patrokolos projects

FROM 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:58:00 -0400

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities.

Today I began to construct my first “punk” vest.

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:13:00 -0400

Today I began to construct my first “punk” vest.

Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that in spite of yourselves my beauty...

Fri, 03 May 2013 23:55:00 -0400

Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that in spite of yourselves my beauty leads you to love me; and for the love you show me you say, and even urge, that I am bound to love you. By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, “I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly.”

But supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason but that you say you love me? Nay- tell me- had Heaven made me ugly, as it has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not loving me? Moreover, you must remember that the beauty I possess was no choice of mine, for, be it what it may, Heaven of its bounty gave it me without my asking or choosing it; and as the viper, though it kills with it, does not deserve to be blamed for the poison it carries, as it is a gift of nature, neither do I deserve reproach for being beautiful; for beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come too near.

Honour and virtue are the ornaments of the mind, without which the body, though it be so, has no right to pass for beautiful; but if modesty is one of the virtues that specially lend a grace and charm to mind and body, why should she who is loved for her beauty part with it to gratify one who for his pleasure alone strives with all his might and energy to rob her of it? I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside.

Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope- and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other- it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation?

If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle.

Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom’s impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.

Today I read the discovery of the zewa aloud. If you want a copy...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:16:00 -0400

Today I read the discovery of the zewa aloud.

If you want a copy some are still available at Sweet Candy Distro and a print pdf is here.

The Colors of Early Spring Camping

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:48:00 -0400

The Colors of Early Spring Camping

TWENTY PAGES BEFORE THE MIDPOINT OF DHALGREN

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:40:00 -0400

Free of name and purpose, what do I gain? I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands. The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night. Reality? The only moment I ever came close to it was when, in the moonless New Mexican desert, I looked up at the prickling stars on that hallowed, hollowed dark. Day? It is beautiful there, true, fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but it is distorted as distance itself, the real all masked by pale diffraction.

Buildings, bony and cluttered with ornament, hulled with stone at their different heights: window, lintel, cornice, and sill patterned the dozen planes. Billows brushed down them, sweeping at dusts they were too insubstantial to move, settled to the pavement and erupted in slow explosions he could see two blocks ahead—but, when he reached, had disappeared.

I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable.

scarealdine: http://amaliawilson.com/ Sometimes my friends...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:12:00 -0400

scarealdine:

http://amaliawilson.com/

Sometimes my friends get weird and sometimes I get weird with them. Amalia is one of the best. She now has a website documenting her experience-creations.

She has a tumblr too.

A YEAR OF RUNNING

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:19:00 -0400

A PASSAGE I RETURN TO

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:07:00 -0400

And then I started to think again about Stridentopolis, about its museums and bars, its open-air theaters and newspapers, its schools and its dormitories for traveling poets, dormitories where Borges and Tristan Tzara, Huidobro and André Breton would sleep. And I saw mi general talking to us again. I saw him making plans, I saw him drinking, standing at the window, I saw him receiving Cesárea Tinajero, who had come in with a letter of recommendation from Manuel, I saw him reading a little book by Tablada, maybe the one where Don José Juan says: “Under fearful skies / keening for the only star / the song of the nightingale.” Which is as if to say, boys, I said, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.

At the end of thirty-four miles.

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:03:00 -0500

At the end of thirty-four miles.

END OF WINTER THOUGHTS

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:51:00 -0500

It seems to me that while you are young you can ask to be judged on your potential instead of on your works. You can say: “While it is true I haven’t done anything yet, something is coming.” And then at some point you can’t say that anymore. You have to be judged by what you have done or are doing.

Looking over my projects I have decided that I have done very little and none of it noteworthy. I have wasted time.

There will be no new zine, nor will there be a new poster. Those things are not satisfying to me and making a new one would be only for quick external recognition. I would make it to hear someone tell me that they liked it or that I did a good job. This kind of validation is important but it shouldn’t be the only reason to make something. To make something just for the short-term praise of others would be to abandon my actual task, the actual challenge I have set before myself. I want to write a novel.

Diverting attention and effort to zines and posters is a way of distracting myself. A way of saying “Not yet, not yet. Just let me finish this first.” Or, “It is too hard to work without recognition.” Or even, “I know I am going to fail so I will stay with these things I know I can do.” I do not want to say any of those things.

You can still order all three of my earlier zines at Sweet Candy Distro and print copies of them, and the three posters, by following the links posted below.

Previously, revolutionaries understood their role as introducing movement into that facet of...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:43:00 -0500

Previously, revolutionaries understood their role as introducing movement into that facet of domination that had appeared as eternal. But this role has itself now become eternalised. And in its place, those who were once revolutionaries are now forced by circumstance to intervene in favour of that which is not moving where everything in the world is defined by its ‘real movement’. They must identify, separate out, and hold back some thing, anything, that is not hurtling towards the desert.

From: Giving up on the identification with forward momentum

This is at my house. There will be copies of the patrokolos...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 20:54:00 -0500

This is at my house. There will be copies of the patrokolos personal ad posters available for free and, if this week goes as planned, a new zine.

THE WORDS I RECALLED TODAY WHEN I DISCARDED ELEVEN MONTHS OF WORK

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:52:43 -0500

Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

The lines of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years’ attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now.

THREE IN CLEVELAND SENTENCED

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:14:00 -0500

At 9:00 this morning Connor Stevens, Brandon Baxter, and Douglas Wright were sentenced after pleading guilty last September. The three of them were part of the group of five who planned to blow up a bridge under the direction of, and using fake explosives provided by, FBI informant Shaquille Azir.

Connor Stevens, who is twenty years old, will get out in 97 months.

Brandon Baxter, also twenty, will get out in 117 months.

Douglas Wright, twenty-six, will get out in 138 months.

All three of them, after prison, will be on “supervised release” until they die.

Azir, thirty-nine, was paid $5750 for entrapping them and $550 for expenses.

EVEN IF SOME THINGS ARE SAD NOT EVERYTHING IS

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 22:10:00 -0500

Two years ago I sat alone on the hardwood floor of an empty house in Salt Lake City folding and stapling copies of six letters addressed to you.

A year ago I left Utah and moved to Philadelphia, a city where I knew no one, to try and begin again.

Today I met three old friends at an art museum. We spent a few hours talking quietly and looking at paintings. Among other works, we stood before this painting by Vincent van Gogh. It portrays a view of wheat fields in rain, a view van Gogh could see out the window of Saint-Paul-de-Mausolée where he went to try and save his life.

TWO QUOTES I SENT WITH MY LETTERS TO KTEOO, LEAH, AND MATT

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:10:00 -0400

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

(from Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses)

_____

Pierre went back, but not to the campfire, to his comrades, but to an unhitched cart, where there was no one. Crossing his legs and lowering his head, he sat on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart and stayed there motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour went by. No one disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he burst into his fat, good-natured laugh, so loudly that people from different sides turned in astonishment towards this strange, evidently solitary laughter.
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier wouldn’t let me go. They caught me, they locked me up. They’re holding me prisoner. Who, me? Me? Me—my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha! … Ha, ha, ha! …” he laughed, with tears brimming in his eyes.
Some man got up and came to see what the strange, big man was laughing about by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went further away from the curious fellow, and looked around.
The enormous, endless bivouac, noisy earlier with the crackling of campfires and the talking of men, was growing still; the red flames of the campfires were dying out and turning pale. The full moon stood high in the bright sky. Forests and fields, invisible earlier beyond the territory of the camp, now opened out in bright, wavering, endless distance calling one to itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!” thought Pierre. “And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!” He smiled and went to his comrades to lie down and sleep.

(from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace)

_____

In two weeks I will be revealed publicly for the first time as the person behind the patrokolos projects, as I am tabling at the Philly Zine Fest. I will have the three posters, copies of six letters addressed to you, zewa buttons, and the last copies of the discovery of the zewa.

Any money I get in exchange for these items will be donated to support Kteoo, Leah, and Matt, the three Pacific Northwest Grand Jury Resisters. I will also have paper, addressed envelopes, and stamps. For every letter you write one of them you can have something off my table. If you write all three of them you can have one of everything.

THE THIRD PERSONAL AD

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:47:00 -0400

Download and print here.

A PART OF APHORISM 338 FROM THE GAY SCIENCE

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:29:00 -0400

How is it possible to keep to one’s own path! Some clamor is constantly calling us aside; rarely does our eye see something there that does not make it necessary to drop our own occupation instantly and spring to assistance. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing myself from my path, and, verily, highly ‘moral’ ways! Yes, the moral teacher of compassion even goes so far as to hold that precisely this and only this is moral - to lose one’s own way like this in order to help a neighbor. I, too, know with certainty that I need only to expose myself to the sight of real distress and I, too, am lost! If a suffering friend said to me, ‘Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me’, I would promise it; likewise, the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its freedom would make me offer my hand and my life - for once to choose bad examples, for good reasons. Yes, there is a secret seduction even in all these things which arouse compassion and cry out for help, for our own way is so hard and demanding and so far from love and gratitude of others that we are by no means reluctant to escape from it, from it and our ownmost conscience - and take refuge in the conscience of the others and in the lovely temple of the ‘religion of compassion’. As soon as any war breaks out, precisely the noblest men in the population immediately begin to experience a delight which is, to be sure, kept secret: they throw themselves rapturously into the new danger of death because it seems to offer them that long-desired permission - the permission to deviate from their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And, although I will keep quiet here about some things, I do not wish to keep quiet about my morality, which tells me: Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of what seems most important in your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today! And let the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions, be but a murmur to you.

APPEARANCES ELSEWHERE

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:48:00 -0400

This lone zewa made it either into or out of the “Happy Show” in Philadelphia,
while an entire zewa pack was found at the Portland Zine Fest on the Sweet Candy table.

Also, the text of the second personal ad, “I want to let you in to the shower of my heart”, has been reproduced by AFFECT in their zine The Weather is Changing.
The original accompanying images were left out but the zine includes other writings about the five accused in Cleveland, one of whom has now become an informant while three others have plead guilty. The fifth is undergoing psychiatric evaluations and his trial has been postponed “indefinitely”.

Lastly, several anonymously contributed haikus have made it into the journal
“Three Word Chant,” which you can read online for free here.