Our carnivals are for the most part no more than mild relief for sorrow-stricken hearts. We were born, however, for a society in which joie de vivre routs everything opposed to it.
A festive life should not be confused with the kind of exuberant outbursts that are paid for in the currency of disillusion and misfortune. Such a life is incompatible with joys whose essence is so fragile that even as we grasp them we feel that they must soon fade. It cannot be achieved by way of contemplation, but it is even less accessible via the sort of hedonism which, aware that ennui kills, promotes the belief that it can be tricked by overindulgence in the pleasures of the bottle, the table, or the bed of looming death.
On the contrary, festive life is a continual flux that carries along, fertilizes and gives meaning to everything that motivates us. It calls for a society flooded by the human generosity to which everyone, rich or poor, has aspired at some time. It requires a material abundance founded on the wealth of “being”—a wealth that treats “having” solely in terms of pleasure taken in its banishment.
Sooner or later, atop the ruins of the tyranny of commerce, generalized self-management—no matter what one calls it—must become the groundwork of a genuinely human society, a society from which money has vanished; where one benefits oneself by bringing benefits to others; where individuals enjoy the leisure to give, and to give themselves, without making any sacrifice; where brother- and sisterhood propagate the minor attentions of gracious friendship: “You like this necklace? It’s yours then!” Or: “This thing appeals to you? Take it, it’s a present.”
The citizens’ groups that mercantile imperialism tends to spur into being against itself everywhere in the world promote a direct democracy, in opposition to the parliamentary variety, that replaces citizens by actual individuals. The rejection of inhumanity leads to a projected society in which the humanization of the world and that of the individual cannot be separated.
Let me reiterate that all opinions, no matter how absurd or repugnant, must be allowed free expression. On the other hand, no barbaric acts should be tolerated.
Inhumanity is not open to question or debate: it is to be universally condemned. It invalidates the very notions of majority and minority. If it should happen in an assembly that a barbaric motion is put to the vote, I contend that no majority decision has the authority to support it. I reject the right of the greater number to prescribe a measure whose cruelty is beyond doubt (as, for example, the death penalty).
No majority is entitled to issue decrees harmful to the interests of life. The human choice of a single person carries more weight than an inhuman decision approved by many. The quality of life abrogates the dictatorship of numbers, of the quantitative.
Resolving to “take care of our own business” will constitute a great forward step in the struggle against the corrupt business system that lays waste to beings and things. It will fall to you to debate the creation of territories at last freed from the grip of the commodity. You will have to institute the rule of gratuity, organize the demise of money, and supervise the temporary use of a currency restricted to the exchange of goods and services, a currency that is non-capitalizable, non-accumulable….
All the same, you must never lose sight of the fact that a self-managed arrangement confined to the economy will tolerate the maintenance of the regime of survival, that rift between human beings and themselves which spawns of all other rifts and hatreds.
We are so accustomed to paying for whatever we receive that the fear of having to settle the bill arms us against the gift. It is not for nothing that the economic law of supply and demand shapes the survival of the most diverse of peoples worldwide.
Let us stop scorning our ability to invent a new life. Everything is given, nothing is owed, because we are entitled to give what has been given to us. Such is the basis of human generosity.
As life economized, survival is subject to the laws of the commodity. That is why the right to survival necessarily entails duties. Life, by contrast, means rights alone, with no quid pro quo. Its sovereignty signals the end of economic tyranny, the abrogation of the principle of “having”—no more outstretched hand expecting value for money.
Surrendering neither to manipulative egoism nor to contemptuous egotism guarantees happiness. My only possible concern is the combined transmutation of the self and the world. I have but one passion, one which embodies all the others: to wish “from the bottom of my heart” for such a change to come about with its infinite ramifications.
The metamorphosis to which I aspire is that of man into human being, for the human being continues to dwell within us awaiting eventual revitalization. Human being is the being that each of us remains and that remains within each of us, no matter how hard we try to reject or ignore it.
The revolution of the human race is, quite simply, the reconciliation of humans with their destiny. It will transcend the agrarian and industrial revolutions which not so long ago inflicted on humanity the injury of a history made by itself against itself. For too long we have wasted our energy struggling in vain against a morbid fate which reduced us to nothing. We are now about to devote our forces to a destiny yet to be constructed whose building blocks are the scattered fragments of an imperishable life.
Contrary to the sickening regurgitation of forms of communitarianism whereby the individual identifies with a religion, a nation, an ethnicity, a tribe, or an ideology, I can only repeat that there is only one valid identity: to be, over and above all, a human being.
We may well be witnessing a combined rebirth of nature and mankind. As though the fury of a land too long brutalized by labor and greed were seeking a gradual pacification by means of a hitherto inconceivable alliance. As though, once liberated from its age-old servitude, the earth were announcing the resurrection of the living, free being that mankind has buried within itself. As though the end of the exploitation of the soil and subsoil, as hitherto decreed by the putative mandate of heaven, certified the marriage of heaven and earth. As though, lastly, the union of human beings with their bodies and with the chthonian components of those bodies broke the chain forged by religion for the benefit of the gods and their blind followers, thus making way for an osmotic relationship, a universal symphony, the ligature of each of whose notes to the work as a whole restored the original meaning of the term religio.
The dogma of the intrinsic weakness of man usually seeks justification by adducing the depressions that nobody avoids and that exacerbate morbid imaginings, amplify doubts and instill irrational fears. But are we not all victims of an artificial interpretation of the biological rhythm in which exuberance and melancholy alternate in a sort of systolicdiastolic way? The dominance of the death-oriented perspective dramatizes this natural rhythm to the point of distorting it, pointing up depressive states and downplaying joyful ones, whose transience is exaggerated. The death-centered view is a function of our denatured condition.
Beset myself by surprise onsets of melancholia, I have found consolation by drawing an analogy with the tides. Like waves lost in the ocean of life, are we not subject to ebbs and flows, to alternations between joy and distress, exaltation and dejection, vivacity and lethargy?
We are not governed by lucky or unlucky stars, by some capricious fate, by divine intervention, or even by a nature eager to exact dues for its gifts. We are part of a living sea that advances and recedes, turn and turn about.
Low tide leaves wrack and rubbish on the foreshore that high water then conceals in its hidden depths. Likewise we feel brutally overrun by a mass of sordid thoughts, shameful emotions and unhealthy images which, once the rising tide of life submerges them, cease bothering us, fade, and vanish.
No sooner, however, does the vital tide ebb than unrefined animality insinuates itself into our emotions, startling us. As it passes through, it scatters the remains of unfulfilled or dead passions that bear witness to our denaturing and seems to tarnish past, present and future. The humors that for no apparent reason shake and tumble us are surely nothing but a continual oscillation between forward and backward currents whose movements we should be well advised to join after the fashion of a seasoned swimmer who has the secret of being one with the flow.
Our torments, irrational fears and pathological tendencies are not washed away by the high tide, but rather covered by a vital force that churns and soothes them. Why should we not bank on powerful moments of life to advance a human consciousness well able to take our residual animality in hand, at once embracing and surpassing it? That exercise has nothing unprecedented about it: no true lover has failed to discover the joy of refining the rudimentary genitality of coitus and transforming it into erotic passion.
The best way to avoid ever giving up life’s gifts is to desire them incessantly, as though granting them to us reflected a generosity inherent in its nature. That said, such manna still needs to be incorporated into the riches of “being,” not into the ledgers of “having.”
Every kind of cult consecrates. But life is not a sacred thing. Life is utterly indifferent to ritual, devotion, and mystical or contemplative visions. Vital energy demands nothing at all save deliverance from the exploitation and economy that hobbles it. The alliance between being as it discovers humanity and nature will reveal the inexhaustible power of life.
Nature’s generosity delivers everything wholesale. It is up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff and gather the best part of terrestrial largesse.
The secret of endlessly recreated love lies in its fusion with the love of life. To separate the two is to deprive love of its center of gravity.
Let no one weave the web of your destiny in your stead. Be the only one to decide, and this in full awareness that hostile and demobilizing forces are at work within you also. Steer as close to life as possible, and tell yourself, between perils and joys, that life is there, present in you, even in the shadow of death.
Despite doubts as I grope my way forward, the adoption of a few practical principles has helped me navigate a little less blindly through the existential labyrinth where the body and its consciousness join forces in a vital surge to foil what conspires to divide and destroy them. These principles have nothing to do with either a set of magical spells or a book of recipes. The relief they have afforded me can be partaken of solely by virtue of the way they are applied:
Let no one take it into their head to give you orders! Banish from your circle anyone who displays contempt and arrogance. Distrust obedience. If the taming of dogs, wolves and wild animals is supposed to demand a spirit of mastery and impeccable authority, constraining one’s peer or complying with orders means regressing to the animal level.
No truly human society will see the light of day without eradicating the power that any man or woman arrogates to themselves from another.
Confronted by fear and a flood of wild feelings, I force myself to go down like Orpheus into the Erebus of my uncontrollable emotions before reascending slowly toward those illuminations of consciousness which, as uncertain and flickering as they may be, do at least reflect.
So as not to be obliged to turn to Eurydice with reassurances that I do not feel, I make sure to place her ahead of me, lavishing all the love in the world upon her.
Whatever your preoccupations, may you harmonize your own passions and discover in yourselves that magnetic pole whence the harmony of the whole world springs and radiates. The Great Work of existential alchemy is the transmutation and refinement of every single instant.
Whoever learns to love themselves needs no lessons in loving others. Happiness shared chases away misfortune. Only when it changes into “having” does it provoke hate-filled envy and destroy itself.
What drives people to fight one another so resolutely, under whatever pretext, is misery, and chiefly the misery of beings dispossessed of their own existence. They feel so deprived of life that they never tire of depriving others of it. The commitment to death whereby individuals celebrate their betrothal to nothingness is powerful indeed, yet life is stronger still. Life is the wager we must lay every day.
How else are we to get rid of those crutches which religions and ideologies sell to the handicapped, whom they cripple from birth, than by disseminating the conviction—to the point where it permeates thought, the body, and social mores—that life is not an object to be exploited, that no aspect of it should be commodified, and that it has no place for either guilt or atonement. Life is just life, sown far and wide so that from every seed individuals may bring their humanity to fruition.
Beware of those who contest barbarity without laying the foundations of a society that derives the power to banish it from happiness. How could armed groups ever truly overcome dictatorship when they are themselves imbued with a military spirit?
“Take care that the enemy you are fighting is not already inside you!” Should not this kind of warning encourage us to take aim not at humans, but rather at the system that manipulates them?
The fact that old age and death will one day get the better of me has never convinced me of their inevitability. Market civilization has duped the world and made a category mistake by mechanizing the life forces. Here we stand, confronted by that civilization’s last gasps, by the pathetic and risible paradox of a survival more comfortable than ever and a life so lethargic that a danse macabre suffices to divert it.
Under the scalpel of science the mechanics of the body is gradually losing its mysteries. Medicine makes progress in the art of galvanizing individual health so as to ensure everyone’s productivity in the labor market. The surgeons of the soul are not far behind. All would be fine if only humans were cars whose operation was the province of conscientious and skilled mechanics.
But that is not so. Mechanical reactions are precisely what shatter and denature our life instincts. The prevailing forms of therapy do not grasp and serve to conceal the degree to which we are composed of unexplored universes. Do we have any idea of what dwells within us and provokes anxiety, terror, feelings of well-being and sudden bursts of joy?
Our inner recesses are peopled by monsters that demand nothing so much as to find themselves tamed. What is their origin, if not the attic of our great mansion, where our brain, though designed to discover and fertilize vast territories, has been pared down to the barest minimum, colonized by the spirit of predation, and conditioned to repress natural instincts, animal emotions and the volcanic potential of the senses?
Whether mainstream or alternative, medicine cannot evade an economy that reduces life force to a survival that is a function of work. Only the will to create a destiny for oneself can give voice to the wild outbursts of our frustration, thus assimilating them to the language of humanity with no loss of ardor. Granted, it is no easy task to identify our desires and restore to life those which have been perversely oriented toward death, but such is the passion that revives all others.
Unprecedented questions now arise that challenge past and present conceptions and science. Do our physical organs have consciousness? What about the visceral brain, intercellular communication, the power of autosuggestion, placebos, or a form of time that contradicts the doctrine of time’s ineluctable flow? What are our dreams, traversed and fertilized by the imagination, and how do the resonance effect and coherent fields work? To what extent does our existence condense the lineage of the generations from which we descend and to what extent does it enshrine the seeds of the generations to come? By what alchemy does our destiny regulate the transmutation of the desires that closest to our hearts? Of what is the energy of ephemeral and constant desire capable? How is it that I am, at one moment or another, my own enemy?
Answers to these questions can be furnished only by whatever of universal life resides within us.
Rediscovering our kinship with the animal realm means reconciling with the beast in us, refining instead of opposing, repressing and allowing it only cruel forms of release. Our humanization entails granting animals the right to live in accordance with their own specificity.
Killers of men, women and children are a vile brood who must assuredly disappear. And, along with them, all those who massacre animals, trees and landscapes.
The time must come when a great reconciliation takes place with the beasts and even—who knows?—among the beasts themselves. The time of alliance with the body, and with the life which the earth carries just like the woman—its analogical double—whose desire to give birth only purposefully it will eventually echo.
Nothing could be further from my intent than to get the feeling of having done my duty. All constraint is anathema to me. At the same time, I am well aware that my whole being becomes a “duty to be” just as soon as desire arises and takes aim at fulfillment. This process of becoming is what breathes life into me and, thanks to the oneiric condensation of time that desire contrives, causes the future to come to meet me, offer me its happiest emanations and nourish my present with its benevolence.
In diametrical opposition to tragedy—the word is related to the tragos, the poor skinned goat—and likewise to comedy, the catharsis of laughter, I go forward alone, surrounded by the countless creatures, present and yet to come, that the great sower of life casts to the four winds and that I gather in a laborious yet passionate manner. Each partakes of the egregore that distils the totality of singular, collective and universal life forces.
May the poetry of life be our ultimate weapon! It captivates without capturing, gives but never commandeers, and propagates an aspiration for happiness that revokes the need to kill.
We are dissatisfied only because we fail to be insatiable.
History is the outcome of a deviation. It has been made by mankind against mankind. It has betrayed man by misdirecting man’s natural evolution. It has impeded his transition from animal to human and spread-eagled him between two conditions that incessantly divide his being. It falls to you to liberate humanity from the limbo where it languishes and restore its rightful destiny. That task is less daunting than a facile rhetoric suggests: all that is required is the mustering of the universal movement of all those, ever more numerous, who seek the sovereignty of life.
I have no yearning for immortality save in the form of the timeless and evanescent smile that Lewis Carroll gave the Cheshire Cat. Be ready for it to manifest itself as you make your way at leisure through a world where being has supplanted having.