Toward the Creative Nothing: TOWARD THE HURRICANE

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

TOWARD THE HURRICANE

While it is day we will remain

with head high and everything

that we can do we will not leave

before we have done it.

– W. Goethe

We heat our pen in the volcanic fire of our negating spirit. We dip it in our vigorous heart, full of rebellious blood. And in the atheistic light of our mind, we write and write…

So we write, quickly, without literary pursuits, without repugnant theoretical ideologies, without bigoted and sentimental mush from hysterics and political hacks, wrapped only in the cloak of our raging passions.

We write only words of blood, fire and light.

My rough, fiery, energetic pen creaks and scrapes over the white purity of this page, like a viper’s tongue over the tender throat of an innocent baby, giving it death, through poison.

Away, away from me, all ideologies, theosophies, dogmatic and political philosophies; far from me, all pre-established systems: everything has fallen and burned to ashes in the corroding flame of my negating spirit.

I am the complete nihilist, the radical atheist.

I did not just now find out, I did not just now discover and come to know that the one and only most beautiful framework within which proud human Individuality stands out free, solemn and magnificent is the Nothing, the true Nothing!

No foul prison could ever hold this rebellious, iconoclastic spirit of mine; now less than ever!

Now that the enormous trumpet of time has sounded – and indeed it has sounded strong blasts to break the hardest neck of the idiotic rabble – the bold phalanges of black flame must furiously spring forth from the Nothing. In the passionate violence of spontaneous revolt, this flame will form the crackling pillar of fire which goes before the people, giving the first warning of final destruction. This is the hour of feverish bitterness, of terrible anguish!

This is the hour that comes before the divine hour of imminent tragedy, which will give us heroic Death and heroic Greatness.

Oh delightful hour that gives me all the feverish intensity of spirit, I love you!

I would not give up all the bitterness that you bring me for all the mediocre sweetness in the world. I would not give up the fevers that hammer my temple, that burn my temples, that burn my forehead for the tranquility and peace of all the cowardly men.

Oh, Satan, inspire me! Inspire me, oh my divine brother!

Give me the hellish potential to set fire to all those virgin spirits that have not yet been buried in the dung heap of deceitful theories; make it possible for me to draw a daring handful of lovers of heroic, libertarian Greatness and Heroic Death to close to me.

But they will be there! They must be there! May the temperate souls remain calmly rotting away in the company of their stupid saints and senile, old good god.

But we will march! The time has come for all those who, by dominating the ideal, have become its symbol and embodiment to march.

Wrapped in the divinity of our torment, we will go forward and, through the example of our deeds, we will show people which paths lead to new light. Will we fall? It doesn’t matter! We want liberation from the stupid life of humility, slavery, servility, where man must walk on his knees and the spirit must speak in a subdued, low voice, like a prayer.

It is necessary to kill christian philosophy in the most radical sense of the word. The more it goes slinking into democratic civilization (this most cynically ferocious form of christian corruption), the more it becomes the categorical negation of human Individuality.

Democracy! Now we know that it means all this. Oscar Wilde said that democracy is “the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people”.

The hour for rising up against all this has sounded and not just with some disagreeable and repugnant theoretical sheep’s bleating.

Something else entirely is wanted in this bloody twilight of a civilization whose time is over! Either Death or a new Dawn where Individuality lives above every thing.

I have forgotten everything, or rather, not forgotten, but gone beyond (and I know with how much torment), even the unsurpassable love for my Mate and the adoration for my child.

My books – my dear books that I loved above all else – now rest far away from me, there in the old house, in a large chest of drawers, maybe covered in dust, maybe bathed with the tears of my dear Mate.

But even my love for you, my dear books, luminous torch of my thoughts, is overcome!

Today, I feel something inside me, stronger than any love, something that kisses my mind with all the heat of an irresistible charm…

On the ruins of all this that I destroyed through negation, a new faith is reborn. Faith in the impossible mad possible by my negation, or the final purification, how very real, that is met among the ardent flames of the final, tragic and redemptive catastrophe.

Today, I seek a single hour of raging anarchy, and I will give all my dreams, all my loves, all my life, for that hour.

But that hour will come! Oh, when will it come! And if it should not come, I would willingly give myself over to the human-eating hands of the idiotic and brutal society that has already given me a magnificent death sentence (for recalling that I possess higher ideas that have the value of pointing out that the divine freedom of the I is something more beautiful and greater than its brutal war), and I would cynically make them shoot me as a sign of the deepest contempt for myself and the unmentionable cowardice of every human being.

Greeting the revived Libertario and the next social insurrection, I fraternally clasp the hands of true rebels of all the various tendencies!

Today is the eve of Action! At the first spark I will be among you.

Il Libertario, volume XVIII #721, La Spezia,

February 27, 1919

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INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to find anarchist works in English that are at the same time individualist and explicitly revolutionary, that emphasize the centrality of the aim of individual self-determination to a revolution that will “communalize material wealth” as it will “individualize spiritual wealth”. For this and other reasons I chose to translate many of Renzo Novatore's writings. Written between 1914 and 1922 when he died, these poetic works respond to the upheaval of their time (World War I, revolutions in Russia and Germany, social upheaval in Italy and other places, the birth of dada and other movements of cultural rebellion) with a call for a revolution that could truly move the human race beyond the spiritual impoverishment, the equality in baseness, that democracy and socialism offered. Bourgeois society seemed to have reached its dusk, and Novatore saw the hope for a new dawn only in such a revolution—one that went beyond the mere economic demands of the socialists and communists—a revolution moved by great ideas and great passions that would break with the low values of bourgeois democratic civilization. Novatore recognized that the war had simply reinforced the lowest and most cowardly of bourgeois values. The “proletarian frogs” just let themselves be led to the slaughter—killing each other for the cause of those who exploited them—because, in spite of their exploitation, they continued to share the values of their masters, the “bourgeois toads”—the values of the belly, the democratic values of equality in baseness, the rule of survival over life. In our time when the “great dusk” of bourgeois democratic society that is heralded in this text seems to have become an eternal dusk making the entire world a dull grey nightmare of survival, Novatore’s call to a destructive revolution based on great passions and ideas, on the dreams and desires of a mighty and strong-willed “I” seems more necessary than ever if we are to move beyond this pathetic swamp of mediocrity. Of course, no revolution can go very far without the insurrection of the exploited against their condition. But this is precisely the point: when the proletarians rise up against their proletarianization, this means taking their revolt beyond the demand for full bellies to the active appropriation of full lives. Novatore recognized that one could not struggle against this order alone—that revolution was necessary, not just individual revolt. If he mocked the proletarians of his time, it is because they did not lift themselves above the bourgeois hordes with great dreams and great will. So, as Novatore could have predicted, the “great proletarian revolution” in Russia came to embrace the worst of bourgeois values and created a monstrous machine of exploitation. Starting from the bourgeois values of the belly, that anti-individual egalitarianism of survival above all, that place productivity above all else, how could it do otherwise? Now more than ever we need an anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-state revolutionary movement which aims at the total liberation of every individual from all that prevents her from living her life in terms of his most beautiful dreams—dreams freed from the limits of the market. Such a movement must, of course, find ways to intervene in the real struggles of all the exploited, to move class conflict toward a real rupture with the social order and its survivalist values. These are matters we must wrestle with now analyzing our present situation to find the openings for our insurrectional project. Novatore’s writings are a light of poetry and passion—one light among many—which may help us to pierce through the gloom of the capitalist technological dusk that surrounds us—a ray of singularity breaking through the dinginess of the present mediocrity with its call for a revolution of the mightiest dreams.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Renzo Novatore is the penname of Abele Rizieri Ferrari who was born in Arcola, Italy (a village of La Spezia) on May 12, 1890 to a poor peasant family. Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits imposed by the educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Schopenauer and many others with a critical mind. From 1908 on, he considered himself an anarchist. In 1910, he was charged with the burning of a local church and spent three months in prison. A year later, he went on the lam for several months because the police wanted him for theft and robbery. On September 30, 1911, the police arrested him for vandalism. In 1914, he began to write for anarchist papers. He was drafted during the first World War. He deserted his regiment on April 26, 1918 and was sentenced to death by a military tribunal for desertion and high treason on October 31. He left his village and went on the lam, propagating the armed uprising against the state. On June 30, 1919, a farmer sold him to the police after an uprising in La Spezia. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was released in a general amnesty a few months later. He rejoined the anarchist movement and took part in various insurrectionary endeavors. In 1920, the police arrested him again for an armed assault on an arms depository at the naval barracks in Val di Fornola. Several months later, he was free, and participated in another insurrectionary endeavor that failed because of a snitch. In the summer of 1922, three trucks full of fascists stopped in front of his home, where he lived with his wife and two sons. The fascists surrounded the house, but Novatore used grenades against them and was able to escape. He went underground one more time. On November 29, 1922, Novatore and his comrade, Sante Pollastro, went into a tavern in Teglia. Three carabinieri (Italian military police) followed them inside. When the two anarchists tried to leave, the carabinieri began shooting. The warrant officer killed Novatore, but was then killed by Pollastro. One carabiniere ran away, and the last begged Pollastro for mercy. The anarchist escaped without shooting him. Renzo Novatore wrote for many anarchist papers (Cronaca Libertaria, Il Libertario, Iconoclasta!, Gli Scamiciati, Nichilismo, Pagine Libere) where he debated with other anarchists (among them Camillo Berneri). He published a magazine, Vertice, that has unfortunately been lost. In 1924, an individualist anarchist group published two pamphlets of his writings: Al Disopra dell’Arco and Verso il Nulla Creatore.

Toward the Creative Nothing