The only thing for a citizen to do to be of service to his country is to patiently wait for the day when he can cooperate in a material revolution

A very short film.   



For Carlo Pisacane, via Jean Vigo and a lost language of the steppes.  The barbaric restoration of order.  An insurrection rewinds like snow.

 ---

On a related note:

"There are some who say:  the revolution must be made by the country. This there is no denying. But the country is made up of individuals and if we were quietly to wait for the day of revolution to come instead of plotting to bring it about, revolution would never break out.  On the other hand, if everybody were to say: the revolution must be made by the country and I, being an infinitesimal part of the country, have my infinitesimal portion of duty to do and were to do it, the revolution would be carried out immediately and would be invincible because of its scale."

[Pisacane]

This is precisely the problem, even if the historical deck - and how it played out - is stacked against the pro-plotting line, at least of the relatively micro form of "plots."  Because it is the basic split in question, the one that can be restated as:

we cannot bring about a revolution of "our" own accord [for if it lacks the scale of that mass of the infinitesimal, then it is nothing],

and a revolution does not happen of its own accord [for the set of objective conditions for which one might wait are themselves dependent upon individuals doing all those things that inflect and make up the infinitesimal, and profoundly difficult, portion of the duty; a duty which is itself dependent upon, and only able to be thought through and measured against that process on the scale of a nation; through and against the process of ceasing to be nations, ceasing to be individuals]


Even so, we still aim to conspire.  Desperately, invincibly.

Insurrection for a prom night

John Maus - Cop Killer from Know Phase on Vimeo.


Riot porn has found its soundtrack of the times, a stateless coup d'état dreamed up drunk in the backseat of a car.  Yet this is no adolescent fantasy of the few.  More the scent coming through the open window, something much larger, slow, something magisterially ugly.

With all the formal driftiness of grainy footage.  With the grandeur and delay of pixels that can't quite register the speed with which a scatter of gasoline takes off, along the tar, up the body, across the shields, already fire before it gets there or got itself lit.

O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!... An if we live, we live to tread on kings.

"Take the grey wolf, the child of Saturn (..) and throw him the body of the King.  And when he has swallowed him, build a big fire and throw the Wolf into it, so that he burns up, and then the King will be liberated again."

- Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, 1618

Or a sad history of insurrections gone wrong and the king - as no longer a king, but kingliness diffuse - strides away after the scuffle, rises up to pollute and settle back on all things, while the ashes of the wolf are, at the end of the day, just dust gray and graying.

To stand Saturn on its head, then - which is to say, back on its feet, to make the doubly inverted exceptional night last for years to come.

Archer and arched bleed alike

Insurrection, which does not exist, that's the point, is a diagonal cut away.  A double-headed arrow, which wounds both the archer in the act of drawing back and the target when it falls.  There's correspondence, but its other term, what it was the pejorative bastard cousin of  - what we used to call revolution - isn't there, and definitely not as some haunted absence or trace.  It's relation without a relative, adrift in the black, but stepping down and out.  Hypotenuse of the knight's move.

That or the tired, somewhat strategic erasing of other words left on the board after an early morning section, with the end result of a two-bit Richter painting.