Occupying Anarchism

[alice wellintown]

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God
and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of
man."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


Now, it may be sophomoric to use the butterfly to represent beauty,
and that word terrible here, like the fear of god phrase, is also
rather simple, but the battlefield heart, now there is a mature
notion. I guess this is Ivan. Maybe not.

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 5:58 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The tale deserves a closer look but I am lazy. the anarchist, or so he
> is called by his boss, the man who exploits him, is called or named
> the anarchist of Baecelona in fact, though he is not Spanish, does not
> even speak Spanish, a skill that might, given his place of employment,
> if we can call his exhange of labor employment, increase his
> opportunities for work, and the local folks, who read the European
> papers and are familiar with the accounts of anarchists and their bomb
> tossing, quickly, and without much thought, accept that the man is an
> anarchist of Barcelona. But if he is not of Spain, but of France,
> Paris in fact, might he not also be, not an anarchist but a
> revolutionary or some such man, and the irony, that the people who
> read the European papers much admire the French for their liberal
> ideas and democratic ideals, even their resistance to, what these
> local people would call the enslavement or exploitation of the working
> class. Not that they are Marxists, for many of them like a strong, not
> exactly facist, leader, what they call a man of the people. someone
> like Nostromo,  but the people, many of them, while they are
> interested in progress, do not want too much order. Order and
> Progress? As it turns out the man in question does, on a night of
> drinking, ignite a bar brawl when, after one too many, he yells, down
> with the capitalists and plutocrats, or something like that, and
> anarchism is the road to liberty. Or some such. He has not much idea
> of what he is saying. He knows nothing of anarchy. He is not a scholar
> or student or even an intelligent fellow, if by intelligent we mean a
> person who reads and is educated enough to know that yelling anarchy
> ina crowded bar is dangerous enough, given the state of things around
> him, of which, as I said, he is, it seems, ignorant. Nonetheless, he
> is taken in to the brotherhood of anarchy. Though he feels the
> murderous hands at his throat, one a capitalists, the other an
> anrachists, for he is caught now between the devil and the devil, and
> wants only his freedom from both. In fact, it is the anarchists who
> grip him tightest, for he is a poor worker and must encounter many in
> his ordinary life. His circumstances will make of him an anarchist,
> one who holds a gun to others, a man alone without a friend. To make
> progress he must impose order on the other rebels, for progress is to
> live. Though his life is desperate, he has it, though he must keep the
> grip of the capitalist tight about his throat. and butterflies are
> free to....did I mention Nabokov? Fly away Papillon. Now....