慢悠悠

‘Past revolts take on a new dimension in my present, that of an immanent reality to be constructed immediately. The walks of the Luxembourg palace and the square of the Tour Saint-jacques still echo the shots and the cries of the suppressed Commune. But there will be more shots fired and more heaps of corpses. One day the revolutionaries of all the ages will join together with the revolutionaries of all countries to wash the wall of the Fédérés with the blood of firing squads.

‘To construct the present is to correct the past, change the psycho-geography of the landscape, free dreams and unsatisfied desires from their matrix, and bring all the separate passions together in harmony. From the insurgents of 1525 to the Mulétist rebels, Spartacus to Pancho Villa, Lucretius to Lautréamont, there’s only the time of my will to live.

‘Hope for tomorrow overshadows our festivities. The future is worse than the Ocean – it contains nothing. Blue-print, program, long-term view… count your chickens before you’ve even seen eggs. But if you construct the present well the future will be more than abundant.

‘Only the quick of the present, its multiplicity, interests me. Despite all that might prevent me, I want to surround myself with today as with a great light; and bring that other time and the space of other people to the immediacy of everyday experience. I wish to embody Schwester Katrei’s formulation: “Everything that is in me is also outside me and everywhere, around me; everything belongs to me, and everywhere I can see only what lies within me.” That’s no more than subjectivity’s rightful triumph, as far as history allows it today; however firmly we go about tearing down the bastilles of the future and however thorough our restructuring of the past, if only we could live each second as if caught in the spell of eternal recurrence, it would exactly and endlessly repeat itself.

‘Only the present can be total. A point of incredible density. We must learn to slow down time and live the permanent passion of immediate experience. A tennis champion tells the story how once during a very tense match a ball was played that was very difficult to take. Suddenly, he saw it approach slowed down, so slowly that he had time to judge the situation, make a reasonable decision and return it with masterful brilliance. In the space of creation, time dilates. In inauthenticity, it speeds up. Whoever possesses the poetry of the present will experience the same adventure as the little Chinese boy who loved the Queen of the sea. He went to look for her at the bottom of the ocean. When he returned to the land he met an old man cutting roses who said to him: “My grandfather told me of a young boy who disappeared in the sea, and who had exactly the same name as you.” ’

— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life