kagablog

dear friends click here to watch dick tuinder’s documentary space, a portrait of the exhibition sanctuary mental space held at the centraal museum, utrecht, in november 2003

2002

THE WHIPPING ANGEL
Gallery BuryZone, Bratislava Sk
Composition in darkness and light, merging Greek mythology with modern French eroticism.

SEED OF THE BLACK SUN
Illuseum, Amsterdam Nl
Philosophical argument over disinheritance, the acceptance of lost dreams.

SUCCUBUS OF NIGHT
Winston Kingdom, Amsterdam Nl
In the teeth of night one man breaks a hole in the wall which unleashes an evocation from the past. An exotic experiment bathed in red light and smoke.

THE CORPSE-GRINDERS OF BERLIN- novelette published
Pine Slopes Press, Johannesberg SA
Fake fiction novel antidote which plunders the plight of modern Europe.

SCAPEGOAT FOR ZUNA
Kut, Bratislava Sk
Revival of ancient Eastern ritual; a call for the blaze of sacrifice in the modern world.

TWILIGHT OF THE CENTAUR and
ENCHANTED FOREST CONCERT
Illuseum, Amsterdam Nl
Thoughts on existence of a centaur written by Zuna Deneb Algiedi; medieval concert about the lost city.

2001

RABBIT’S MOON (article published)
Necronomican 4, London E
Acephale interview with filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

ASH OF MARCEL DUCHAMP
Torch Gallery, Amsterdam Nl
Reflections on the state of hedonism in the modern art structure.

FRIEDRICH ON THE EDGE OF CIVILIZATION
Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam Nl
A 12 year old child sings of harmony and discord, with Merzedes Sturm-Lie.

THE BIRTH OF A SILVER SUN
Galeria Priestor, Bratislava SK
Dissected ritual dramatization of Isis and Osiris myth. Blood streaming from a broken violin, leaving huge scar on a female body.

MARK OF THE BEAST #1
Gallery Drantmann, Brussels B
Found object performance about the castration of America.

MARK OF THE BEAST #2 (for Yves Klein)
Kanal 11, Brussels B
A fire lit for the imagination of the public, radical violin.

MARK OF THE BEAST #3
Crown Gallery, Brussels B
(in collaboration with Erwin Olaf exhibition)
The naked business man of Pasolini enters the void of existence, without words and only a scream of longing to defend himself.

THE CENTAUR
Filmakadamie Overtoom, Amsterdam Nl
Three performances concerning the remembering of a hidden past; the flowers of melancholy.

IMMORAL TALES
So to do festival, Schloss Brolin D
Banquet for the finishing off of art once and for all.

THE ACCURSED SHARE
Kit Kat Club 3, Berlin D
Decapitation in the pleasure dome of debauchery. A radical re-working of George Batailles ‘The Dead Man.’

LA VIE SEXUEL BELGIQUE 5 (film)
Oostende, B
Self designed Acephale performance sequence in this film by Jan Bucquoy

2000

SONATA FOR THE MISSING
L’Archiduke, Brussels B
In the market corpse of democracy we find a nude at the piano. She was like ice, she was like a burnt out tree, shimmering in the industrial dusk.

REAL MEAT = REAL LOVE
Art complex Schloss Brolin, D
Prositutionalism in the fine arts- live. Art, desire, missing fingerprints, the smoke from the gas chambers.
LIE
Holland festival- De Balie, Amsterdam Nl
The apex of Acephale’s social-individual critique. Adornoesque thesis on collaboration.

PANDORA
Beganegrond, Amsterdam Nl
A severe twist of the veins between theatre and addiction- sensual fascism.

IN DER HOLLE DER LIBERTINS
Eschloraque, Berlin D
Crass exploitation of De Sade anaophelorastia, featuring Malte ‘coeur de fer’ Rudhart.

TOTE TAUBER
Kit Kat Club #2, Berlin D
Insurrection remix for the liberation of dark Easter.

THE JUDAS KISS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Juliettes Literatursalon, Berlin D
Investigation into a bucket of snakes posing as love’s body. Featuring Blixa Bargeld.

FULL ENTRY
Austrian psycho-nights festival, Volksbrunne, Berlin D
Silencing silence, first action of the Artaud Tribunal.

1999

LOSE!
Dolle Molle, Brussels B
Virgin rituals, poetry, noise, etc. In collaboration with Asa Lie.

JE SUIS MOI-MEME LA GUERRE
CBK, Dordrecht Nl
Performance over the wasteland of the modern landscape, surrealist seduction. Dedicated to Breton’s Nadja.

H. BARBIN CONCERT
Winston Kingdom, Amsterdam Nl
Inauguration of the Caligula bossa-nova cycle, tribute to polysexuality.

KNUCLEHEAD
Museum Abteiberg, Munchengladbach D
Prelude to extreme temptation, dedicated to the spouses.

LIVE SNUFF
Cocopelli, Amsterdam Nl
Twilight immolation ceremony for Mammon.

WESTERBORK
Dam Square, Amsterdam Nl
Promethean attempt to return the holy fire.

SONIC AXE
Paradiso, Amsterdam Nl
Concert with Japanese musician Misami Akita (Merzbow).

NIETZSCHE INNA BABYLON (film)
Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo
Digital cinema with director Ian Kerkhof. Fake fiction film over Friedrich Nietzsche’s love affair with his sister Elizabeth.

APART/TOGETHER (film)
Amsterdam
Film over the gulf of intimacy, made with Alica Framis.

LOST IN THE MIST OF A DUBIUOS PAST
Stedlijk Buro, Amsterdam Nl
Performance installation in collaboration with Spanish artist Alica Framis.

DEATH COLUMN and ACEPHALIC REMIX (articles published)
Wax and Jardins, Amsterdam Nl
2 articles for this art magazine reflecting upon the death of death.

1998

ODE TO SEITO SAKAKIBARA
P gallery, Tokyo J
Seito had scandalized Japan at that moment. A 10 year old boy who had decapitated four schoolgirls. This concert-performance pontificated tersely with the situation.

SIGNAL TO NOISE (film)
VPRO, Hilversum Nl
Experimental documentary over contemporary noise music.

1996

FEMME DE SIECLE
Arti e Amicitae, Amsterdam Nl
Reinstatement of classical poetry with multiple film projections.

THE SUBLIME
Rijksakademie, Amsterdam Nl
Performance lecture over the beating out of transparency in the body.
LE SEXE ILLIMITE
Silo, Amsterdam Nl
Experiment in intimacy and seduction of the public. The necessary destruction for every resurrection.

1995

DIANA SHOOTS HER SILVER BOW
Filmakademie, Amsterdam Nl
Ritual slaughter of the white Goddess. In collaboration with Grace de la Luna.

Acèphale is an artistic cell of solo and group performances involving various members. It has performed internationally in such countries as the United States, Germany, Italy, Holland, Mongolia and Japan.

Acèphale takes its name from the clandestine cult organization formed by Georges Bataille in 1938. Its present reincarnation was intuited by Sir Djeffery Babcock and Aryan Kaganof in 1994. Since that time it has produced a wide range of artistic projects including films, concerts, books, interviews and experimental theatre pieces.

In all of its endeavours it incorporates a similar system of creation. It has developed a structure of intersections which give rise to the definition and direction of a given moment. Therefore it always takes connections from outside of the artistic sphere, in order to influence its creativity. This procedure takes Acèphale away from most current artistic trends and places it closer to the mystical sciences. Acèphale accepts this banishment gladly since in its estimation most modern art has succumbed to middle class gallery aesthetics. This seems to be more of a marketing ploy, rather than an intensely creative impulse.

In respect to the original Acèphale group, it must be said that we have a predilection for the more severe and tender dimensions of creativity. Out methods, whether poetic or political, will always have more affinities with Artaud, Bellmer, or the Viennese actionists, rather than the pop aesthetics of, for example, Andy Warhol.

Acèphale believes that in order for the spirit to rise, creativity must be re-grounded. It attempts to fertilize that ground through a range of transgressive acts manifested in literature, cinema and live performances. It is especially when all three of these primal elements are harnessed together that Acèphale feels that a true filed of discovery is penetrated.

In these acts of extremity they aim to loosen the moorings beneath the surface of existence, so that all that is suppressed can flood once again into the physical realm. In this way it is important to note that Acèphale doesn’t believe in transcendence as a solution, but rather in the infusion of magic into the physical.

Acèphale
June 14 2002
Bratislava

CONCLUSION

Sometimes
All it takes
Is the smallest detail
To turn something beautiful
Into something ugly.
Sometimes such a
Transformation is easy
But it’s more difficult
The other way around.
That’s why television,
Insensitivity, speed
Spread out with such ease
Because it’s not doing
The difficult work.

On sale now
All the worst ideas in history
Renovated, masked, blown-up, distorted.
On sale now
The steady decline of quality
For the sake of mass-production
For the sake of Democracy.
On sale now
The loss of morality
The loss of history
The loss of courage
All those things which are too heavy
And which sink to the bottom
Of this ocean of tranquility
Like a treasure chest.

How far I had to search
To a small village
In the middle of nowhere
Lost between Poland and Russia
To find a lack of business spirit
A lack of enterprise
An ancient and living connection to life.

Once when you were married
You were married for life
With no chance of escape.
But now it’s just as bad
You can only marry, in fact
Divorce
With a small Purgatory in between.

Even though it’s all wrong
Nothing forever changes
Because nobody wants to lose their job
Nobody wants to lose face
People are willing to call a spade a spade
But never a nigger.

A big black man
Was crying
Telling me that somewhere
Something was going to change
Very soon
And it would spread everywhere
Berlin maybe
Maybe Warsaw
But it would change absolutely everything
And everything absolutely
It would be a revolution of the heart
Just watch and see.
The tears ran down his face
And I didn’t believe a word of it.

Brussels – Amsterdam
Autumn
In the fear of our Lord, 1958

He continued beating her. She would tremble uncontrollably, like the trees shedding their leaves.

“I like speaking English,” she said. “I find a lot of poetry in it. Like the phrase he rose from the chair. It’s so nice that he is compared to a rose when he rises.”

It was September. The day he left was the first day that autumn could be felt. He asked her if he could have breakfast at the train station. She laughed. No, it only had terrible food like sausages, and the drunks hang out there all day long. Do drunks hang out at the train stations in other cities, she asked. She couldn’t understand why they were there actually, they never travelled anywhere.

At dusk he walked along the Danube, past the rows of elm trees where lovers would kiss in the shadows. The waters of the river glistened like the eyes of a dead cunt.

Bratislava had obviously died a long time ago, but it felt like it had died a natural death. In any case he preferred this bitter pallor to the so-called health of the west.

He looked out the window of the train for hours. What he was looking for in life was a magical incongruity.

Pierre got out of the train in Prague in order to change to a bus. He walked around the city at sunset. Dark stone statues with golden crowns and wings.

The things which are invisible are what’s golden.

He stepped on the bus to Brussels. It drove away from the darkening city. There was a misty moon rising. The feathery sky of El Greco passed through his reflection.

“The most tricky thing in the world” he said to himself as he blew out a candle, “is to refuse to be either a dead man or an ass-hole.”

All real vampires never went for the neck. They always went for the breast, of course. Where the heart is.

Lilith can have a shiny intelligence which can cut, but Isis is more intelligent because she knows how to love. Confronted with the wreckage of this present civilisation, the only thing wiser than cynicism is love.

She said she had never been fucked in the ass. It was amazing how un-European the Europeans were becoming.

Many worried that the apocalypse was approaching. Their fears were misplaced, since the apocalypse had already occurred. It had happened when the threshold of authenticity was shattered. When even DEATH vanished from life, becoming an absurd joke.

No secrets (pornography)
THE secrets (Holy things, numbers, systems).

A narrative which disintegrates into aphorisms. A contraction which swells into pure reverie. The lines in the face disappear.

The cool breeze of affection, after the heat of Hell.

Elegant stylisation can often forge false links between people. In Bratislava these false connections practically didn’t exist. Instead there was the glamour and depth of things which were broken or stripped to the bone.

What formed in Bratislava was a unique kind of love- a love which was neither desperate nor overly romantic. A light, fleeting exchange which could grow slowly.

The two laid upon the bed, naked and calm. She said that their meeting was a new experience for her…somehow beyond sexualization. She said that she couldn’t comprehend it. He said that if she didn’t understand it, then it was probably real.

She said she had a series of disastrous romances behind her. Relationships in which she threw everything she had all at once. This love carried with it the blue flame of an enigma. She laid her head on his shoulder.

When he had left Rome a half a year ago he felt that he would die before he could return. Now he understood this premonition, it was because he had turned to ash. He died in Berlin in a fundamental way. It was a difficult shedding of skin.

He was wearing his black leather jacket, shining in the moonlight. In an open field in the Czech countryside he fucked her. Her face lit by a blue-gray moon, her features soft, her eyes glistening.

His throbbing horse-cock plunged into her again and again. They fucked like two wild wolves. While he violently rammed her, he felt a certain sense of serenity. A black dog was running through the wheat field, her breasts heaved in the grey gleam of the moon. This was his way of burning away ghosts.

He preferred lightning which whispered, to insects which roared. That’s why he left Berlin.

On one of his last days there, she asked him to beat her.
He beat her, he whipped her. He cut her with a razor blade.
He ran the razor over her breast, coming slowly to a halt
just before her nipple. She shivered with a thoughtless, vibrant beauty.

He drank her blood.

He beat her mercilessly, so that she would change forever.

Together they went to the old graveyard in Prague. They wandered through the broken and toppled gravestones. At one moment when they turned a corner, all the trees shivered at once, sending a dark veil of leaves twirling to the ground in an instant. He knew then that they had just been blessed by the dead.

In the morning he sat at a wooden table in a bar with an open hearth, the fire raging. Our so-called Pierre took a sip of his coffee and then ordered a Spanish brandy. The waitress had short dark hair and black glittering eyes. He held the brandy glass up to his line of sight and looked at the world through its amber brilliance. The world set on fire, bright and golden. Alchemy was never about transforming metals, he thought. It was about forming an esoteric language dealing with metaphysics, which was guarded from initial, and therefore superficial, understanding.

Pierre never took a step towards enlightenment, without taking an equal step towards endarkenment.

He was skeptical of all illumination. The flash of the photo-camera always destroys the situation. There was a reason why the dark stone innards of the Gothic cathedrals in France were kept in a subdued, indirect half-light. This dim light, stained by the coloured glass was necessary to provoke meditation. He didn’t believe in stainlessness. Alchemists knew that all things were conceived in darkness- whether it be the seed of a tree or an embryo in the womb.

He took a cigarette out of a pale blue package. The half-light in the room was a rich umber.
He lit the cigarette. The ignition of the flame- the sacrifice of Prometheus. Isn’t all creation born from the duel face of devotion and challenge?
The secret of alchemy laid in measurement. In a world of increasing expansion and distraction, he still believed in measurement. If something is made for measure then it follows that it will be undone by ill-measure.

He was moved by Bratislava, the most hopeless city he had visited in all of Europa. It was even more fatal than Liege.
Every morning he would go into the city, which was often shrouded in mist. He would go to a bar and have coffee and brandy. He would sit there hunched over and think, submerged in stillness and silence. In the afternoons he would hang out in the bars drinking large glasses of beer in the setting sun.

She asked him if he had a map. “No map, no clock.”

He had many discussions over death and resurrection with this curious girl with the half-moon eyes. “The eyes of Pythia” they said about her. Misty eyes of disinheritance, thereby inheriting the world.

As the days darkened, he would burn brighter.

In the afternoon they drove to a small village in the countryside near Bratislava. They parked the car and from there they climbed a steep hill until they reached the ruins of an old castle. For a long time they sat on the broken walls, silently looking out at the saffron coloured rays of the sun falling upon the dark green forest.

What modern philosophers use such areas as an inspiration for their thoughts? And if they don’t, then where do their thoughts derive from? Insulated and caught in a psychotic urban death cell. Deleuze jumps out the window, not even a very inspiring manner of suicide. Debord fires a bullet through his heart in utter solitude. But Nietzsche was different, he knew that he needed to visit powerful places as a source for his know-ledge. His philosophy wasn’t separated from his vitality.

And Bataille - the period when he was inspired by Laure and he took his theory into practice, has been largely ignored. People either pretend that it didn’t exist, or they deal with it with a kind of uneasy nervousness. A philosopher just can’t start performing strange Dionysian rituals in the forests. Official scholars will burn you at the public stake if you turn your back on a sterile academics and try to find a way to live your philosophy in everyday life. But of course in the end this revenge is just a persecution of their own guilt, an awareness of their own weakness. It was clear to Pierre that the expression “intellectual integrity” was a contradiction in terms.

There are those who speak and there are those who live what they speak.

From the ruins he watched as the shadows moved slowly across the scenery. Soon the valley was engulfed in shade. Once again he was struck by the sensation that the earth was positioned between two opposing planets, two destinies- the sun and the moon, between light and death.

A soft white half-moon in a sky of infinite blue, the walls of the shattered castle burst into a fiery orange.

His harsh judgement like an ass-priest, without even a God to back him.

Instead of our anti-hero turning to stone, his love turns to marble and fades away.

One doesn’t enter history by doing something famous at a particular moment, he thought to himself. It isn’t that easy. One only enters history by an action which speaks of the eternal.

Sitting in a cafe he listened to rock music. Rock was another disaster brought on by the 60s. It was the climax of a certain kind of love which burned itself out through a lack of authenticity. Hypocrisy hadn’t reached such a high level since perhaps the Inquisition. The new dark ages, splashed with colour and bright lights.

In the city of Bratislava he saw midgets and giants. He saw people without eyes, legs, arms, and faces. All of this of course held a certain charm for him.

* * *

The continual re-carving of one’s identity.

A subtle apocalypse in the form of the eradication of subtlety.

He couldn’t help but see her eyes as wounds. Two eyes like gleaming razor blades. Somehow they cut into his existence so very deep. Not that they couldn’t be false, which they often were. At these moments it seemed that it wasn’t a simple mask though, but a conjuring up from something far more complicated, much deeper.

Her ability to destroy was equal to her ability to dance.

He arrived in Bratislava in the early evening. A strange city indeed, which was already dead quiet by eleven in the evening. He had never seen a capitol city like this. He walked down the empty street with only barking dogs in the distance.

All the buses had already stopped, so he had to take a taxi to where he was staying. He looked out the taxi window as he drifted through this bizarre city of emptiness. La Capitale du Vide.
The taxi pulled up to a modern apartment building. Actually he had no idea what he was getting himself into. He rang the doorbell. The door buzzed opened and he walked up the concrete staircase with his suitcase. A door was open on the top floor.

Inside was a small apartment. Nice old wooden furniture, an open veranda. Pierre introduced himself to the girl whose apartment it was, and whom he had never met before in his life. It was a special girl, with very dreamy eyes. After they talked a bit he excused himself, he was exhausted. It had been a long trip.

Here he was sleeping in the living room of the apartment of a stranger. A small balcony that overlooked the hills that this city was nestled in. He felt good here finally. She had few things, but the few things she had were well chosen. A beautiful mahogany writing desk which shined.
The sun blazed, which gave everything the aura of northern Italy. A bit like Trieste.

When he left Berlin for Slovakia he was pretty much destroyed. He felt wretched. Too much drinking, too many cigarettes. And he had barely slept in days. All he could do at this point was let go.

He found himself in a car with three others. It was a bright September day. They talked about Carravaggio, and about Ezra Pound’s incarceration by the Americans in Pisa. In the car he was forced to listen to pop music all day long. For him this world was laughable, but it was a laugh which carried with it the end of the world. There were so many different kinds of music which touched and ignited the soul and instead people chose to listen to the same pop songs endlessly.

Eventually they entered the familiar Bohemian landscape that he hadn’t experienced for at least seven years. Those hills and fairy-tale forests with their winding roads. And afterwards they drove into the misty gray-green hills of Slovakia which were descending into a deep blue dusk.
Pierre represented the motif of lostness in a world which was too well ordered and blinded by routine and which knew exactly what it wanted. But what it wanted was nothing. Pierre was lost because he knew what he wanted, but what he wanted was something.

In a world of dis-intimacy and disconnection, relationships also suffered. Since the 60s not one of his friends was able to have a long-lasting, meaningful relationship. Everything was in broken pieces. There was no longer any respect, and no longer any tolerance. Everything had taken a different course in history.

A friend once started speculating: “If I’m honest, the number of women in which I have a really meaningful connection to is about 1 in 1000. But I would have to meet that person in a real way, which makes the odds more like 1 to 50,000. And the other person would have to recognise me also, which makes it about 1 to 200,000. And of course the girl would also have to be free, I mean not in a relationship already….1 in 500,000. And she would have to live in the same city….” and he went on like that until he was in the billions. Luckily life is not only at the mercy of statistics, the impossible was still possible. But in the end Pierre had to confess that his friend’s conclusion was quite realistic, it felt like finding someone in this mess of a world seemed almost that difficult. It was obvious to Pierre that most of his friends had just given up and had taken what was available out of desperation- and not out of any real conviction.

At the highway bus stop he stood looking down on the small Slovakian village shrouded in darkness. The church tower lit, the village lights strung throughout the valley. The unbelievable din of crickets vibrating the landscape.

Too much cinema, he was thinking to himself while passing this scenery, attempts to simulate life, and in the end it is only suffocating life. It tries to recreate certain aspects or events, which always ended in a bad imitation. Pierre thought that films should either be busy creating life, like Godard did with his erratic jump cuts, or it should be an abstract reflection on life- as with Bresson or Paradjanov. Either way it was artifice, and not naturalism that struck him with significance. It was a delicate and refined relationship that was maintained and not a simple jerking of the emotions. A bridge should always be crossed in perception in order to preserve the integrity of the viewer.

Black Marble Heart

She extracts herself suddenly
Her torso silhouetted, reclining
Revealing a marble interior
Her hair cut short and wild
A body which echoes.

Here,
Here is the ash of an alchemical girl
Who turns gold into shit a la Berlinese
Many lovers blamed themselves wrongly
Many faces cringed
As she danced the dance
That meant their death
Upon a Weimar dancefloor.

This spirit which burns so bright
Speaks of a callous love
Lips of betrayal
Whispered breaths which flay
Pig-hearted as nails.
It’s true her breasts shine
Ghostly white as porcelain
But with a nervous revelation
Wordless and lawless
Revealing the brightness of extinction.
He who descends the stairs
Past the willow and past the pine
Will find her reciting other’s words
Endlessly
Between screams and laughs
A criminal of love
She changes her name with the seasons
To escape the law
But tell me, dark Lilith
From what law are you running?

The day is as dark as water
It’s Berlin
Irene wanders over a glass of Sauvignon
Lingering she’s searching
Finally she says:
”Without responsibility there’s no
understanding.”
In the sapphire of the half-light
Things are glowing, shifting
Glasses, eyes, it all seems relevant
And her sharp cheekbone
And watery gaze
Are somehow unconjureable
An eclipse of release
From the crematorium of twisted limbs.

”I’m not myself these days”
Well, few people are
The pumping of her blood
Steered by jealousy
Nevermore flows naturally
But is tainted psychologically
Smoking to burn away the past
Drinking to avoid responsibility
Stripping to excite
The testicles of death.

Poetry is a chaos which endures
Not revenge, nor amnesia
Not even dreams saved Cassandra
”We came together as we separated”
The incomprehensible source.

At the final moment
The statue of Venus
Quiet and cold as a winter’s river
Reveals her secrets
By the narcotics of twilight.

Through words reality is evoked.

That night he went to the Kumpelnest 3000, perhaps the only bar left on this desolated planet that he still really liked. He took a couple drinks. He knew the guy behind the bar, a big black transvestite from Amerika. He talked to some one from San Diego about the apocalypse. It was getting grim.

Then his old lover, the one who smashed him, walks in and pretends not to notice him. His shit-German girlfriend. He was happy to see her again in a bittersweet way. He would never stop loving her, he realised. In fact the phenomenon of the disappearance of love or love into hatred was incomprehensible to him. Once love was there in his soul it was there for good, no matter how painful.

I have been watching you as you stand
With wide open eyes, at my door
And a razor in your hand
Washing your heart out
On a rocky shore
Insanely pounding mist out of marble.

Broken pussy of Saint Lucy
Blue eyes disarrayed in the dusk
Too many coins shine of bankruptcy these days
And too many gifts caste shades of theft
Stay by my side, glittering
Ardour of a broken line.

His amie damnée was dancing in the middle of the bar, curving and swaying in the soft red light. He watched her. She was with another guy of course, an endless string of guys. She was able to fuck almost anyone. It didn’t matter what he looked like, or what a shit character he had. The whore of Babylon.

She glowed under exterminating circumstances.

Through this brutal haze he asked her to sing a song.
“You always go too far!” she snapped .
“You‘re right,” he answered, “and that’s what actually makes you Bataille, and makes me Laure.”

THE TONGUE OF REDEMPTION

He arrived back in Berlin in the morning and spent the day looking for a way to get the hell out again as soon as possible. After a lot of hassles he was able to organise a ride to Bratislava in two days.

He sat in Cafe M in the approaching autumn weather listening to French rap music. He read the Herald Tribune for about five minutes and then threw it down again. The first thing he noticed on his return was that he didn’t like people’s eyes here. They were dishonest.

He made a phone call to Amsterdam. He called an old girlfriend who tried to console him. She said nice things. “I’m nothing but an ass-hole, pining away for some impossible love,” Pierre told her. They talked awhile and then said goodbye, and then he was suddenly transported back to the busy intersection in Friedrichshein. Alone again amid the nauseating farts of automobiles. He stood there and looked at the dead street corner. Jesus, Berlin was sure a city of ugly street corners. It was also a city of apothekers and travel agencies. Never had he seen so many drugstores in a city before, except possibly in Brussels. Pills and vacations. A paradise of headaches.

In a cafe, sitting next to the window, he watched as the waitress poured his wine into a cheap glass. Pierre believed that wine should always be drunk from crystal. The materials of this world were becoming more and more insensitive, less and less aesthetic. What people called progress these days had only to do with the victory of mass-production and had nothing to do with the true quality of things.

Reality could be as harsh as any serial killer.

But at least serial killers chose their victims without discrimination. Reality on the other hand had a way of coming down hardest upon those who should be given a break. That Christ was crucified wasn’t a flaw or exception, it was a reality principle.

“The meek shall inherit the world”. Well, as a revolutionary Christ might have been brilliant, but as a prophet he was shit.

It’s true, Pierre thought to himself, what Jean Genet said: “Only violence will stop man’s brutal ways.”
A very unpopular point of view, he realised, in the sheepish pacifism of the present software world.

The Germans he met shit upon history. Maybe this was because Germany had shit upon history so well in the 1940s. In any event they did at least become scatological and poke at it with a stick from time to time, but only to reject it again. They were smeared and blurred by distraction and by envy and guilt, and especially by the avoidance of guilt. An inbreed predilection for catastrophe.

He had the sensation that the world was narrowing down on him. He could no longer believe in many of the things he was naive about earlier in his life. How is one, in all this clutter, to keep a wide horizon, like the one has in one’s childhood? He thought about fleeing to the countryside. But there was always the problem of money. Almost the entire planet had been monopolised by it, everything was subject to its reign. It had become the blood of this civilization. Blood-money. Shoot someone and coins fall out.

While driving through a small village Pierre saw a McDonald’s billboard which had an arrow pointing in one direction which said 2 minutes, and then another arrow pointing in the opposite direction which said 5 minutes. My God. “Gottdammerung” he whispered to himself.

There is something dreamy about sitting in front of a large window and watching the landscape pass.

In a gas station in Poland you find the same shit that you find in any other gas station in Europa, or in Amerika, or in your worse nightmare.

A curtsy, a bow, a puff of smoke
It’s Westerbork -
Still snowing in August.

O Mama!
Streaming with the bloody furs
Of your children!

O Europa!
On your knees again
Wiggling your dirty ass on the flagstones!

Pierre had pondered a lot about death these last few days. In fact a tone of sex and death permeated his existence. He was preparing to leave Riga, like a Steppenwolf packing his bags. He spent his last evening in Latvia in Jurmala, the tourist resort north of the Riga. As the day finished, he walked along the beach with its unearthly blue waves. He strolled into the town at dusk. It had a cool breeze blowing through it, giving it a wind-swept ambience. He ate at a table outside on the promenade and listened to a cheesy band playing Judo-Russian classics. He felt clean, as if the breeze had blown away his old thoughts.
He smoked a cigarette and listened to that wind. An eclipse from the straightjacket of time.

His clothes were quite dirty and ragged by this point, as they always are when you are travelling the way he had been travelling for the last months. His shoes had holes worn through their soles, and he was forced to put cardboard in them. It was time to leave.

When he returned back to the apartment he was dead tired, but still he got on his feet and went out to the city’s centre for a couple hours since it was his last night. It was a kind of prayer, a way of paying homage. He watched the hookers. The nouveau riche in their convertibles drinking bottles of champagne, laughing loudly and looking like they came out of Fellini´s La Dolce Vita.

The next afternoon he took the bus. He fell asleep quickly and was awakened at the Polish border. It was towards the day’s end. The asphalt gleamed gold and pink. In the sylvan distance were the emerald coloured forests, soft with a kind of purple misty silence. It was the time of the day when the faces on the bus glowed with a dark orange light, which somehow blurs out all traces of modernity. For these few moments eternity would win. It emits a primeval quality, something stronger than the torch of man. An atmosphere which is suspended, which is somehow visceral. Such a sacred vision was the true blood of this world.

He had passed so many borders, and each one was like stepping on the tail of some dormant dragon.

All this hopeless hoping. Better to kill it without mercy.

Walking down the Richarda Vágnar iela, Pierre ran into a Russian girl he had met the week before. She seemed upset. She put her hand on his cheek unexplainably. “I had a dream last night. A boy and a girl were fighting for a long time….it ended in blood. I thought of you.” At the moment she said the word “blood” a tear welled up in her eye and rolled down her cheek.

The next time he met her she laughed when she saw him. “I just saw a film. It was in Lebanon. It was the story of little red riding hood. The girl had a bad relation to her mother and left home and was hitchhiking on the highway. There she met the wolf who was dancing very badly in the Lebanese landscape. But the wolf, he had exactly the same eyes as yours.” She laughed again when she looked at him.

A dead cat in the middle of the road
Amidst a soft landscape of lavender
Let it stay this way
Within perfectionism
Lies the death of romanticism.

He stayed in the city of Riga for a few more days. He travelled to the countryside and the seashore by train. When one speaks of Riga, one isn’t only speaking of Riga, but also the powerful countryside around it. They are inseparable. This was actually the curse of Amsterdam, because it had no strong nature around it to save it from itself. And Berlin. Berlin put up walls against nature, only allowing a little to seep through. Then when the weather became nice the whole city would jump over that wall in hordes and swarm onto the countryside and lakes like flies on a dead carcass.

Once he had met a Geisha who had quit her profession to become a punk rock singer. He asked her why she quit. She said it was because it didn’t have a future. Pierre replied “but it does have a past”. He didn’t think she understood what he meant.

Warren or Antoine or Acateon or Pierre or whatever we call this anti-hero, was in the white blaze of the central market. Here we must ask ourselves if we really believe in his existence. Fiction is largely successful only to the degree that the reader buys the illusion fabricated by the author. Instead of such a brick wall, which was similar to the Hollywood brick wall of cinema, he preferred a veil.

So what do we have as a composition for this loser, for this dispossessed ass-hole? Eyes of a wolf, a soul like a debauched priest, a heart as clean as a fresh razor blade, a face which was an incision between Christ and the Devil. He had been called a range of things by different people: a saint, a pornographer, a lover, a drunkard, a rapist, a poet, a terrorist, a priest, a woman-beater and a gentleman. Can you really comprehend that? Can you really identify with that?

* * *

The problem of the passage between the heart and the mind was the one which exemplified the western crisis. He saw it everywhere, in every guarded eye, in every calculated movement. Perhaps at different times in history this passage was blocked by different substances. At the moment it was choked by the shit of finance.
He thought about his last meeting with his friend Jadrin in the Ville de Bruxelles. It was at the cafe Le Clef d´Or. Brutal sunglasses, a shaven head, black attire. Jadrin was silent for a long time, then he said “You know the nineteenth century was the time of morality. Dostoyevsky, for example. Then the twentieth century, that was the time of politics. The world wars, the rise of communism, the 60s, etc.” He looked around the smoky French barroom a bit. “And today it’s the time of business.”

It was true of the entire western civilization, but nowhere was it more obvious than in the art world. It was in the 1960s when the redefinition of an artist occurred, and it was largely perpetuated by the New York artists like Rauschenberg, Pollack, and especially Warhol. This is when the role of the artist turned into being a businessman and the whole art world entered the field of marketing. Ever since being an artist had acquired a meaning that it had never had in history before. And the art community as a whole was largely unreflective about this obvious change. Only one artist from the older school even had the integrity to mention it:

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialised to such a degree that art and everything relating to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our e-poch. Art in these times has probably reached one of it’s lowest points ever in history, probably even lower than in the late 18th century, when there was no great art but only frivolity. Art in the 20th century has become to a similar function as a mere entertainment.

Marcel Duchamp

In northern Europa what it meant to be an artist was to fill out endless grant applications (or to pay for someone to fill them out for you) and going the route of middle class security. No more taking any risks. And yet everyone has always known that the middle class solution was the most cowardly- it was always better to be either rich or even poor- but never middle class. And it is the poverty of middle class aesthetics that rule the art world these days, along with its flimsy ideals.

In the evening he went with several Russians to the sea. It was glowing crystal blue. He took his shoes off and walked into the cold waters, a large black dog splashing circles all about him. While they were there they visited some artists who lived in incredible poverty. A world of broken wooden houses and concrete housing estates. For him, this was the real pornography.

He returned back to Riga in the night, but something special happened to him for a moment. He met a girl named Beta. It was a chance meeting and only lasted a few minutes, but he recognised her immediately (in the poetic sense). Her dark shiny eyes, her wild bleached hair. She couldn’t speak any English, which kept their contact almost childlike.

She took him by the hand, and she laid her head on his lap. They laughed together, and he realised that he loved her, even if just for a moment. A spark in the endless cold night of his existence.
But why was he so attracted to these mad types, so bright in such a dark way?
Another girl where everything would obviously be temporary, everything impossible to build upon.

Although he had a side which was undoubtedly rational, he was still drawn in his heart to mystery. That was why he would never fit into any system and why he felt such a connection to these crazy types. But why was he unable to find anyone like himself, who was able to clutch both these sides at once, without falling off into either one? And there was something else he realised with Beta. That something inside him yearned for this world of no language, a world beyond any steady form. That was probably why he was travelling at the moment. To reach the magical properties of travelling.

He felt that language simplified communication while it damaged the transmitter. In one way it was perfect. In another way it was a perfect disaster.

The windows of the staircase in his apartment in Riga were so blackened by coal dust that even the brightest sunlight allowed only a dim gold-brown circle of an image to filter through. It was like looking out into the last century.

* * *

Let’s pause here in this “narrative” to consider the main character once again. What name should he be given, absurdly, shortly before these pages close? He could be called Sam or Nico or Aesaeus. But for the sake of our earlier reflections, let’s call him Pierre.

And with what nationality shall we christen him? Russian? French? African? Anything would be a lie because it would automatically put him in a false milieu and forge a false alliance. It’s better to keep him simply a foreigner- a witness or a terrorist, but a foreigner. It’s more vague perhaps, but it is also more exact. And age? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he is 52.

One thing that can be said about him to make him more comprehensible is that he was irreverent. But this irreverence was based upon a severe and crystallised reverence, much like an anarchist is not someone who is lawless (as many claim), but is someone who is so full of internal laws that he cannot obey the laws of others. The only person that can follow the laws of society is someone who, in fact, carries no sacred laws within.
Another thing. Whereas most people were condemned to either guilt (for what they did do), or regrets (for what they didn’t do), he was carefully guiding himself between both sides of this dichotomy.
So let’s get back to this withered branch of a story.

In the morning he spent a few hours drawing and staying warm in the Russian orthodox cathedral. As he left the cathedral there was a little old man playing his accordion on the bridge, singing and yelping like a beaten doggie.

He had breakfast in a dreadfully cheerful creperie in the city centre. Nothing could be more depressing. It’s when you are alone in the world that the world opens itself for what it really is. He longed for his industrial cafeteria that he normally went to. Does this seem negative? He wasn’t one for cheap solutions. Besides, at this moment he was still eating his suffering over his lost muse. He believed he had to eat this unbelievable shit of love in order to get rid of it. One of the reasons why this world was such an intercontinental mess was that it never tried to really solve its problems, but merely bandage them over as easy as possible. In this sense many people eat without shitting. They just look the other way and try to forget, and the shit just builds up inside them.

Some had accused him of a lack of will and said that he was indecisive, because he left most decisions up to others. But in reality he wasn’t afraid of making decisions. It was just that he actually couldn’t care less about 95 % of what this world had to offer. What difference did it make to him what bar they went to, or what kind of tea he drank? In the scope of his life these were all insignificant details. For him all that was important was a good glass of wine, fucking, someone intelligent to share a few words with, a cigarette once and awhile, and his creativity.

But when something approached the arena of his self-styled ethics, he never budged. And if someone tried to persuade him to leave himself, they would find it was as difficult as pulling a tooth.

It was interesting that the Latvian language didn’t have any connection to any other European language. It only had similarities, strangely enough, with Sanskrit.
It was a strange country torn between Scandinavia and the Orient. A land which is at the mercy of the wind. Suddenly the weather switched from late autumn to blistering hot summer.

Later that night he was walking down the Caka iela, past the prostitutes, and he felt his hunger grow. He needed to fuck again, to touch and be touched. But then suddenly it all became a weird mix, a kind of cultural nausea, as it always does in this fucked-up society. It happened when he came across an old woman in utter poverty living in the streets. Her face black with soot, she paced in circles trying to keep warm.

In the morning he went out to his favourite cafe, which could barely be called a cafe, lacking any of the charm necessary to function under the illusion of commerce. My God, how could anyone drag themselves here each morning and then go to work in some dreary shit-hole afterwards? There he had breakfast with an old woman who had lavender hair and a businessman who looked like a pig drained of all its blood.

It was a terrible day, raining endlessly. He walked through all of it. He went to the open market which was a swamp, he walked the streets alone. He especially liked the wooden houses, appearing as if they had suddenly come out of the set of some cowboy film. The Jugendstijl gates, the huge piercing faces mounted on the sides of buildings, staring down like guardians of the past. The hand painted cinema posters. The shops which were open all night. It rained all night long, through all of it. He walked until he couldn’t walk anymore, and then he had to walk back. He came back to his building around three in the morning, climbing the wet and rotting art-deco staircase with its distorted shadows thrown up against the walls like the mise-en-scene of some German expressionist film from the 20s.

While he was walking down the street the next day a Latvian grabbed him wildly and asked him, “Quick, do you have an aim in life?” It was a good question, because most people don’t. He answered instantly. “To write poetry and to find someone to love.”

During the nights he would walk the streets of the old town, listening to Latvian rock music. He was drinking bottles of beer on the street corners, but of course he would never meet a girl on the street. Girls want to meet guys with money, the guys in the bars.

Once in the middle of the night he found a guy, blind drunk, laying in the street. Someone went up and slapped him hard to see if he was still alive. The guy responded with a very faint moan. People just left him. The guy was wearing a designer‘s suit, and the stranger was surprised that nobody went for his wallet.

Here there was no history as it is known in the west. Here history was always entangled with mystery and inexplicable events. Stories of astrological clock-makers going blind, monks that were bricked up alive behind church walls, black cats and so forth were blended in with historical data. This was the case to such an extent that a so-called factual history of causes and effects would now be impossible to reconstruct.

The toilet in his apartment was the most brutal he had ever witnessed. The pipes were all held together with wet scotch tape and the walls seemed like they had been painted with shit.

In the morning he put on his vest and parted his hair, like some dinosaur.

The next day was grey. When it came to the time of departure everyone suddenly became concerned about his welfare. They gave him address and telephone numbers to call in Riga if things went bad. In fact he wasn’t feeling the best at this moment. The vodka ritual of the night before had given him the distinct feeling that his head had been pulled off and replaced incorrectly.

He got into the Mercedes with one Dutchman and the Russian driver. For the Dutchman the Slavic show of feelings and companionship was too much. He confessed to the stranger that he was afraid of all the emotions. He was almost shaking. It was unknown territory for the northern European pale-ass. At this moment he understood the irony, that in fact, those who build walls out of fear can function much better in this society than he ever could. In the end it was always the same conclusion though: he was a real shit.

As they approached Riga the driver decided that he wanted to go to a banya. They pulled up to a harbour where there was a black banya- which meant that it was one in the old Russian style. The air by the river was clear and fresh. Back to the shimmering cry of seagulls. Standing at the edge of the docks the seagulls swirled all around him.

The banya was an ancient exotic ritual which bordered on masochism. Red hot stones which carefully rip away the layers of the world. It was here that men of all different backgrounds could meet as equals, all of society and its laws are suspended temporarily in this sweat lodge. There was a mix of criminals (with their huge tattoos), businessmen (with their lack of charisma), workers (with their muscles) and Mafia types (with their big golden chains).

They said the ritual was developed to move the blood, and it included self-flagellation with birch and oak branches. They would all of a sudden start whipping themselves into a frenzy, the branches burning like flames in the ultra hot sauna.

When they were finished the three of them were totally broken, left in a kind of daze where it was even difficult to utter a single word. Of course they finished the entire ritual with a large glass of vodka.

* * *

Let us think about tears for a moment. The three months he had lived in Berlin were filled with tears. Whenever anyone spoke to him about some problem in their life the tears would be unleashed. Anytime he thought of his lost love the tears would also flow. Therefore tears would automatically and unpredictably well up and spill from his gray-green eyes. It didn’t matter where. Any place where he was quiet and not moving much- on a park bench, in a cafe, on the metro, in the kitchen of a friend. At these moments he felt he understood how much suffering there was in this world. It was a world of tears.

And this awareness was perhaps even accelerated by the stony urban environment of Berlin, where all emotions seemed to have a tendency to ricochet rather than disperse. But he had felt good about the advent of this almost constant stream of tears. It felt like tears were pouring out of his eyes from all corners of existence.
He studied and wrote at his small table. Anton would often come in and sit at his own writing desk and also study his books silently. There were actually very few things which our stranger considered holy, but the acute moments of creativity was one of them.

The landscape was shifting with shadow and light.

A Caligula of the heart faces me
An endless beach of untouched paper
This is her madness.

A cosmic power is unharnessed
In a blaze of meditation
Footprints of memories soon erased
Stone the colour of thought.

A week went by like this, with endless vodka rituals, with herring and rye bread, with swimming in lakes, with bright sunsets and swaying apple trees. In the early evenings when they were talking at the table outside and it started to rain, no one would budge. They would stay until it became unbearable and then slowly make their way inside.

Here it seemed to him that everything was a ritual to open up pure communication- a wild communication of the soul. What was important for him, and what was disappearing from the face of the western world, was the integrity of the spirit. All that was left in the West was a mockery, pathetic when held up to the light.
He thought about these things and watched the noble face of the old man by the light of the fire. The greatest effect of modernisation, he continued to observe, was the result of body-capitalism: the confiscation of the blood. In this way the individual lost his own sovereignty and inheritance.

At the end of this week was the final all-night vodka ritual. When at one point Anton was leaving to go to sleep he said something in Latvian. The others at the campfire jeered “Ja, ja- Heil Hitler!”

The next morning he awoke before anyone else. He got dressed and parted the curtains. It was a stormy vision out there with the trees being tossed wildly.
“I’m an idiot” he mumbled to himself. He remembered the woman he loved, a love which was impossible. Just as impossible as the impossibility of war breaking out here at this very moment, so settled by calmness and routine.

He lit a cigarette, alone in his barren wood and stone room. He felt that he had finally started to breath again.

Some people smoke to forget and disconnect, to build walls around themselves. He smoked rather as a kind of meditation, a ritual of creation. Also to brush wings with death of course, which was necessary for any stirring of creation. The sovereign passage of fire.

Outside he noticed Anton walking through the wheat fields with his pitchfork and high rubber boots. That old Nazi had a kind of gallant beauty about him. His hair was a wispy silver and his eyes a watery blue. He moved slowly, but with a steady determination. Even at his age he was still always busy working on something- making the fire stove, cleaning the kitchen, making jam, picking apples from the trees.

For the stranger, this journey was a stripping away process.

After an hour had passed, he heard noises from the kitchen. He went outside and walked around the house. The others were busy setting the wooden table under the apple tree. There were bowels of berries, bread, butter and a huge jar of fresh cream.

He looked around at the fields. The sun had come out and ignited the landscape.

Everyone sat down and the others spoke in Latvian, Russian and broken English. They drank tea made of fresh white blossoms. There was a cool breeze in the air. A cock was crowing in the distance. He studied the countryside with musement.

Here forms were gentle on the eye. Most forms were composed of curves, and they were changing shape. The hilly landscape, the swaying trees, the clouds- all changed their outline subtly. In other words, they interacted. This was shocking having just come from Berlin where all lines were straight and hard, and any movement had meaning only in terms of ballistics.

For him, this countryside educated the eye with its openness. The city, on the other hand, controlled the eye with utter brutality. It was a system built upon attraction and lack, both feeding off each other- and those rigid lines drove straight into the heart, killing the soul through routine. Piero della Francesca would never have painted the works he did if he had lived in a sewer like Berlin, that was clear.

Everything was different here. Very few man-made images, and if there were some they were unbelievably rough soviet-style designs. The salt was raw. The kitchen only had a cast-iron wood stove in it. Many things reminded him of his childhood- the toilet outside, the hay in the barn, the broken plaster on the walls, the dampness which permeated everything.

At night the stars had returned to him. In the early mornings he had misty landscapes with stone farmhouses and countless hills.

One morning he was sitting reading and taking notes. The old Nazi came up and took him by the arm and led him to his room. He then set up a small table with a white tablecloth and told the stranger, in German, to work at this table. “Arbeiten Sie bitte.”

Once alone, the stranger looked at the walls of Anton’s room. A poster of a racing driver. A photograph of a wolf. A few old black and white photographs of children. A vase of flowers and a small portable radio. In the corner there was a statue of a bear with a top hat. Contrary to what he would have expected deep in the countryside, there was a great respect for writing here.

Drawing and painting not as expressions of creativity, but as desperate attempts to connect with the real world.

By the fireside the four all sang criminal songs and drank a lot of vodka and told stories under the influence of the moon.

Skiraphorion leaned over to him at one point, his face silhouetted in the flickering glow of the flames. He said with a heavy Russian accent: “Listen. Amerika, OK. Two hundred years. Two hundred years old. Yes. But also two hundred years of perversion! They destroy all the Indians. Look at the people that went there. Fifty percent criminals, thirty percent troublemakers and twenty percent religious fanatics.”

He knew that Skiraphorion was right. Something had happened in Amerika which had changed the face of the world. For example, when he had travelled to Portugal the previous summer he could see a deep relation between the people there and their land. He could see that those people had come out of that landscape.

But Amerika was something quite else. In Amerika one had the distinct and unsettling sensation that here was a country where the indigenous population had been exterminated and that a bunch of foreigners, without any understanding of the land, came in and started building cities everywhere without any sensitivity.

But here, as he sat by the fire, all he needed was a house built of old gray wood, some bread, sausages and vodka. No need for the complications, and therefore no need for the possibilities of the West. He knew that Europa was entering a similar phase as had occurred in Amerika, in that it was breaking with its history in order to gain some vague notion of freedom. And like the system which developed in Amerika, which had been composed of so many nationalities but made blind by an unified destruction of culture, so Europa had made a similar choice- to collectively unify their production. This was not a cultural revolution, it was a business revolution. Europa was falling apart as it was coming together.

As he looked at the moon, with the flames of the fire roaring beneath it, he thought of Ezra Pound. Pound thought he had the chance to escape Amerika, and took an opportunity to run away to Italy. He went to Italy because of the culture and its Mediterranean mythology. But when he arrived he found, already in the 1920s, a desecration of the ethnic Italian tradition and a move towards an Amerikanisation of lifestyle and production. As a result Pound joined up with the fascists, which he felt was the only real force powerful enough to stop the dreadful eclipse. Interestingly enough, 30 years later the anti-fascist filmmaker Pasolini came to precisely the same conclusion, despite the fact that he was coming from the opposite political position. His last film Salo, which was a very coded film and therefore often misunderstood, was about the degeneration of Italian youth and the breakdown of Italian heritage through consumerism, the fascism of desire.

Amerikans, who treat Europa as a kind of monumental Disneyland, can never understand the amount of destruction that had taken place in such a short amount of time. And not only that, but even the new generations of Europeans, enchan-ted by the hallucinations of the mass media and technology, could no longer comprehend this wicked turn of events.