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Title: Stronger Wine! Madder Music!
Author: Apio Ludd
Date: March 2008
Language: en
Topics: surrealism, puritanism, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #377
Source: Retrieved on 19 August 2019 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/377-march-2008/stronger-wine-madder-music/

Apio Ludd

Stronger Wine! Madder Music!

“Their lives are like their knitting: introspective yet mindless; fussy,

exacting, repetitive and pale-tinted by the cheaper dye.”

— Rikki Ducornet

When I first encountered godless anarchy in the late 1970s, it was its

excess, its unconstrained exploration and experimentation with the

furthest realms of passion and ideas, and its desire and dreams that

attracted me.

It was a magnificent feast.

Its wines and ales were strong, intoxicating and full of flavor, hints

of spices, herbs and fruits from undiscovered realms of poetic

imagination.

Its music throbbed with crazy rhythms, laughing leaping melodies,

harmonic cacophonies of joy and rage.

It evoked wild, unfettered dancing, and I threw myself into it with

total abandon.

At the time, one could still imagine that a whole new world was breaking

forth…

Of course, then, imagination was a lush erotic flower whose delectable

nectar brought visions of its luscious utopian fruit…

Or so it seemed to me.

But puritanism–never truly defeated–has had a resurgence, building new

walls and cages where old ones had broken down:

fear of crime, fear of drugs, fear of disease, fear of terrorism, fear

of disaster, fear of poverty.

An endless parade of real and imagined threats that reinforce walls and

armors.

But they’re all just new names for the old puritan fears:

fear of desire and passion, fear of dreams and excess, fear of the other

and of the unknown.

In recent years, much of what drew me to anarchist perspectives has been

fading within anarchist milieus: the joyful embrace of life;

playfulness; laughter in the face of the ruling reality; imagination and

creativity; the capacity to dream. It seems that more and more

anarchists are succumbing to realism, accepting the inevitability of the

misery that surrounds us even in their own lives and relationships and

with it accepting the misery of existing as a subculture within the

present world.

Even personal choices get transformed into moral identities (veganism,

straight-edge), high grounds from which to look down on others.

Retreating like hermit crabs into rigid ideological shells, many

anarchists have developed miserly and miserable ways of thinking, acting

and interacting.

I am not willing to accept this anarcho-miserabilism which is expressed

in political correctitude, in new forms of puritanical renunciation, in

the self-sacrifice of militantism, and in pragmatism with its

willingness to limit oneself to “the possible.”

I could waste my time and energy writing endless critiques of the

situation like some voice crying in the wilderness, but if I limited

myself to this I would get drawn into the vortex of this miserabilism

myself. It is necessary to go beyond critique, to go straight to the

attack, and for this I want accomplices.

Attack in this case, means the active rejection of all aspects of this

miserabilist way of acting and being in the world, refusing to succumb

to the demands of political correctitude, of any morality whatsoever, of

all calls for self-sacrifice or for being realistic. It means breaking

down the barriers and bursting through the boundaries such ways of

thinking and acting put up. This attack is a merciless game, as violent

and cruel as it is playful…

Though I don’t call myself a surrealist, my anarchist ideas and practice

have certainly been influenced by surrealism. its emphasis on desire,

excess, imagination, creativity, poetry as a way of living, its

exploration of methods for breaking down barriers within us and raiding

the areas of our being that lie below the conscious surface, its

attitude of total revolt, its capacity to combine uncompromising atheism

with a strong critique of rationalism and scientism, its use of scandal

to expose the realities of the ruling order–all influenced my way of

exploring what it means to be an anarchist: an individual in revolt

against the reality of this world. And there are still surrealists, many

of them also anarchists, who are still exploring poetic revolt and its

practical meaning in this world even to this day. Despite differences I

have with some of them, I am convinced that there explorations have

weapons to offer us for attacking all forms of miserabilism.

In the face of the current misery of this catastrophic civilization,

those of us who desire a real transformation need to take up the dance

of unfettered rebellion once again.

Now more than ever, we need to challenge all boundaries and refuse all

constraints–first of all those that we have placed on ourselves.

And if imagination has dried up, we need to saturate it in these wines,

unleashing the poetic intoxication of the marvelous. But let’s be clear:

Real poetry never watches its language or holds its tongue.

It trounces on political correctitude along with every other kind of

rectitude with libertine mockery and lusty sarcasm.

It mercilessly tears through the armor of identity to reveal the

glittering jewel of the unique.

It is a thief, a lover, a dreamer.

Yes, in a world of misery and disaster, freedom and the joy of life

require the strongest wines and ales and the maddest music. The

intoxication of poetic imagination and the soaring melodies and untamed

rhythms of total revolt are the axis for the wild, unfettered dance of

anarchic insurrection.

Let’s take up this dance.

Let’s leap, naked, toward the stars, our steps interweaving in lusty,

erotic patterns.

At times, perhaps, we’ll fall face first into the mud. But if we have no

fear for our “purity”, we’ll just leap back up to storm the heavens in

our dance of wild abandon.

Let’s leave the misery to the rulers of this world with their petty

regulations and miserable moralities. Our aim is to destroy this sorry

world and its rulers so that we can take back the joyful creation of our

lives.

And if we fail? What does it matter? By grasping our lives here and now,

and dancing, intoxicated with rebellious joy and poetic wonder to the

music of untrammeled freedom and the excess of desire, we will be the

happiest people of our time.

I’m reaching out my hand. Now, who will come and dance with me?

Contact Apio Ludd at apioludd – at – gmail – dot – com or at 818 SW 3rd

Avenue, PMB 1237, Portland, OR 97204 USA