4.6.07

Concerning Primarily Ourselves (OR MY FAVORITE MANIFESTIMALS)

I can buy a beatnik for a quarter. I can go to a fancy ballroom and hear the words of a radical spouted by expensive-bloused faculty. I can see the million seller of anti-american terrorism on the classics shelf with respected men blurbing it the “Great American Novel”. I can hear that they’re not called faggots anymore, and the books and paintings and lives they created are reduced to the available and good.



But what was their reality, the holy unpackaged? It is the same thing rejected by veneration. The true radicals were able to tear into decency and conformity and staid capitalist rehashes of their parents’ old and boring masters by being terrible. They were vicious, and stole and raped and murdered their lovers. They ran guns for terrorists, made friends with dictators, laughed in the middle of a genocide. And they were terrible on other fronts too. They made bad art, and their movements were self-defeating and wasteful, and often created worse than they dispatched. They were all too non-conformist to write a proper sentence or paint a pretty picture or hesitate before tearing down perfectly good habits. But these are not the phrases of the apologists, “isolated incidents”, “not representative of the whole”, “troubled periods”, or “character flaws”. They are the real geniuses behind our real-genius suits, outfits of dirty trousers or mohawks or heavenly shit-kickers, only not missing the blood and terror we can’t remember anymore.



We are forward thinking now. We are not old and our brains are not dead. But we will age and it will come that our geniuses mine themselves, selling scraps of the heyday they couldn’t recognize in its midst, and it will happen that our minor luminaries steal from our geniuses and sell a clumsy board game of our radical youth to those too busy or too young to have one themselves, even to us, when we imagine back and pretend that our achievements were important enough to warrant commercialization. Our revolutions will be repackaged and our radicals will become venerable saints, imitated and anthologized to safe distances, and then torn down again. Where do you think your parents went?



But Nihilism only works for so long. What do we do to stave off the future? We tear harder. We throw the bombs that smarter and better people forgot how to make. We ignore the lessons of the old radicals, who sadly mourn their failed revolutions and their wasted lives, and we fail and waste and become pathetic like them, except when we succeed and when we bring it all down around us. We’ll kick the last shin and shoot the last cop, and humanity will descend into madness. Our despair will not be so foolish because it will be in vogue. People will notice us and our genius and they will beg for a way to join our revolution, to fight as hard as we have. And we’ll open a small shop where for a very small fee you can fight back too.



If only. Maybe the real lesson that it's already over. We're washed up before we start; everything we have was broken and old when we stole it, the starter’s pistol in their back has misfired from lack of will and anyway, all our bullets have the stink of an image search and a thesaurus. What sort of revolution is this anyway? It's this. Give me the stupid jokes and wasted effort. Celebrate the collapse, engineer our failure, not for a swift moment of glory at the end of a revolution, but as its template....Fuck all this, this is some stupid shit.  I'm just going to put up my favorite animals and fuck the rest of you.

7 comments:

E T C said...

Access to the potential everything has eliminated the ability to transcend boundaries. An infinite wall containing one point of fault...

With limit there is guideline, the ability to push potential within bounds... There is focus; it takes place within a room in which one can scour for hours... inch by inch... Give time and persistence and the wall shall be surpassed.

Everywhere to go, everything to learn - oceans of worth. Get your feet wet...

Fuck it. Lets drown.

Anonymous said...

indeed...suddenly a ping-pong ball flew across the universe and blew fate out of the water, they were prolific and prophetic, it was inexplicably pathetic

Anonymous said...

your line in the sand is my ether of love, painted to blend in and seemingly awkward, asking pointless questions and lacking a distinct nervous tick of his own he shifts from repetition to repetition searching for meaning, not knowing where he heads or with whom, this lavish catastrophe kept him warm and he was free to think about the future.

Gregory Hubacek said...

your internet poetry sucks.

E T C said...

internet poetry battle?...

yes.

Anonymous said...

¿que es la problema? ¿No jode usted bastante? ¡La corrupción prevista es el peor! Quizá somos apenas molinos de viento.

illllllllllllli said...

rassr'ct ter buff'loes