07.05.16, 12pm, CONVERSATION II
Taunting that powdered death called Respectability. The history of protest in poetry and song, fighting for revolution, against politics.
“At last we know that not all problems need to have solutions, because some solutions can be more disastrous than the problems. Politics may be as much of a fiction as writing is. Everywhere we look we see the implosion of public morals. Socialists are even more greedy for protocol and patronage tha conservatives are. Every North needs a South (it may even fabricate an internal one as we see happening in Europe now), if only to provide for the movement of disequilibrium.
The nature of man is bestial, the concept of progress futile and redundant, but struggle for decency continues. There will always be history because there will always be dreaming, and therefore conflict. No gain is permanent and permanence is not a gain either.
I must keep running after myself so as to not lose sight of the dark light of creativeness: that is, subverting the hegemony, unhinging the unstoppable process of accretion and accumulation, rattling the skeleton and the empty bowl of the mind, taunting that powdered death called Respectability, keeping the cracks whistling, fighting for revolution against politics. Aesthetics and ethics cannot be separated.
It is important to take responsibility for the story. Imagination is politics. He who travels alone travels fastest, but in the company of friends you go further.”
From Memory of Birds, Breyten Breytenbach, p.105
