Reyhard Rumbayan
A Brief Guide to Individual Liberation (Desire) in the Postmodern Era for Every Henry Miller Who Misguided
1/ Masters Without Slaves
WORLD WAR THREE and the last, is taking place in the depths of our souls and hearts. On the one hand, it becomes a question of our beliefs about the world and the various prodigy we can do in it: our love and our dreams towards life. On the other hand, it exists as fright, discomfort, and inertia within us—which corporations and governments use to divide et impera the society, reducing the complex complexities of the world and life by narrowing it down to economic computations. What this War has at stake is nothing, but a choice between total liberation with routine and isolation. We are expected to lose in this way: at wars with one another for the sake of fighting over a nibble of the world, rather than taking over the whole for the benefit of all. Numerous are trapped—including us—into this trap: the rules that make us reciprocally compete, derogatory, and have suspicion of one other.
The desire for hierarchical power, for domination over others, is created by reversing the desire to have control over life. At this point, in a world completely polished by human culture and technology, where there are no more privatized spaces, it is very usual if we can only maintain our individual lives through cooperation. Our fate all rests on our ability to overcome every discomfort and pettiness of our own, likewise how we build a way of relating to fellows, in order to help each other, and be masters without slaves: afterwards we can seize the world.
2/ For Myself
OF EVERYTHING that’s been said, I just want to say: you’re welcome here, but I’m not doing this for you. I’ve spent my whole life pondering what ‘duties’ I haven’t done to the world: whether I must refuse my desire to serve your interests, or repulse yours in pursuit of my desire. Two trapping choices: If I repel you, I will lose partially of me that is within you, and if I give it all up for you, I have nothing more to offer for you.
The choices were delusive and fake, I no longer believed them. Now I let it go and fully consign for myself, only then give myself entirely completely thoroughly to the world. Because only by realizing who I am can I live my life as it should be, so that I can give more to the world than the charitable morality of the religious and the liberal bourgeoisie. What I mean is to make serious efforts to satisfy our own needs, in a way in which the needs of others can be satisfied as well, namely by striving to destroy every authority that seeks to exploit and demolish all of us: nature and living things. From this moment, I do all of this for myself, without the illusion of respectability and duty. As one poet said: “What I seek in others is the fulfillment of the self hidden within. Therefore, those who realize that their lives are very dependent on others, still have to find themselves first. Otherwise, they will find nothing in others other than the negation of themselves.”
Thus, I wrote this for myself. Not to sell my ideas, or try to give alms of my time enlightening people, or, even worse, try to elevate my stature into an intellectual—but for an exercise in expression, to enjoy lark around with language, logic, and poetry, for an opportunities to write about the world and my life as well as its own possibilities, inside a new form.
This essay will possibly give you a different experience. Words, sometimes, capable of setting in motion of emotions, give you liberty sensations, even stir you to do something. Or, conversely, the words will make you stock-still, paralyzed helpless. In a situation like this, you are the reader who reads my writing, you are merely the reader. Apart from the fact, for example, that there is something noteworthy that I have to say here, there are points that can explain some things, these cold pages can become something void, a confirmation of your helplessness.
I write this declaration of ego is to defy you, to continuously clarify your position, who’s here take benefit and who doesn’t—and also, engage you to coalesce, for your own sake. You don’t have to be a writer, theorist or artist or activist, or every role that obstructs you to be the one who is free. You just have to vow to yourself, to seize the world or nothing. There are as many paths to liberation as there are as many different people in the world; for everyone’s sake, find yourself.
3/ For All of Us
FOR THOSE who are in situations like mine, the biggest defiance is how to doest not give a fuck to the potency of others. We live in a society—economically unequal—where selfness is seen as a finite resource: there’s not much to share, because everything is centered around a few rock stars and celebrities—in the same way that capital is owned by a few capital owners and investors, who take it from the accumulation of sweat of everyone. The forms of self-expression that exist nowadays are hindrance to the self-actualization of every human being: to make one person appear on television, it takes thousands of people sitting in their homes watching, and the same applies to sports games, writers and readers, actors and their admirers, politicians and political supporters, artists and patrons. Even our rebellion is structured like this: punk vocalists and radicals figures are above the audience, their voices supported by amplifiers at high volume, conditions that make people become passive spectators.
Now, we must find a way of producing a voice that can give voice to others, a way of behaving that stimulates people to be active, a way of living that allows us to share our lives with others without having to disengage our own lives. I’ll never release the will to express myself, or pleasure in what I’m drinking while doing it. I am quite aware that by expressing myself, I risk replicating a system that capitalized on the impoverishment of relations between individuals; but what I seek here, is to find the lethal voice, which can be a tempestuous plague to annihilate every veil of human self-consciousness and every inertia that still haunts all of us hitherto.
Mind this, don’t ever try to frighten people in order for them to take action. Everyone was exhausted enough by the helplessness, with all the harshness of the barbaric world. Instinctively, everyone knew that something was wrong with the world. No one is fond of it, even though their social status and their occupation always try to make them think on the contrary. The only way to encourage them is to show that free will is still possible. The ugliness of the world is nothing new to those who watch the news, even if the news doesn’t escape censorship; the only attraction to cheer them on is to bring beauty to the surface to make it visible.
If we want to make people active, then our task is this: to create and undergo a new beauty, which is completely different from the “beauty contests” often held by those with a slave mentality—to see about wonders in a world that is no longer believed in miracles and surprises—to resuscitate the dead back to life, as when we would tear down every imperial edifice.
If we succeed in creating one, then our blood will become the lines of supreme angels, who are here to redintegrate the weary and heal those tormented by the death—which blowing tightly like a wind before a storm that comes ravaging the hushed graveyard, remodels the paths, liberates every astray soul that it goes through. Let’s discover a new future, and echo it through a propaganda of desire that has not yet been known by the world. The ploys of the advertising world’s practitioners no longer illusions us, and those on the old side world, will be devoured by fire.
We gave up everything so we wouldn’t owe anyone anything, so the world would be ours. You devoured it all gone, nothing was left. You are the void, which devours all—look what you have done to the world.
But we are the karma of your civilization. For us, pilferage never existed, it is fair to act to take over what is ours, and every violation is liberation.
For those of you who embed complaints: you may be one of us. Tell us what you feel. Nothing is more tragic and vacuous than your absence when the world must we seize. Smooch with every drool inside your mouth, fight with soul in your arms and blood in your eyes.
From now on, trade will disappear from life, no business as usual. Destroy and cure. Vanish and exist. Take and give. Live, then die; fight, thus you will live.
Armed to the teeth and dressed to kill.
2008