Martin Bakero: Militancy of Poets

The first revolutionary action that people from the commune of Paris did in 1871, was to break all the clocks of the city. That action engaged the possibility to 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 people. One of them was the word “mors” (dead), the poet who were chose for that task, Truc Malec, returns the next year to propose to the poets of Trobar Clus the word “amors” (love or specifically “not dead”), inventing a new way to go beyond the limits of the human being. Those actions are examples of what we can do in terms of politically poetic actions. Open the borders of reality to bring more freedom to people.

Go beyond time. We must create associations with scientists, mystics, farmers, people who know how to work with materials, and then imagine new connexions of things in the world. To emancipate people from the slave condition of “meaning”. Words, syllables, whispers, colours, sounds...which will open poetry from its exclusively communicational function, to stop merely making sense so as to develop the experience of a more playful state of liberation of the mind and the flesh: to unchain the tongue of the signification system, in order to open the atom-sparks of joy.

The poet is the one who is supposed to know how to deal with the transformation of things, he is that one who has to be trained, all his life, into the guerrilla state of “déreglement de tous les sens” "the derangement of all the senses" (as Rimbaud, Nerval, Hugo, Arnim and Novalis said) and in that way she 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 way to prove that 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 can’t see by ourselves.

The problem of Violence is the selfish accumulation of things only for private property, “Property is theft” says Proudhon, that is the terrible sentence that capitalism gave to us. But it’s the same about the creations or discoveries that poets keep for themselves without sharing them with the people. The poet only produces the half part of the poem, the rest is the reader or the listener. The power of poetry and its capacity to revolutionize and to propose new links between things, could become mere accumulation and a source of unnecessary violence, and of no help to human society, if we don't show collectively, to others, the free associations that traverse us. If we don’t show the way by the way that we poets we break free from the excess of reality. Reality indeed dominated by paranoiacs, politicians and economic speculators.

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 republic. The fixed aspects of those things don’t allow us the possibility to grow and feel the power of hidden marvellous destinies, and the combat against the fixed things is an old struggle of poetry.

Actually poets are engaged with 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 himself free from it in many ways, then he will able to return to reality to produce new symbols, articulations of beauty, symbols of transformation.

During these days the majority of artists deal only with their ego and try to put themselves inside reality without any criticism and to win lots of money and prizes, each one is under the slave position of their own personal ego as a master; to achieve a mission commanded by his or her own family, town or ideas of success. We forgot that we are always linked with all the “pluriverses” and we are 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 now that collective ideas can go farther than single ones. One of the topmost struggles in inner life is that one between reality and desire, and in that way we must need to create new spaces into reality to bring life to singular desires, individuals and collectives. We don’t allow repression of instincts, nor any oppression of freedom, but instead we are compelled to create Spaces where resonances of untried analogies could happen. 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 and we must display to the world that another kind of life is possible.

Like Charles Fourier’s attempts to create a new kind of organization of collective live, by the way of respect for passions, and spontaneous ways to express together those passions and desires. Without repression or mistreating the other. Not by way of adapting people to the idea of work in something that they don’t like, and the alienation that it produces to us. Instead we must propose new ways of organization in the sense of spontaneous associations and desires of the subject and community, to be shared with the others, and where every one could work in joy and freedom about the things that she loves, sharing them, and that will impel collective power. We must also propose new community rituals and awake the poetry of single existence in books or printed paper, to bring them into action. Like the pre-pythagorean poets who heal the cities and propose new solutions to individual and collective problems.

The speculation of poets with theirs own careers, managing only their single individual destiny, is maybe the most dangerous effect of neoliberalism in arts. We have no more anonymous actions of poetry, or collective creations. We accept to pay taxes, to read the newspaper, to watch television, without any action to deconstruct that. How we can continue to accept the discourse that produces fear and makes people more alienated and puts us into false necessity to respect political power, that television, pharmacy and newspapers determine and that tries to confine reality to all their business plans of weapons, invention of terrorism, legal drugs, politicians who bring more fear to the world, and fear is the enemy of joyful knowledge.

If we are not in the way of speculation, we must prepare ourselves to deal with the excess of sensibility of beauty and to learn how to do with it. We must create objects together that can witness and share our perception of things, we need to meet us like here to think together about poetical ideas who can bring happiness and health to the world. We must demand all the money that military, pharmacy and political power brings to weapons and to the dangerous idea of “nation”. We must demand that those resources must become free for collectives, poetic work to change the world, and not only grants to have more celebrity, more public, more money...

We must struggle against the idea of nation, “why should someone who was born some kilometres away from me be my enemy just because we are from different nations?”

Georges Bataille said that if we don't use the energy that grows into us, the product of exchange with the universe, it could transform itself into something that will destroy us and we will pay for that inevitable explosion. The nations of the world expend all their wealth into weapons to kill other humans beings, and that is the sad destiny of that internal entropy. If instead we eliminate the idea of nations and we use that energy for something else, where we poets share the mission of open the mind of the world.

We must build new societies with the same substance of dreams, to propose new political organization farther than democracies or totalitarianisms, poetic revolutions where people can follow their own singularities and at the same time respect and encourage the other ones. Without a master like “state”, who was the principal criticism from Bakunin to Marx. We can meet regularly to think and to create collectivities, because we can go together to more powerful and durable thoughts. To fight old symbolisms and fixed ideas and then propose to create new ones or to return to better ones that brings us more peace and joy, symbols that can develop analogies of apparently opposite things. Like by example in Mexico we must returns to the idea of “the plumed serpent”, more than the symbol of an eagle eating a serpent!

Let's go to break some tvs in front of parliament or the queen’s house.

Don’t read the newspapers, fight the idea of a so ugly reality.

Combat the idea of monotheism that doesn’t allow another gods or demons, why should we have to believe in only one god or one queen? How we could open the space to different kinds of thoughts and not impose on others our own vision of religion or faith.

Create new articulations of time and space. Go beyond the gregorian calendar, adopt new kind of organizations and definitions of time: “the time of a coffee”, “the time of sleep”, the time of making love, the time of reading a book, etcetera...

Create new kinds of association between people where we could be united better than by family who impose to us fixed ideas of ego or success.

We need places for spontaneous improvisations and to group us in troupes of action poets. Free association of human beings from the below to above, not the control of our wills that the State tries to impose upon us.