..The ultraleft poets, former readers of Tiqqun (turned towards moralism, though occasionally they would still say liberals, put a bullet in your head), were bitching about a cringe and morbid poem written by a Seattle doctor about his “friend” the maintenance man, his “friend” Juan, dead of Covid on the couch before he was even fifty: a necropolitical dirge for the working class, a poem written to bury, not to praise, the working class, etc. The good doctor knew enough to ask what right have I to write this poem? But this only infuriated the ultraleft poets more. As did the admittedly offensive and aesthetically appalling image contained in the line I who will not see him in his uniform of ashes (the doctor must have thought he was channeling Paul Celan), which made me wonder if the doctor thought janitors are buried in their uniforms, condemned to the pyre in their subordinate social role. The ultraleft poets were not happy with this poem. They asked when one has the right, ethically, to mourn, in a poem, another over whom one holds power in a hierarchical relationship. I thought it must be tiring to live this way, to create art this way. Though the ultraleft poets, former readers of Tiqqun and prophets of the streets, having seen many of their tenured comrades canceled for various major and lesser sex crimes, didn’t really write poetry anymore, to tell the truth. Pretty much all art and politics, on the left, had been swallowed up by the most dreary and tautological dogmatism without anyone really noticing. They went on each other’s soporific podcasts where they interviewed each other about books no one read or could even afford, put out by academic presses, and their vanguardist misanthropy (though they would never consider themselves vanguardists) had reached insufferable proportions, they were repeating all the errors of the sixties and seventies without any of the bombs or the fun, the only interesting product of the times having been the FBI performance art project Black Hammer with their literal clown antics and their rants against the colonizer Anne Frank. But I’m tired of the recognition of the good and the leftist superego. I want to go back to what the soft animal body desires, to poems written by piss-drinkers and sex maniacs, by people who actually live in the street, by broken boys, sadist hermaphrodites, whole manifestos proclaiming the death of mirrors and linear time, whole novels written under the influence of ketamine and estrogen, etc.
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Dzokhar: Who really holds power, at the end of the day? Did these neo-communists swallow the Foucauldian pessimism after all? Are you speaking about me or am I speaking about you? Are you speaking me or am I speaking you? Etc. Life is a sex dream. Death is a dream of sex, is dreamt by sex. Sex is a dream, dying. From what ashes, woman, will you rise? What sickness? Listen, the snow is falling everywhere, between your bed and mine, between your head and my mind…
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…Where, and with whom, did I smoke al nabti al-murrah, the bitter crop, as the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon call tobacco: poor farmers stuck in the addictive ecologies of capitalism and war, sustained and enchained by those ecologies, as we all are, as we’ve all been for at least half a millennium, and maybe more? I smoked Cedars, Lebanese cigarettes, while reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish in K’s dormroom in Shatila while K worked out some last logistical stuff with his boss, a former PFLP Marxist guerrilla, at his U.N. job, which he was leaving, while for some reason a Swedish retiree couple who considered themselves champions of the Palestinian cause tried to draw me into a discussion about the decline of Palestinian virtue, fighting spirit, etc, all the Palestinians cared about now was Islam and drugs, the men were brutes, it just wasn’t the same anymore, etc. K and I smoked the same brand of cigarettes in the bougie Beirut apartment of his friend Mahmoud, an avuncular man in his early seventies with a kind and mischievous spirit, who broke out his bottles of expensive foreign scotch and said we could be naughty and smoke inside the apartment while his wife was away at a meeting of the Lebanese Communist Party, since reduced to a kind of social club for little old ladies, though when she came home she scowled at all of us. K and I smoked tobacco mixed with hashish on the hashish farm of a Hezbollah narco-patriarch in the Beqaa Valley, a kind of Hezbollah Tony Soprano, with the same charm and outlandish appetite and sad eyes, and his younger cousin, who could drive an off-road vehicle, shoot a bird out of the air with an AK-47, and smoke a joint, all at once, without breaking a sweat, as if through a kind of acrobat anamnesis. I smoked cigarettes while K smoked his pipe overlooking the ruins of Balbec and listening to the sounds of artillery fire from the Syrian Civil War echoing over the Anti-Lebanon mountains, as if the twentieth century had never happened, as if the horrors of the nineteenth and the twenty-first century (the penultimate century) had been fused into a strange planet, into one dusty mirage. We lit cigarettes after we were released from a surreal and arbitrary detention at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, shortly after the coup, thinking we were going to enter the ranks of the disappeared. I smoked cigarettes and K smoked his pipe on our rooftop hostel in Cairo, discussing the tragifarcical fate of Arab Marxism over a breakfast of shakshuka sandwiches and instant coffee. I smoked Paraguayan cigarettes in Buenos Aires, the harshest, cheapest, and most carcinogenic cigarettes in the world. Mario and I would go through three or four packs a day together on the patio beneath the rose bush, taking trips back and forth to the chino or the kiosco for another pack and a few more bottles of Quilmes. And Dani, when she was in Buenos Aires with us, visiting from Chile, I can’t picture without a cigarette in her hand: her beauty is imprinted with the image of her smoking, for me, indelibly, her smile shrouded in an exhalation of smoke, her enigmatic and poetic speech, the speech of an insomniac dreamer, too, coming in between long quiet drags, her melancholy gaze a smoker’s gaze, etc. R and I always smoked together outside movie theaters, before and after. Isabella and I smoked together over homemade margaritas on my backsteps and after bouts of violent sex. Did I start smoking Newports in emulation of V, thinking in those early days that she embodied a dangerous depressive sexiness, even as I was starting to date R, her best friend? I really can’t remember. R still smokes Newports, though, even as they’ve become nearly impossible to find in California. What did R smoke when we first met? We smoked together all throughout the day and night that first year, inseparable as we were. I chainsmoked Newports in a U-Haul from Chicago to Boston by way of Pittsburgh with K and V and only sometimes managed to successfully eject them from the window. I smoked Newports and chugged sugar free Red Bull in a parking lot at four AM outside Pittsburgh while K and V slept in the UHaul, trying to stay awake for my leg of the journey. An indescribable sadness and horniness came over me. When I smoked my first cigarette at the age of thirteen, in my room at night, with the window open (an unsuccessful gambit), I experienced an instantaneous and almost sociopathic erection. Maya smoked when she lived at my place in the throes of one of her relapses, going in and out during her sleepless nights and often letting my cat escape, so that we’d both have to go hunting for her in the middle of the night. By then I’d mostly lost my taste for cigarettes. I started to lose my taste for them around 2019, getting down to three or four a day, listlessly, without trying, whereas previously I’d always smoked at least a pack a day from the age of sixteen onwards. In rehab during the summer of 2019 my smoking picked back up again, as I smoked from morning to night without pause. I smoked with Jay, probably my only real friend there, a heroin addict and founder of several pretty famous Bay Area hardcore bands, who died of an overdose in the early days of the pandemic. I smoked with Tamara, a beautiful and tragic heroin addict with face tattoos (I got kicked out for fucking her on the smoking patio after lights out). I smoked with the sad queer boy who liked the Beatles too much, discovering his homosexuality, a boy I could definitely say was too weak for this world, though I wouldn’t say that about many people, maybe about anyone but him. I smoked with the handsome and rogueish schizo from Alaska. I didn’t smoke with the pathological liar hedge fund manager with homicidal rage and an overly virtuous self-image who claimed to be tortured and psychologically ruined by his wife, who was too hot for him, according to everyone who saw her, and a shamaness, which he thought meant she was nothing but a drug dealer, he had various stories about her beating their autistic son, but I began to think that it was him beating the kid, or that they were both beating the kid, it was hard to tell. All told I smoked for about twenty years, from the age of sixteen until my thirty-sixth birthday. My HRT doctor told me I had to quit and by then I didn’t even like smoking, so I did. It wasn’t hard for me, but for my brother, whom I got addicted, it was hell-on-earth. In high school I smoked with the antiracist punks and probably with some of the racist punks, too. I smoked with pretty much everyone I ever fucked and I wondered if romantic and sexual anhedonia wouldn’t follow my quitting. It seemed likely. I smoked with B– when I was cheating on R during our first year together, during that impossibly cold winter in Somerville, a lunar cold. She had a hacking cough that winter and in fact during most of the time I knew her. Her apartment reeked of rabbit shit (a smell I actually like, associating it with certain women from my past) and her sisters were always crashing there, one pregnant and the other addicted to heroin, so we fucked on an old mattress in a freezing shed. I smoked not only at Balbec but at the pyramids of Teotihuacan and Giza, where I rode a horse for the first time, too, a dying horse, shitting constantly, half-starved in the economic downturn following the coup (our other option was a camel, which K, mindful of Orientalist absurdities, quickly turned down). I chainsmoked with my Slovenian cousins by Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj, the most beautiful lakes in the world, in my opinion, and I think a lot about the sheepish and rakish way my cousin Marko would ask for a cigarette. I like giving people cigarettes, especially people who mooch cigarettes. I like taking one from someone else’s pack. I like the shivering way fingers touch when you’re sharing a cigarette with someone you haven’t fucked yet, but you’re going to fuck, and that’s the moment you both know for sure. I don’t like how I don’t see my friends anymore and how I connect that obscurely to the fact that I no longer smoke. But I don’t want to smoke, and I don’t want to see my friends. When I was seventeen I was beaten up by British skinheads at a bar outside Heathrow Airport because one of them said I smoked like a homosexual (before they beat me up, one of them showed me porn on his phone of a woman fucking a horse, and I don’t know how the two events connect to one another). I flew back the next morning hungover and with a pounding headache. Our first week in Santiago R and I met a bunch of cuico rich kids at a bar in the city center and we ended up at a strip club with them. One of the kids, whose daddy had been high up in the Pinochet regime, told me, you know, if I had smoked the way you do at school, they would have kicked my ass. Well, I said, do you want to fight? No, I’m just saying, he said, that they would have kicked my ass. I got in his face. And, how about you?, I said. Do you have a problem with the way I smoke, hijo de puta? I blew smoke in his face. I was drunk. There’s no problem, he said, probably thinking I was crazy, or not knowing if I was crazy, which at that moment I was, I would have done anything, I suppose to avenge the beating at the hands of the British skinheads, or the victims of Pinochet. I was smoking when I read Bolaño for the first time, Savage Detectives, on some bleachers in Oakland in 2010, right after I’d broken up with Marianne, numb, free, before the heartbreak set in. I read all of Bolaño that year in a frigid house in Berkeley as I succumbed to the worst period of alcoholism of my life (I also read Beckett, and Isaac Babel, and Thomas Bernhard, and other apocalyptic melancholics whose names began with B). I smoked with my grandma, who at first didn’t approve, but then it became a ritual for us. She got hooked by my grandfather, who used to be a prodigious and messy smoker, an English professor who chainsmoked in his seminars. He quit one day like it was the easiest thing in the world, but she never could, and that summed up the difference in their personalities. I think he quit before I was born, or actually, shortly thereafter, because my mom used to tell me stories about how he was a messy smoker, like me, how they had to keep him away from me as a baby while he was smoking, because he would ash all over me. I was going out to smoke with my grandma at a lunch in Portland, Maine, when she tripped over the step that led to the booth and broke her hip. I have never seen a human, or any animal for that matter, in such pure, excruciating pain. That same weekend my brother had his two front teeth knocked out by a bouncer at a strip club in Montreal, and the family seemed on the point of collapse, which in fact it was. I still smoke with my grandma’s ghost, her unquietghost, in the sepulchral gloom of my dreams. I’m still smoking in my memory, in the memory of my lost and cursed youth, in the cancerous memory of my cells, in my lungs and my heart, in the ashes of this life, this bitter life.
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…Maya and I were discussing a dude on fetlife, Slave2YourAss69, a 24/7 toilet slave seeking a Mistress, who listed his interests as: Cryptozoology, the paranormal, the occult, folklore, Mythology, ancient and medieval history and re-enactment, Thelema, ceremonial magick, Enochian, goetia, grimoires, the unexplained, theoretical physics, strange geometry, Art Nouveau, alchemy, mad science, theurgy, thaumaturgy, tarot, shamanism, yoga, tantra,vamacara, qi gong, nei gong, Mo Pai, dao yin, nei dan, survivalism, permaculture, forestgardening, homesteading, sustainability, self-reliance, self-defense, individual liberty and personal responsibility, paleo/primal nutrition, powerlifting, superfunctional training, Wim Hof Method, human performance, vigilantism, ancient technology, Taoist thought, the Celtic Fairy-Faith, the Merovingian Mythos, Grail Myths, Military History, spycraft, asymmetrical warfare, JRR Tolkien, Egdar Rice Burroughs. Robert E. Howard, HP Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley, Osho, Julius Evola, Gurdjief , Austin Osman Spare, Savitri Devi, Ted Kaczynski, Daniel Quinn, Edward Abbey, Pentti Linkola, Norman Lowell, John Keel, Jacques Vallee, Karl Edward Wagner, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Heinlein, Robert Anton Wilson, Sun Ra…
…Pretty much every one of those things interests me, too, Maya said, and yet this guy sounds exhausting and not fun at all. You couldn’t pay me enough to shit in his mouth, I said.