Toward the Creative Nothing: MY MAXIMS

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

MY MAXIMS

(from the notebook of my intimate thoughts)

GOD: The product of sick fantasies. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. Cocaine for hysterics. A pill for constipated minds closed to knowledge. Marxism for the faint of heart.

HUMANITY: An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on force, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the foul and filthy face of the most vulgar wise ass for the purpose of dominating the crudely sentimental, vulgar herd of idiots and imbeciles.

FATHERLAND: Intellectual life imprisonment for the semi-intelligent, a pigsty of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs.

A whore for her master, a pimp of the foreigner. She eats her own children, slanders her own parents and mocks her own heroes.

FAMILY: The denial of Love, Life and Liberty.

SOCIALISM: Discipline, discipline; obedience, obedience; slavery and ignorance, pregnant with authority.

Socialism is a bourgeois body grotesquely fattened by a vulgar christian creature.

It is a medley of fetishism, sectarianism and cowardice.

ORGANIZATIONS, LEGISLATIVE BODIES AND UNIONS: Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for skinflints and trash. Many join to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, believe me, – and poor naïve devils –, join to end up in jail where they can observe the shameful cowardice of all the rest. The greatest part of the mass to pay, yawn and wait.

SOLIDARITY: The macabre altar on which actors of every sort display their priestly qualities by ably reciting their mass. The beneficiaries pay nothing less than complete humiliation.

FRIENDSHIP: Fortunate are those who have drunk from its chalice without having their spirit offended and their mind poisoned. If any such person exists, I warmly urge him to send me his photograph. I’m almost certain I will look upon the face of an idiot.

LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, fainting of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies on which I get ferociously drunk two or three times a day so that I can consume this precious but oh so stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of Love. It’s the only scoundrel, after Judas, that can still kill with a kiss.

MAN: A filthy paste of servitude and tyranny, fetishism and fear, vanity and ignorance.

The greatest offence one could commit against an ass is to call it a man.

WOMAN: The most brutal of all enslaved beasts. The greatest victim that crawls on the earth. But the most to blame – after man and dog – deserving of all her woes. I’d be truly curious to know what she thinks of me when I kiss her.

Oh, cynical prostitute, daring female expropriator, you raise yourself above the putridity in which the world is immersed and you cause it to grow pale under the perverse light of your great deep eyes.

You are the most beautiful star that the sun now kisses. You are of another breed. And your mind is a song, your life a dream.

You unhinge the world, oh free prostitute, oh daring female expropriator.

I will sing for you. The rest is mud.

Iconoclasta! # 12, Pistoia, Italy, , October 15, 1920

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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