Toward the Creative Nothing: WILDFLOWERS

Friday, September 25, 2009

WILDFLOWERS

Preamble

Even throughout the endless, barren lands of the bleak deserts flowers bloom. Flowers that put out a sinful perfume and the make the very hands of those who pick them bleed, but that still have their own splendid history of joy, sorrow and love. I repeat, they are strange, wild flowers that arise from the nothing that creates. They were fertilized by the sun and then cruelly battered by the storm, thus!

These flowers are thoughts that sprouted in the deep and meditative solitude of my mind, while outside in the world that is no longer mine, madness rages furiously, lashed by the electrifying fire of lightning that strikes relentlessly.

And I, an unrepentant vagabond who loves to run wild on the joyous and frightening paths of this my solitary and deserted realm, will take my pleasure by periodically gathering a bunch of these wild flowers to crown this rebel banner. It was once already brutally crushed in a cowardly way, but it still sings the joyful chorus of eternal return.

Only those who have found themselves again after a long, hard desperate search and placed themselves on the margins of society, contemptuous and proud, denying anyone the right to judge them, are anarchists.

Those who are not able to recognize themselves in the greatness of their actions, they alone being their own judge, may believe that they are anarchists, but they are not.

The strength of will and potentiality (not to be confused with power), the spirit of self-elevation and individualization are the first rungs on a long and endless ladder that those who want to surpass themselves along with everything else climb.

Only those who, with impetuous violence, know how to appraise the rusty gates that enclose the house of the great lie where the lewd thieves of the I (god, state, society, humanity) have arranged to meet, in order to take their greatest treasure back from clammy, greedy hands adorned with the false gold of love, pity and civilization, from the baleful predators, can consider themselves lord and master of himself and call themselves anarchists.

Along with being the greatest rebel, the anarchist also has the merit of being a King. The King of himself, it is understood!

Those who believe that Christ might be the symbol that man should wave in order to achieve the libertarian synthesis of life would have to be a socialist or christian negator of anarchism.

Despite everything, Socrates was undoubtedly much greater than the brutishness of those among his people who condemned him. Nonetheless, when he accepted the hemlock that they sentenced him to drink, he carried out the sort of act of cowardice and devotion that anarchism mercilessly condemns.

When an individual uses any means to escape the insurmountable brutishness of a populace made ferocious and brutal by cannibalistic prejudices and frightening ignorance, or the sadistic corruption of a rotten society which believes it has the right to judge and condemn an individual because he carried out a specific action that the above-mentioned society is never at the level to understand, this is a superbly rebellious and individualistic act that can only find its reason for being and its glorification in anarchism.

Alas! Up to now, consciousness itself has been an atavistic and fearsome phantom. And it will only cease to be so when a human being has learned how to make it the image and mirror of his own unique will.

The first human being who said: “There is no god,” was undoubtedly an athlete of human thought. But the one who limited himself to saying that: “The god of the priest does not exist,” cheats through equivocation, leaving if sufficiently clear that he is a shady partisan who is already planning to kill people, perhaps with a new lie.

Remain very suspicious of those who limit themselves to the mere negation of god.

Cronaca Libertaria, volume 1 #8, Milano,

September 20, 1917

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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