The Gurriers 1969

Libcom note: This version combines the PDF (see foot of the page) previously available on Libcom with the text version from the Revolt Against Plenty website.

..... In Ireland the walls of repression are high and splattered with the blood of thousands of Irishmen and women. But they are old,and the wear and tear of the plaster is is to be seen everywhere. The cracks which for centuries have been covered over by the ivy of statesmen and religious leaders are beginning to appear. People who have been denied imagination are beginning to tire of all that destoys imagination. In some places the wall has already been rent; the foundation stone bears the scratch. It is our task to make this wall crumble and scatter in a thousand pieces as a thousand individual wills are grasped in a union with regenerated society. Our thunder must only contain the poetry of an orgy of self-release......

EX-CATHEDRA

'The truly free man is king and lord of creatures. All things belong to him. All things which God created are common; whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp'.

(POPE PAUL V1)

The Beginning of the End
Irish society is founded on all the failed revolutions of the past. From the first murmurings against the plantations right up to the present the might of tyranny has succeeded against the will of the people; or where the masters were ousted, tyranny merely changed hands. The revolutions of 1798, 1803, 1867, 1916, never succeeded in ridding themselves of the ideologies of nationalism and religion. The critique was always partial, and where this critique dominated the struggle, the struggle itself was falsified. It was never that people taking up arms and attempting to rid themselves of their masters was false; but that the motivations and ideologies which their masters imposed on them falsified the end-product.

Slave mentality continues in Ireland; only today this slavery is being carried out in the name of freedom, progress and the Republic. Capitalist economy manages to change illusions at an accelerating pace, a pace so fast and so il1usory that it manages to dissolve the very illusion of change. We find ourselves coming out from it, alone, unchanged, frozen behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks and behind the high wall of Masses and Rosaries offered up for our suffering.

Everyday pre-industrial society is meeting consumer society and at the appointed meeting place one monotony is exchanged for another.

People who used to die of poverty will begin to die of boredom; Keogh Square will be exchanged for the Ballymun Housing Estate. Today the unity between those still dying of poverty and those dying of boredom is the spectre which must destroy the immediate construction of reality.

THE DEATH OF RELIGION

Release man from the chains of myth. Religion was able to conceal man from himself; its Heaven welled him up in a pyramidal world with God at the Summit and the kings, princes, lords and bosses just below. The Jesuit father Charles grasped the real power of Christianity. 'Since Christ's Coming we are delivered, not from the pain of suffering, but from the pain of suffering uselessly'. The problem of hierarchical power has always been, not to suppress itself, but to give itself reasons so that it did not oppress uselessly! By marrying man to suffering, whether on the basis of Divine Grace or Natural Law, Christianity, that unhealthy therapy, pulled off its masterstroke. From Prince to manager, from Priest to university specialist, from father confessor to social worker, it is always the principle of useful suffering and willing sacrifice that forms the most solid base for hierarchical power. Everywhere today, in the official speeches, the Evening Press, the television, the disgusting image of that crucified man, the stupid halo of the suffering martyr, is grasped and used to justify that power. The crucified man on the cross, that sacrifice of all sacrifices, is the prototype of all the sacrifices that are made daily; the sacrifice of the worker to his boss, the sacrifice of the sexual desire to a repressive morality, the sacrifice of 'the difficult road of life' to a mythical future in Heaven.

At the bottom level the slave can identify himself with his master, the worker with his boss, to whom he delivers his life force. But who is the master to identify with? Since the master qua myth, sacrifices himself on the spiritual level, he must seek in the coherence of his myth something to which he can submit. This is why the class of masters have created a God before which he kneels down spiritually in order to identify with it. God, the greatest myth, authenticates the mythical sacrifice of the slave to the private power of the Mass. (The workers who are released from work on holy days by the masters in order to attend Mass is the system whereby the battery of sacrifice is recharged and the power of the masters affirmed). The master is seen to sacrifice his authority and his power as a servant to the excluded; he is ready to pay for the common good of the people. The master, if he is to remain a master must appear as a kind master.

The Reformation in Europe shifted the relationship to God by seeing it through the relationship to the devil. The psychological premise of Protestantism, as Norman 0. Brown justly remarked, is the conviction of sin. Now not only suffering must be accepted, but guilt must be the result if one does not suffer. This superb con effected the whole rise of the spirit of Capitalism; to welcome one's suffering as a punishment for the omnipresent and uncontrollable evil in the world, is to give up everything to one's master.

PROTESTANTISM VERSUS CATHOLICISM in Ireland was never anything more than the power amassed by a rising bourgeoisie against the Irish people. In 1652, Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher, supported Cromwell's slaughter of the Irish peasantry by calling it a religious war. While the henchmen of Cromwell drove the people from their lands and took their possessions, he dryly remarked 'the catholic murderers had to punished for their sins' meaning that their sacrifices had not been enough to allay God's anger or drive away the Devil.

A spirit of revolt has always existed within Christianity, though this spirit never reached into Ireland. What more could we say today than the 'Brethren of the Free Spirit' said in the 13th century; 'One can be so united with God that whatever one may do, one cannot sin' they said as they stripped off their clothes and danced to the death of their repressions, living unlawfully and justifying theft. From the Amaurians, the Taborites and the Anabaptists we can find a tradition within christianity for our present project. When the anarchist Pauvels planted a bomb in the Madelaine Church on the I5th March 1894 it was this great heretical tradition, which he, poorly though worthily, followed.

But there are no heretics now. The theological language which so many commendable uprisings expressed themselves was a mark of an epoch, the only language of the time. Henceforward one must translate; and the translator is self evident.

To our Maynooth comrades, to our Sunday morning Mass going revolutionaries, to our comrades in the priesthood all over Ireland we can only say that if we are to make a revolution worthy of the power of our imaginations then it must go further than the slow bicycle peddling to Belfield, the weekly recharge of sanctifying Grace and willing sacrifice, the banal ritual of a dead myth. Give sex a try this year and who knows some of the rust may have cleared away in time to enjoy it. Holy Communion, like junk, is difficult to break once one gets the habit.

THE 1916 REVELATION

'..contained some of the poetry of a people who had been beaten down by the heel of exploitation and who felt the passion and intensity of their newly promised freedom. Only to have it wrested from them as their new masters came into being, reinventing in the name of the revolution, all the old poverty and exploitation. They believed they were dying for their country; but they were dying for capital and their new masters. Irish history, and the people who made it, have always faltered on this tradition; one isolation, one monotony, one lie was being changed for another. The illusion of Gratten's parliament in 1793 was that it allowed the Catholics the freedom to vote for their protestant masters. The politics of Unionism was no more than the illusory bond between master and slave.

CONNELLY'S GREATEST MISTAKE was to side with the enemy and hope that the conscience of the masters would be such that freedom would be given away. Today this freedom is being sold in the supermarkets, the shops, on the television; the 'kindness' of the masters has proved to be total. And today, the totality of living being brutally denied can only create the totality of freedom being brutally affirmed.

Connelly, as Larkin, never understood the importance of everyday life and like Lenin, was blind to the total decomposition of forms that Nihilism had announced. When the workers in Cleeve's factory in Limerick in May 1920 declared a soviet, when the miners in Arigna, Leitrim, followed suite, when the workers in Bruree, Limerick took control of the mills, they had grasped a critique of their own everyday lives that was well in advance of their 'Leaders' or their Unions. The result showed their leaders once and for all to be on the side of power.

The history of Nationalism came to an end in 1916 when it became apparent that fighting for one's country was an abstract struggle in which the leaders of the struggle were the only one's to benefit. The IRA in the meantime, still felt the alienation and continued the struggle. But their critique lived in the nightmare of a destroyed myth; it failed to see the totality. When the government recently revealed that they had not ruled out force against the North last August, had the 'interests of the people' necessitated it, they had moved into the position of potential matricide. But it could not have killed the hand that fed it. The IRA, not serving the same interests as the government, could have only rooted out the oppressor had its critique gone further. We have moved out of the old days of colonialism.

Today no-one fights for their country. For what could be the possible use of fighting for a sham when that sham will be left to exploit you at the end of the struggle. What more can we do than echo, in the words of De Sade, Republicans, one more effort in order to be revolutionaries; whilst at the same time learning much from the tactics of our rebellious brothers-in-arms.

Everywhere to day, the Spectacle, the illusion of living, oppresses the attempt to break forth from the chains of myth. Everywhere, life and its thumping pulse is slowed down to a deadly pace. Death enters the living by the back-door of the illusion of living. From the Father Murphys on Vinegar Hill to the father Caseys on Charity Hill, from the Wolfe Tones to the decaying body of De Valera, from the pubs to the television sets, there is only to be found the pale representation of living.

And this representation has all the dynamism of an illusion. Save the Grand Canal. Save Hume Street. Save Sandymount Strand is the fragmentary belief in the good in our society and is at the same time, the last desperate effort to save fragmentary power. There is the flirtation with non-conformism, the protests, which are integral parts of prevailing power. Politicians reach out to artists just as much as artists reach out to politicians and in that unity the pulse of our society is seen to be restored.

The farce of the three day Seminar last year is the spectacle which allows the oppressed to redirect their own alienation. Ireland must not seem to lag behind and so the authorities direct a little gasp of student power.

IN THE HALF LIGHT THAT SOME HAVE CALLED LIVING

''.amidst the the total repression by religion, the illusion of freedom. consumer goods, poverty and boredom, everyone wants to breathe again and no-one can breathe. And most do not die because they are dead already. Today the only choice that exists is Suicide or Revolution. It is now or never.

IN A DUBLIN BAR Where everyone is bored a drunken man breaks his glass and smashes his bottle against the wall. Nobody gets excited. The disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. But everyone there could have done the same thing; he alone made the thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation. He remains alone however, like the hooligan who burns a church or kills a policeman; at one with himself but condemned to exile.

For the nihilist, as for the young man, the distinction between living and surviving is taken seriously. If living is impossible, why survive? And in that void everything breaks up. The Nihilist, however cannot go on living as he is; he has been thrown out of too many bars. He must either throw a coin and decide on a good cause and become its devoted slave; like the dispassionate civil servant (poor Flann O Brien), like the dumb slave. For Art's sake, for the sake of the country, for God, for bread, or perhaps for the 'best of all possible causes' the proletariat. Individualism, Alcoholism, Republicanism , Trotskyism, Communism, Connellyism, Hinduism. Christianity, Catholicism, Voyeurism, Maoism, the whole variety of ideologies which offer a hundred ways of being on the side of power. He must always remain the social worker, tidying up the loose ends, but never for a moment suspecting the source of the discontent.

The active nihilist on the other hand is not content simply to watch things fall apart. He intends to speed up the process. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter revolutionary. Most people oscillate between the two. But circumstances inevitably end by drawing a line and people suddenly find themselves once and for all on one side or other of the barricades.

The most potentially revolutionary phenomena in recent years has been the most savage outbreaks of juvenile delinquency. From the days of the 'ANIMALS' , the gang of thugs who terrorised and killed bookmakers in the 1940s to the teddy boys of the 50s right up to the present wave of hooliganism in our schools, a critique of alienation and decay is grasped and acted upon. In this waste land, co-habited by the suicide and solitary killer, there is a transition, a shifting ill-defined sphere, a period of wavering between extremes; one leading to subservience and submission, the other leading to permanent revolt.

The Lugs Brannigans, the police, the moralists, the psychiatrists, the sociologists, represent the absolute rejection by society of the individual and this can only correspond to the individuals absolute rejection of society. And the natural reaction to the chaos ruling the world is sabotage.

Sabotage is merely the crisis which is always impending manifesting itself in the open. There is definitely a crisis today. When the Pope blesses the United Nations and attacks the sociologists, when there is a flying apart of all values, the eunuchs of fragmentary power the psychologists, the moralists, the sociologists, the literary critics, the trade union bureaucrats, the politicians, attempt to grapple with the question of living only to push it still further out into a representation. The essential meaning is pushed aside and the totality of living is lost to the heirs of fragmentation.The anaemic Gods will be called in; The Popes, the Telhard De Chardins, the work-study officers, the leaders of the trade unions: the Conner Cruise O Briens, the Dail representatives, all the way down to the archbishops and the Denis Donaghues of UCD. The Body will be divided into forty pieces and lots shall be cast from the parts. Poverty and boredom shall be analysed and re-analysed and still nothing will reallychange. The workers will return from yet another strike, victoriously, and face a rising cost of living and a wider range of consumer goods. The sociologists will publish his article and wash his hands of the whole nasty business thinking that it had nothing to do with his own everyday life anyway.

Only the rusty pieces of silver shall be exchanged in the half light.

THE DEATH OF ART

For the last century and a half, the most striking contribution to art and life has been the fruit of free experiment with the possibilities of a bankrupt civilisation. The erotic reason of De Sade; Kierkegaard's sarcasm; Nietzsche's lashing irony; Mallarme's deadpan; Carroll's fantasy; Wilde's wit; Joyce's dream world. Dada's negativism -these are the forces that have reached out to confront people with some of the dankness of decaying values. And with it the desire for a reversal of perspective, a need to discover the alternative forms of life.

Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression in Dada. Dada did really contain the seeds by which nihilism could have been surpassed. But it was just left it there to rot, along with the rest. The Dadaists savage programme of total subversion exploded in a world of decay. Certain features of Romanticism had already proved, without waking the slightest interest on the part of Marx or Engels that art - the pulse of society and culture - is the first index of decay and disintegration of values. A century later while Lenin thought the whole issue beside the point, the Dadaist could see through the artistic abscess as a symptom of a cancer whose poison was spread throughout society as a whole.

('ARTS FINAL MASTERPIECE WILL BE ITS OWN DESTRUCTION' - Soffici.)

('The New Artist does not paint or write but creates directly, the New Artist protests' -Tzara.)

The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their civilisation of its discontent 'working in the last analysis far more coherently than Freud himself built the first laboratory to revitalise everyday life. The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and pure rubbish cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end everything was transformed.

One day that period from 1910 to 1920 will reveal its incomparable richness. For the first time a bridge between life and art was projected. There is very little of any importance, apart from the adventure of Surrealism, between that avante garde and the present project

'It is ridiculous and a sign of idiocy exceeding the legal limit to say that Dada (whose actual achievements and immense success cannot be denied) is only 'of negative value'. Today you can hardly fool first graders with the old saw about positive and negative. The gentlemen who demand the constructive are the most suspicious types of a caste that has long been bankrupt. It has become sufficiently apparent in time that law order and the constructive understanding for an organic development are only symbols. curtains and pretexts for fat behinds and treachery. If the Dadaist movement is nihilism, then nihilism is a part of life'' Richard Huelsenbeck 'En Avant Dada' I920

In its history Ireland has produced an incomparable number of exiles. Oscar Wilde whose 'Soul of man under Socialism' went way ahead of anything else in its time in its treatment of the creativity that lies in every man looking for a way of releasing it, gave only a partial critique. He remained committed to the spectator's art without realising, in his own words, that this remedy was part of the disease. He remained aloof over the spectator. Like Yeats, whose heart, sick with desire, awaited the Second Coming, when 'things fall apart, the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'. Yet both did little to achieve that poetry in the world of everyday living.

Joyce, we are told never remarked on a public event. After that bible of individual creativity (Ulysses) all that could happen was that the Leopold Blooms of this world united to get rid of their poor survival and to introduce into the lived reality the richness and variety of their interior monologues. Joyce never joined with the Viennese workers nor with the Austrians. His total subjectivity amounted to total abandonment.

When the characters in Flann O Brien's novel unite to destroy the novelist and the novel within the novel they still face the real novelist: Flann O Brien! Their freedom is decided within the closed system of that novel. The task today is to unite to destroy our masters in the real world. There are no more artists because today everybody's an artist. The coming work of art is the construction of the passionate life, The poetry of everyday life couldn't care less about poetry. Mallarme's desire to abolish the poem can only take place when the poem is realised. The creation itself matters less than the process that engenders the work, the act of creating. It is the state of creativity, not the gallery, which makes the artist.

Indeed today the gallery, like all works of art has given way to the might of consumer society. The price tags, the museums, the attributes of a dead culture, only go to make our task the more vital. Today, in the universities, in schools, in the art collages, students are introduced into the arts of the dead generations and everywhere the poetry which flourishes in their hearts is denied them. They peek at the corpse of art and literature, which is laid out and cleaned up for them by the informing critics who slip backwards and forwards between text and audience stealing the decaying organs and exhibiting them.

When the art students raided the museums last year their critique of museum culture as well as a tactic for getting attention was correct. Bakunin before them, in 1848, when the barricades looked weak rushed into the museum and propped a few old masters against the failing structure. Its strength was increased a thousand fold.

Today to transcend Dada we must take up arms. Brutally repressed, the poetry of everyday life can consecrate riots, espouse revolts. As for the other poetry, the shit of Kennelly or Kinsella, the garbage of Murphy or Montague, we can only pass over to the garbage cans. Their Bohemianism is pathetic; they still cling desperately to their degraded versions of individual revolt. You must destroy the Poet, the Literary Critic, the Sociologist, the Painter, the lorry driver within you in order that you can make poetry. Real poetry is in the event or situation which one creates.

Dublin: 1968