our cover...The enemy is a noncreative
parasite.’ - William Burroughs, First Recordings
Radical disengagement is the
exorcism of the Normal, of Maya, of the evil enchantment – the world of
ultimate illusion created by the black magic of the world power monopolies.
Against Plato the fascist, against the denigration of reality as a reflection
of a supra-sensible world that is only a moral fiction.
Dissociation of perception/creative vertigo, protoplasmic reversion,
atavistic resurgence. Arthur Machen, H P Lovecraft (Cosmic Horror), Austin
Spare. Breakthrough in plane, ‘outside the circles of time’ (Grant). Neo-shamanism.
Urban alchemy.
Objective Dissociation
Clinical dissection on all parties, cults, religions and beliefs.
Clinical dissection of the mind.
Clinical dissection of yourself, the elimination of all parasitic
accretions of thought, all Pavlovian worship-responses: behavioral conditioning
that accepts the Nirvana Syndrome.
De-politicization will lead to total de-sacralization: Nothing is sacred:
You have only just begun to exist!
Cultural Subversion: the Grotesque, Uncertainty and the
Absurd
Continue the battles of our sacred ancestors who began to undermine the
bastions of perception:
Nihilism
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
– Nietzsche: Toward an Outline: The Will To Power 1 (1885-1886)
Irony
Sterne, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Beckett, Warhol
The heroism of modern life, dandyism, bitterness; your heart laid bare.
Objectivity
Poe (Ratiocination), Huysmans (Supernatural Realism), Duchamp.
Huysmans: ‘But it was likewise needful to sink a well-shaft into the
soul’
Black Humour
Swift, Gay, Burroughs, Beckett, Breton.
‘Where shall we find such another Set of practical Philosophers, who to
man are above the fear of death?’ (John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, Act II, Scene
I, 1728)
Beckett: ‘No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying
is such a long tiresome business I always found’ (From an Abandoned Work, 1957)
Guignol
Alfred Jarry: ‘Please yourself, Pere Ubu but you’ll find yourself in the
soup.’
The Grotesque &The Bizarre
‘If I am not grotesque I am nothing’ – Aubrey Beardsley.
‘The grotesque deepens life’s outward appearance to the point where it
ceases to appear merely natural’ – Vsevolod E. Meyerhold
‘Dandies deck themselves out and stroll among the charnel-houses’ –
Artaud. The Theatre and The Plague, a
lecture given at the Sorbonne on April 6th, 1933
Gothic Horror: La Danse Macabre of Guyot Marchant, Bosch, Sade, Maturin,
Hoffmann (‘we have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to
have nothing to do with her...’), Poe. Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis.... Et cetera, et
cetera.
Fantastic hybrids, the clash of incompatible elements and the Ducassian
Encounter. Dreams, superstition, madness, extremes, fantastic dislocations,
chimaeras. The Disquieting Muses, Melmoth stands at the door (‘…and his
features underwent a short but horrible convulsion.’).
The Black Labyrinth:
Noircissement and Cruelty
Cruelty and Spectacle: ‘Out of these peculiarities, mysteries,
contradictions and traits, we ought to be able to construct the essential
features of a disease which saps the anatomy and life...we can deduce the dark,
ultimate action of a spectacle...’ (Artaud: Theatre And The Plague)
Beyond nausea: ‘…this black labyrinth which lies, like a filthy copy of
our daylight streets, far below their surface’ (Ostrovsky: Celine And His
Vision, 1967)
Politico-religious blasphemy, visceral expressionism:
Bacon, Grunewald, Goya, Lautreamont, Rimbaud: le Voyant, the radical derangement of the senses. Bacon, Burroughs
(cut-up/fold-in).
Ridicule and
Corrosive Satire
Byron, Swift, Fuseli, Ensor, Goya, Jarry, Grosz.
Parody and burlesque. ‘The chief end I propose to myself… is to vex the
world rather than divert it’ – Jonathan Swift: Letter to Alexander Pope, 29
September 1725.
The Uncertainty Principle
I quote from Robert G. Cohn:
Here we have reached the peak of Igitur’s effort via the absurde, i.e. paradox. In a final
attempt to put a halt to the regress he has violently compressed the
last-generated opposites by accepting a kind of compromise of madness (later folie utile), i.e. the last
consciousness (willed- unwilled), and this is the absurde, or the mensonge
(phenomenon as fiction), and the realite
dementie. Mallarme Igitur (1981)
Or, to put it another way:
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his
laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away
For the Snark was a
Boojum, you see.
Lewis Carroll. The Hunting of The Snark (1876)
Uncertainty, Anxiety, Chance, Nonsense: post-determinism supersedes those
old bogies: God, Heaven and Papal infallibility. For ‘snark’ read ‘quark’
throughout. The void of non-signification. El
Manisero.
TOTAL REPOSSESSION
(NORMAL AND COUNTERNORMAL)
Repossession of The Body
Re-integration with psychosomatic energy processes via psychophysical
aesthetics and visceral expressionism. Austin Osman Spare: New
Sexuality; Arthur Rimbaud: Nouvelle Amour;
Andre Breton: Amour Fou, Hans
Bellmer: The Unconscious Anatomy: L’Anatomie
de l’Image, 1957. Fechner/Henry: Psychophysics. Decadence and Dissociation:
hypersensitivity, perversity, reversion, very strange flowers. Subtextual
automata, deathmasques,
Overthrow of Biological Tyranny. Neurological awareness and ‘unconscious
scanning’ (Bacon).
DESTROY
·
indiscriminate conception
·
servility of parenthood
·
menstrual bondage
·
the Madonna syndrome
·
sexual normality
·
enforced ageing
·
the spiritual tyranny of death by the afterlife
monopolies of the churches of the earth.
Recovery of Cult-Power
Repossession of the Hieratic: dissolution and control of all so-called
religious activities (the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of William Blake).
‘The Iguana girl spoke in her cool remote voice: “All religions are
magical systems competing with other systems.”’ William S Burroughs. Cities of
The Red Night (1981)
Recovery of symbols and fetishes; the power of ritual, of dramatic
spectacle and mythic dramas in public and private life. Christians cannot
monopolize the sign of the cross; socialists and communists have no special
claim over the colour RED.
Requisition the manipulative techniques of politics and the sermon:
restore them to the service of self-creation. You have only just begun to
exist. Can you cope with Subtopia? Those things in fields?
Hermeticism: The
Liberation of The Symbol
Mallarme: patience, ALCHEMY, vocation, the void,
transformation. Des pas sur la Neige.
The Crisis of the Object, the snowbound landscape. The season of the
witch.
Death to all archetypes fossilized by centuries of vampirism by the
churches of the earth.
Reclaim the imagination!
Be incomprehensible!
Counternormality
‘God – or myself – created all possible worlds, they coexist, but men can
hardly glimpse even one.’
Jarry:
Ceasar-Antichrist (1895)
Countermyths. Transfiguration of the personality. Melodrama, mime,
double-entendre, Dada-cabaret, high and low fashion, urban blues.
Ballard’s Crash. Modern myths
and urban legends: close encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects. Nova Express. The Infernal Desire
Machines.
INFINITE INITIATION/CREATIVE PARANOIA
Manipulate images in a synaesthetic illumination of hermetic analogy,
inhabit the bodies of animals, converse with inanimate objects; incarnate the
absurd in the light of the image. Personal magic, sigilization, nostalgia,
modernity, involuntary memory. Surrealism: psychic automatism and the Automatic
Muse. Charisma: Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Federico Fellini, Ziggy Stardust. Prose libre. Midi-Minuit Fantastique…frisson
of nude vampires in the films of Jean Rollin. Underground movies, Chinese Checkers, Chappaqua… Maya Deren, the Haunted Screen…the sinister somnambulist
‘I treated my crab-lice with saltwater and seaweed, but a lot of nits
must have survived’ – Samuel Beckett, The End, 1954
Winterbourne
& Mortlake, 20-31 May, 1982
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