Today went down for a 'walk' starting at Stratford Station through the Carpenter estate organized by tenants under siege from Newham Council and the Corporate Olympics and felt sick with anger. Remembered that had been on a 'walk' some 6 years ago when the Olympic Committee came to 'see' London and its suitability for the Olympics to say that we didn't want it. We were far too few so that if it was noticed at all on a very cold day, it would have been counter-productive. But we did see what some of its implications would be -existing sports grounds being mashed up and Hackney marshes encroached on. That time it didn't take in the Carpenters estate.
Processes of class-cleansing have taken place in Hackney and been understood as such. Knowing too that Global Sporting Spectaculars in Beijing, Delhi and South Africa have been used to give a boost to this process in other cities and that it is already happening in Brazil where both the next Football World Cup and Olympics are due. Today though could see how comprehensively strategic the process is, how planned and how 'in your face' it is. First thing we see is that down the side walls of two oldish high rises in which people live there are huge (100 feet tall?) and aggressive advertisements for Gillette. This in addition to the ubiquitous Coca Cola and McDonalds flim-flam.
On the estate there are hundreds of empty flats.On the Council waiting list there are 32,000 and there will be many thousand more who can't even get on it. The council say they are unfit and have steel shutters over them. Our tenant guides say this is not true and even if they had not said it we could see it with our own eyes, how in the same two storey blocks some were lived in and others shuttered up. Lots of them. And the function of this we see as we pass one shop that is open, is to MAKE THE PLACE LOOK RUN-DOWN and therefore in need of regeneration.
How sick is this!
Occupied London... For Real
Nature's Nothing
I started out with nothin
and I still got most of it left
Seasick Steve
In the spring of 1836, just one year before his death, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote what is considered his poetic testament, La Ginestra o il Fiore del Deserto (The Broom or the Flower of the Desert). Starting off with the description of a flower of a broom plant growing on the arid slopes of the volcano Vesuvius, Leopardi progressed into a fiery attack against both the delusions of his century – which still believed in a ‘magnificent progressive fate’ – and those who failed to recognize the malignity of Nature towards us humans.
Nature in particular is targeted by Leopardi as the true enemy of humanity.
He has a noble nature
who dares to raise his voice
against our common fate,
and with an honest tongue,
not compromising truth,
admits the evil fate allotted us,
our low and feeble state:
a nature that shows itself
strong and great in suffering,
that does not add to its miseries with fraternal
hatred and anger, things worse
than other evils, blaming mankind
for its sorrows, but places blame
on Her who is truly guilty, who is the mother
of men in bearing them, their stepmother in malice.
They call her enemy:
and consider
the human race
to be united, and ranked against her”1
A Life That Could Contain Every Kind of Greatness: Stirner meets Pessoa
“I belong to a generation – assuming that this generation includes others beside me – that lost its faith in the gods of the old religion as well as in the gods of modern unreligions. I reject Jehovah as I reject Humanity. For me, Christ and progress are both myths from the same world. I don’t believe in the Virgin Mary, and I don’t believe in electricity.”[1]
“Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.”[2]
These opening words are part of the literary legacy of a man that never existed, the Baron of Teive. One of the several lifetime incarnations of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the Baron of Teive is possibly his most dangerous heteronym. In his book The Education of the Stoic, the fictional Baron of Teive collects the last thoughts of a life that has come to an end, crashing against the willful edge of suicide.
“Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell. [...] These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition.”[3]
Il Presidente della Repubblica delle Idee
In un'intervista con Adam Mitchnik pubblicata qualche giorno fa dal quotidiano la Repubblica il presidente Napolitano ammette di essere stato dalla parte dei carri armati sovietici che invasero Budapest uccidendo gli operai insorti nel 1956. Potremmo aggiungere che il presidente Napolitano, in quanto dirigente del Partito comunista italiano negli anni dello stalinismo, ha pensato che fosse giusto sterminare i kulaki, internare i dissidenti politici, eliminare gli anarchici e i trotzkisti e così via assassinando.
Ma era giovane. Poi è venuta la primavera di Praga e Giorgio Napolitano ha capito che non era giusto sterminare sistematicamente chi non è d’accordo e affamare milioni di uomini e donne. E’ diventato democratico. Ciò non gli ha impedito di stare dalla parte della maggioranza del comitato centrale del PCI quando il partito espulse i dissidenti del Manifesto proprio per le posizioni che questi avevano preso sulla primavera di Praga. E non gli ha impedito di applaudire al Ministro degli Interni Francesco Cossiga quando questo dava ordine di sparare ai dissidenti nelle strade italiane, quando faceva assassinare Francesco Lorusso e Giorgiana Masi, e faceva chiudere con la forza le radio libere.
E adesso?
Landscapes of the Underground
In the morning, in the trains running underground, we sit as still as tools in a box. Most of us keep our eyes closed. Some yawn and stretch, preparing their lungs and muscles for another day. Others look into the screen of their smartphones, and turn into birds crashing into scaffolding, brightly coloured bricks stacking up in puzzles. I look at my fellow travellers, as if they were a landscape. Scientists tell us that we all belong to the same species, that we all are one thing. But around me I see foxes, rocks, rivers, trees. Our clothes are the same, our haircuts, our artificial smells. But to each other, we are as foreign as planets orbiting in the same galaxy. Yet, we are all here together. Ready to be employed, just outside the gates of the tube station. To become something else from what we are. Something bigger than ourselves, something ‘useful’. Citizens, workers, customers, spectators. When we will be out of here, in the dim daylight of Northern Europe, we will fit together within the frame of the mosaics of which we are fragments. We will have names, and our names will lock together into the bigger names of the machines of which we are parts. We will create companies, networks, Nations, markets. We will create everything, and will turn into nothing.
But not yet.
TODAY #7
TODAY #7: a publication by Through Europe. Featuring articles by Federico Campagna, Toby Austin Locke, Paolo Mossetti, Franco Berardi Bifo, Nathan Witt. Freely available here.
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