File spoon-archives/surrealist.archive/surrealist_1996/96-10-27.153, message 20


From: "Pierre Petiot" <p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 02:04:05 +0000
Subject: Kicking the motorbike


 Celine,

This reminds me a way we had to repair our motorbikes when I was a kid: 
kicking them.
As you may guess, it did not work very often

Romantism does not work - does not transform - and surely does 
not lead further than it historically did. Drop it!

As we are all more or less confronted with pollution, it could have 
come to a few minds, that this visible and hidden pollution in the 
physical world outside might well have a huge counterpart inside too.

A few persons could have guessed that we were also confronted - 
exposed - to intellectual pollution... A quite wide and deep sort of 
pollution. Which does not stop at any private door. 

But we believe so hard in "freedom".
We do not see the obvious shadows playing in the core of our souls.
We should mistrust freedom, really. And desire too.
We should check and verify their existence each time before speaking of it.
We think we are free, when we are just left vaguely able to choose 
what is presented on the shelf

Obviously, when you see people - like on this list - reciting psalms 
of various origins and sincerely believing that 
to be something like thought, 
it might come to your mind, that this is a phenomenum of some interest. 
At least of enough interest and scale to be worth a study, 
rather than kicking in various directions
without attempting to understand what happens.

Now, understanding what happens does not necessarily lead to 
practical means of getting out of it, I know,
but sometimes, it helps.

My experience - if any - is that the only way to detect where the dead 
world is inside of us, is to move. When you move, you feel it. When 
you stop moving, you cease to feel it, so that you cannot guess where 
is the little bit of yourself which is somewhat alive, nor even if 
there is anything alive left in you.
"Je cherche l'or du temps".

The only way to see and detect this dead world inside or outside of us, 
is to create. 
There is no freedom where there is no creation. 
Unfortunately, you do not choose to be creative or not.
It happens or does not happen.

Another way to feel where this dead world lies, is to adopt a 
technical attitude, attempt to understand how it works, attempt to 
approach the "revolution"problem  ("gardening" for me)
with the same sort of attitude as one who wants to repair a car, 
a broken porcelain, etc...

Because, one of the forms intellectual pollution takes - you see - is 
that lots of people pretend to be there for solving one problem, but 
you can easily see by the way they act, that their target is not 
exactly what they claim it to be.
Now, because I have been considering all the material appearing on 
this list, with this technical perspective, according to these 
technical criteria,
I can tell you that I have much deeper reasons to loose hope
than you have ever stated yet.

But I don't have hope, so that I cannot loose that.

Actually, I do not care about hope at all. 
The only point is to try and guess what should be done and what 
can be done, and try to do it - a bit, we are no heroes.

It's raining, it pouring, and it is dirty and it is dark.
But I have to repair that motorbike, if I want to move out of here. That's all.
The motorbike might start or not, I may stay stuck in this dark, and 
cold and mud, I do not care. I have no choice.

And well, after all, that is all this life is about anyway. 
Take hold on the raft of Time, be stubborn and be smart, 
and then one day or another, you feel like releasing you grasp.

And, yes. Every breathe of fresh air is costly. And yes fresh air is rare. 
But well, it has always been like that no ?.
Although of course, this intellectual pollution and the scale it has reached does not really help.

> Tell me how to revolve something dead,

Celine, be serious, what else would you have expected ? 
Is it not precisely the task of any revolution to revolve what is dead ?
This mud is - has to be - our natural ground.

As regards the "how to", there are recipes here and there, 
and no one knows whether they work, and in case they do, how far?
Just try.
But there is one recipe that works reasonably well: 
be stubborn all the time, and smart each time you happen to be.
 
> why to revolve something dead? 
> Better to throw it into the mud and let it disintegrate, 
> better to feed it to the worms.

Well you see, Celine, worms are alive after all.
And they do have to revolve something dead, just to go on being alive.
And since revolution is dead, accordingly  worms shall have to revolve it too. 
Obviously. So what ?

> How can it be possible that in the
> midst of all this chaos my flesh, myself, persists to order
> beautifully? 

It is just that your "flesh" is much much older than your "mind"
and hopefully, knows better.

> I was born into a lie dream

There are no lies in the world, Celine. 
None, I assure you. Nothing lies, nowhere.
But there are liars.

Take a moment to look in a list of Chinese root characters 
how the root for "lie" looks like.
I always found it fascinating, so exact and precise it is.
I made an approximate translation for it: 
"quand on ment, c'est pour etre seul".

> So can you forgive me for climbing into my imagination?

What a strange expression...

Is there the slightest possibility that anything physically alive 
could ever be out of its imagination ?
Is life anything else than a dreaming power ?
Is not it clear that the only question is the quality of the dream ?
Is not it clear that the only thing to be changed in this world, is 
precisely the way we hallucinate it ?

> My stories...

Par ma barbe, Celine...

There is a little  truth about this world: 
It is not made of parts.

It is not meant to be restricted to any of its parts either.
Turn it the way you like, you shall come to the conclusion,
that this is the ultimate nature of sin, indeed. 

And you know perfectly well that your stories are a part.
And because you are honest and alive enough to dare write a truth,
you know very well that that's the reason why you ask to be forgiven.

But forgiving this - if you consider it well - is beyond the reach of 
any power, including yours.

And since we hence find ourselves close to religious matters, 
I would like to repeat and repeat the odd, last but true psalm again:

"The last religion is resignation" 

So that you may well shout and laugh about priests and all, 
the matter is not so easy
because to the extent you resign
you shall end up one day being confronted with religion in your own mirror.

Now deeply I would like any sort of discussion about intellectual pollution 
 - such as this precise discussion is - to get a bit technical 
and to consider in which ways  we can avoid 
spending so much time cleaning our tools 
that we have no time left to make use of them.

To consider in which ways we can clean-up a bit our minds of this 
shit. 

Because I hate reading on this list
sentences that I could hear on the TV. 
And words like "western democracy", "pornography", "paedophilia", and 
even words like "flesh", "body", "mind", "matter".

"Tics, tics et tics..."  says Rimbaud.

This makes me more than a bit ashamed of myself - as I do not have strength enough
to be ashamed for others.

I am not looking for another screen, thank you. 

I am not interested into discussing concepts which are the 
enemy itself. Mainly because it helps them duplicating.
And I do not seen any good in helping the enemy to reproduce.

Debord made theorically obvious - and this list practically  confirms - that truth 
in "La Societe du Spectacle" could be strictly speaking just anything
provided it was repeated often enough.
This is why this list tends to repeat and repeat the same things.
It simply mimics the outside world and propagates it.
(I mean the world I would personally like to keep outside...)

But this artificial replication of lies in "La Societe du Spectacle",
works for a very deep reason.
And this reason is that life looks very much like a bundle of 
concepts that duplicates.

The bias is that
Normal life is confronted with reality, so that 
concepts which are too erroneous simply disappear. (e.g. cancer)
Wheras in articifial propagation the tribunal of reality is not there 
anymore, just the raw power of the replication device is present
and the only problem left is to be the owner of the copy-machine. 
(Just look to the "revolution" in Romania)

The result is a lie that can grow just as big as the world 
(hopefully limited by the stubborn speed of light)
but without ceasing to be a lie.

And well, the only significant difference between lie and truth,
is that truth tends to last longer.
This tells you a bit how far this world will go.

But I think you can logically see now 
why the only way to keep your mind a bit clean is creation
Because in a world in which lies are duplicated so easily
statistically, the only chance you have detect that you are in face of a truth
is to be pretty sure that you have never seen a copy of it before.
(If I was to write a new manifesto, indeed, I would start with that)

So that my point, Celine, is not to deny how good it is
to keep your mind a bit sharp, clean and alive. 
Of course, this is true and a pre-requisite. But it is not enough

Just like a man and a woman
who spend all their time choosing their best clothes for the feast.
If they do not use them the right way.
If they do not make love ever, 
that won't make babies.


Tu comprends, dis ?


Pierre PETIOT 
email: "Pierre Petiot" <p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl>


   

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