“Russia’s lungs
blow the wind
of social revolution
in our direction.
Literary dick gropers
will understand nothing”
–– Manuel Maples Arce
I
The first revolutionary act that people from the commune of Paris did in 1871 was to
break all the clocks in the city. That act triggered the possibility for revolutionaries to go
beyond all the limits that reality imposes upon us. Centuries before, the troubadour poets,
the “Knights of Joyful Knowledge”, met together once a year to find a new word or
neologism in the manner of an antidote for words that limited the freedom of the people.
One of them was the word “mors” (dead). The poet who was chosen for that task, Truc
Malec, returned the next year to propose to the other poets of the word “amors” (love or
specifically “not dead”), inventing a new way to go beyond the limits of human beings.
Such acts are examples of what we can do in terms of politically poetic acts, for they
open up the borders of reality to bring more freedom to the people.
Freedom, especially in this modern age, always comes at a price. Its force is all the more
apparent. Walter Benjamin, at the beginning of the crisis of the 1930s, wrote of the need
for a study of “esoteric poetry” and its “secret cargo”. His wager was that the forces of
the crisis would enable such a study to reveal the rational kernel of poetic mysticism.
“We penetrate the mystery only to the degree we recognize it in the everyday world”, he
claimed, “and perceive the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday”. The
“impenetrable” exists in two aspects: the invisible lives of the workers, and the invisible workings of capital itself, only partially expressed in the lives of the very rich. Part of the
intellectual struggle is to grasp these two “mysteries” in the mind at the same time, and to
force into view their destructive unity.
II
Poetry cannot do this alone, but it has its own way of contributing to the task. René
Ménil, publishing alongside Aimé Césaire in Tropiques––an anti-fascist journal disguised
as a magazine for poetry––wrote that “at every moment the poet is unknowingly playing
with the solution to all human problems. It is no longer appropriate for poets to play
childishly with their magical wealth; instead, they should criticize the poetic material
with the aim of extracting the pure formulas for action”. To extract this magical wealth
means that poetry’s intensities can come to match, and occupy the intensity of money.
Wealth as Hades, as the accumulated dead labour and sensory reality of history, as the
law that fixes reality as conflict, as the “silence at the top of our screams” that become
audible with the rational clarity of what Hölderlin called “the eccentric orbit of the
dead”: an alignment of the planets, the negation of the irrational din of capital itself.
III
The poet is the one who is supposed to know how to deal with the transformation of
things—they are the one who has to be trained, all their life, into the guerilla state of the
“derangement of the senses” (as Rimbaud said)—and in that way they must take care of
the power of capability of the creation of new ideas and explore constantly the
possibilities for producing freedom in the world. The poet can connect things in a manner
that proves the other can complete the self; the existence of oneself is nothing without the
other, because the distance of the other one can show us a hidden part that we cannot see
by ourselves.
IV
The principal enemies of freedom and the mutation of the world were, for Surrealists:
family, nation and religion. They used to link Marx, Fourier, Freud and Rimbaud to
propose the necessity of changing the world. Those concepts are now the basis of every
liberal. The fixed aspects of those things do not allow us the possibility to grow and feel
the power of hidden marvelous destinies, and the combat against fixed things is an old struggle of poetry. Actually, poets are engaged in the constant militant “discrepancy”
from reality to keep ourselves free from capitalist misery and from being governed by
people who only consider the singularity of human beings as a medium to achieve the
accumulation of goods and not as a goal in itself. If the poet is able to have the courage to
keep themselves free from it in many ways, then they will be able to return to reality to
produce new articulations of beauty, and new symbols of transformation.
V
But we are still not done with this world. There is still jealousy, stupidity, the desire to be
someone, to be recognized... the desire to be worth something. And worse, the need for
authority (other than that which we have over ourselves). These are the ruins the old
world has left within us and which remain to be demolished. Under certain lights, our fall
sometimes feels like a decline. Where are we going? There are the Cathares (the ‘heretic’
Christian) who hate husbands more than lovers. There are the Gnostics who find more
charm in the orgy than in solitary coupling. There is the Italian bishop in the 15th century
who was excommunicated for his belief that any woman refusing her body to a man who
asked for it in the name of charity... was a sinner––much like Indonesian infotainment
without the excommunication.
There are the “socialites”––socio-morphically oriented philistines: people occupied with
consumerism, appropriation of property and propriety and with exhibitionistic secretion
of social posing, those who are taking their high place in the social hierarchy much too
seriously. These people with pathological fear of social bottom as a condition of being
unprotected and denuded treat social hierarchy as a kind of peculiar armor. They are
hierarchical freaks of human social nature.
There are the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois, the hipsters and (God forbid) the proto-
hipsters (the bona fides of our age) who live in houses and urban themed clubs, and
devoted their extreme idleness to visiting each other. There are the self-proclaimed Kyais
who insist that for the perfect ones, sin no longer exists. They call each other brothers and
sisters and their Valentine’s Day is not a celebration of the couple but the day when a
married man or woman can go with whomever he or she wants.
“What about Indonesian poets and artists?”
What about them?
At this stage, the majority of Indonesian poets and artists deal only with their ego and try
to put themselves inside reality without criticism, and to win lots of money and prizes.
They are enslaved by their own personal ego (the return of the New Master); to achieve a
mission commanded by their own ego, family, country or petty ideas of success. We have
forgotten that we are always linked and connected to the multiple resonances of things,
and in that way we cannot forget the destiny of human beings, animals, natures, stars and great transparent. We know that collective ideas can go further than individual ones. One
of the topmost struggles in inner life is that between reality and desire, and as such we
must need to create new spaces into reality to bring life to singular desires, individuals
and collectives. We do not allow repression of instincts, nor do we allow any oppression
of freedom, but instead we are compelled to create spaces where resonances of untried
analogies could occur. To combat the control that the newspapers, television and mass
communication have over us, all of them absolutely under the political and business
power control. We must display to the world that another kind of life is possible.
Now we are left with the ‘metropolis’, appropriating what cannot be appropriated,
pretending to ignore perdition, playing the man, the woman, the husband, the wife, the
lover... playing the couple... keeping busy. Accommodating oneself with the utmost
seriousness to the most painful of infantilisms. Forgetting in a debauchery of feelings the
cynicism to which life in the metropolis condemns us. And talking about love, again and
forever, after so many break-ups. Those who say that another world is possible and who
do not bring with them a sentimental education other than that of novels and television
deserve to be spat in the face.
*****
For someone who wants to cultivate themselves it is enough to be capable of carefree
expression. But a poet who possesses love for their country and a sensibility of their time
must get out of the circle of their small ‘I’ and enter realistic society, experience the life
of the large ‘I’, sing praise to truth and justice, denounce hypocrisy and evil, utter a lion’s
roar, and be a firm rock in midstream.
A militant poet is one who breathes militancy and who spells struggle in every blot of
ink, or in every tap of the keyboard. We do not encourage poetry as slogans, for they are
not, nor are they traditional folk songs and much less pseudo-new poems that sell old
Western stuff as being ‘new’, or poetic verses written in Melayu style which are in
essence old. We consciously strive for the New. But the New of militant poetry is
certainly not just doing something new in order to be different. Regarding the Indonesian
poetic tradition, we adopt a cautious attitude of rejection while simultaneously carrying
on. We must explore the principles of what makes militant poetry, militant.
Future Collective
6 June 2015
