Who needs witnesses?
By The Unholy Three

To all the fans who have been overwhelmingly responsive in transmitting us their questions for tonight's live chat-interview, enough! We have enough …of plenty of good material, and uh … so much evidence of your thoughtfulness and thirst for new info. Thank you, and stop writing! Just listen up for what you've been waiting for.
Firstly, we regret to announce there will be no live interview. Secondly and sadly, tonight's guests, the BernadetteCORPORATION, will not be present, due to the stranglehold of their participation in the slick research project, "Corporate Mentality," coming to a theater near you. That this change of heart reveals the B-Corp to be nothing but a group of glory-sniffing opportunists should not bother us, since they claim to be matter-of-fact economic realist bastards. No further information is available at this time. It is a complete news blackout, and we are the first to report that we are as confused and in the dark on this one as anyone else. Thirdly, we will continue with the question-and-answer part of our program by passing-on all the questions to our correspondents who have been locked in and out of bathrooms for three months running. No pun folks, just the facts as we get them. All answers having been postponed three months ago, we will now go ahead.
How's it going?

Hold on, a cloud is passing overhead, I'm breaking up… that's better! The news comes in. American airplanes. American airplanes have no news. Driggles about the landing, for the first time unturn it around. Break all the windows of the car so as to get a better view. Do something. Where will Bin Laden strike next? She wonders, tries to imagine, while tossing her long curly blonde hair over her shoulder, surveying calm Geneva streets with dull eyelashes and a sticky, frigid glare. Three months after the sex-change operation and it still doesn't feel right. Lucie Ladennes, new name, no whiskers, and still so much to do.

What have you been doing?

I am out at sea. Set sail, I'm not sure since when. I think just before Christmas of last year, but I cannot be sure. Something tells me I was at my mother's then. It could have been New Year's Eve, sailing from New York Harbor, but I might have that confused with an airplane. And though the exact date will forever remain obscure, suffice it to say that it was somewhere around the start of 2002. Today, on March 18, I am slowly beginning to accept what I consider to be one of the most harrowing voyages of my life. At some point, I recall five days of an impossible lull. I don't know the technical term sailors use, but the boat was immobile, the sea as well, like sitting brown water in a clogged basin, all gunk and debris suspended for hours on end. Not a breeze, no gust of wind, the Earth had held its breath. It was a strange and choking atmosphere under low gray skies that I could pretend to stir by holding up an oar, and there was quite a smell as well. There, with the bottom of the boat glued to the surface of that monotonous glass plate fabricating itself half-way across the Atlantic, the passengers and crew passed the time torturing themselves in the worst possible way. Mentally, introspectively, with glances recoiling from others, a strange silence covering the ship save for soft footfalls, turning latchkeys, sniffles and coughs, and here and there, slow, muttering conversations between two or three, with phrases always aimed at the horizon, that is, inward. Myself, I believe I had the worst of it. On the first day of the lull, which by the way was like landing solidly in a sand barrier-a jolt, a shock, glasses of gin toppled from the waiter's tray-that evening, I volunteered for night duty. The purpose was to escape into a different schedule and thus avoid the misery of all the others, making room for my own misery, dressing it up in spaciously-appointed settings, a wise little real estate move, the oldest trick in the book. The world will never be truly over-populated until billions become nocturnal, or unless everyone ships off to sea, no matter where they may be. It was a welcome change, working at night, there seemed to be the relief I was counting on. It was as if there was no lull, for if our ship was inching along at all, it happened under the cover of darkness. Only at night did I hear the sound of water moving, the distinct slish-slosh, thoomph-pfumph, slapping against the hull. And although there was still no discernible breeze, if I took a strand of hair and held it up against a light, it would quiver and flutter with excitement. All-in-all, it was an orgy of activity compared to the daytime, at least to my ears, the ones gradually becoming keener to a mind let loose, alone up on deck, under night skies and in command. And the stars above! O those rotten stars! Admittedly, during my first night duty, I drank them in with pleasure, lapping up their eternity. But the calming effect of the universe, indeed, I wonder. After twenty minutes there is a dull and sandy taste in your mouth as your mind rebounds from the platitudes with an, "is that all there is to eat?" After two nights of this steady eternity I wore a visor to block my vision of the above. Near dawn, on the same night, I took to holding two cardboard tubes from toilet paper rolls, fast to my eyes, "papal rolls" "binocular blinders", or so I thought. But there was always a star or so hanging at the bottom of the sky, and so back to the sandy grit of Eternity on my tongue. How people take comfort in this pap, now that they have no God! Pap, pap, and more pap. Not even a stale old crust leftover from the daily bread. The stomach growls. It needs more pap.

On the night of January 16th, an ocean liner loaded with explosives was steadily chugging its way towards New York, anxious to author Part Two of that city's apocalyptic glamour. The ocean liner was sunk off the coast of Nova Scotia, Halifax to be sure, all hundred-fifty hostages, passengers, crew-members, tourists, gawkers, undercover cops, ocean cruise aficionados, priceless guidance systems, pets, cargo rats and brats, going down with a bang, thanks to two non-nuclear submarines of the United States Providence fleet: the U.S.S.ers Nemesis and Estragon. Witnesses in Halifax claimed to have been badly shaken from their beds by the blast, echoing the Halifax Explosion from half a century earlier, the one said to have launched a thousand copycat American garage bands, eager to turn their local bar or lodge into a point on the map of the Second Empire of Swinging England…
This just in: American aircraft have dropped leaflets over four locations in the Gardez region stating, "The partnership of nations has you under surveillance. Cease resistance or face destruction." What exactly is the situation?

A beautifully bright month, day after day, equal amounts of light and shade-togetherness, plus the blue sky was making people happy. It seems precarious, however; the only decisive thing is the land isolated from the sky. A pressured contract, a pressed duck saying that everything is all right as long as man is on the land and a bird is in the sky. This is life at its most honest or deserving, it seems. No physical contacts or ideal circumstances are going to guide me. I need fog. On the other side, across town at night, in the general region of ideas and moods, the forms prevailing are nervous and unasked for. Why? I don't know yet, and I may never know. But I have decided at once to present an account of their application at a point when there was nothing left to defend.
Now war is on everyone's lips. The same lips that flap open to say, "I am doing something." The question is, how to take the war that is on the lips and begin to chew on it, break it into tiny pieces that are then swallowed or stuck to the teeth, towards a digestion of war that reduces its stock in the meat trucks and supermarkets, an eventual scarcity of the war supply parceled out according to season and taste. War broken down by various acids, absorbed internally, neutralized into basic energy, not to become second nature, but to ravage the borders and millions of checkpoints that prop up the regime of the self.

It appears that something is happening, we are in the middle of an event. All ears are ready. Tell us what you saw.

On the first day of the riots, as the murderous wave was advancing, bells were ringing all over town, and people were fleeing. Whether it was a question of a mob or a monster mattered little, the effects were the same: corpses, heaps of corpses made by other corpses. She-her name was Red Zora-was concerned by one thing in the midst of this panic. She wanted to take a bath. The house was almost deserted, the masters evacuated, only a few servants left ironing and folding the linen, ironing and folding in a panic. It was under this cover of distraction that Red Zora decided to begin taking her bloody bath in the Master Bathroom.

Show us a riot, folks, and we'll tell you about a tornado. Both can be absorbed into the category of annual disasters, which is to say that they only become events tallied onto a greater ledger, a wider story. The thing is, with the help of either our brains or our bodies, or a somewhat confused combination of the two, we can begin to formulate a pagan cult of the riot and the tornado, making them a matter of lifestyle choices and ordinary spiritual practice. But let us continue direct from the scene with a few eyewitness accounts…

What was great was this relentless, purely symbolic, ultra-violent force of everything that's in place. It was really bizarre, like getting slapped in the face every day, whether it's bullshit from other people or from the smallest things like where do you sleep, with whom are you going to bank, how to be apart from the others, hammering away. You begin to watch the other bodies. Or throw them at cops. Thus it was possible to find new difficulties, like how to evolve in a medium of destruction.

Any other signs of life to report? What did you wear? Did you make any friends?

Not only were we not all in black, we weren't a block in contact with habits, with planning. But then again there's the-head-of-a-boy-in-a-black-hood-moment, where you inhale your new identity exactly when everyone who has arrived to this situation is busy looting stores, eating, discussing, laughing, even playing basketball. Are these some people you know, some tubes, some distorted plastic-aesthetic beauty, a site of friends-in-black, or is the fact that moments away, the real crushing of us begins to happen and we realize that we are only operating as new encounters…bravely, from an understandable difference, one that is a little more disorganized and a little more elastic than the usual differences we swear by.

Red Zora-dumpy lips, crossed eyes, felt fedora-have you seen Red Zora?

There was a girl with extra tubing and I asked her for it and she gave it to me. I could see she was from a very well-to-do family and that is why I asked her. My eye is good at those things, sizing up people, even when they're all dressed in black and moving like a block. My role was as a spotter, for my eye knew how to fuse observation and relaxation along with a precise judgment of distance of how far off the cops were. Aside from spotting the cops, I would pick out targets for destruction and direct the rioters at them. In these moments, my eye was overtaken by a sort of frenzy for identification-it segmented and condemned everything that was overly familiar or completely bizarre. It was like…I don't know… walking … like walking alone. An unbearable feeling. But at the same time my comrades who don't like social-democratic jokes would encourage me to do it, over and over again.

For a moment, we must change hats, put on our eagle-head hats, becoming screaming eagles, bright red ones, communist, on the horizon, spitting out stars and dropping turds of lightning bolts all over Empire, stretching out fully in the form of the imperial symbol we have taken for ourselves, but only, or forever, for a moment … for tomorrow we shall be peaceful pigs, sniffing out roots in the forest.

And then right there we got busy attacking this long moment of wandering … this extreme solitude where the intensity is lost … we broke all the windows of a disco and then met there later for cocktails.

The Nude Novel is the latest form. It is the result of a conscious decision to collapse testament and feeling and structure in one direction, the wrong direction. It is a form of cure, a cure for the minute pressures and major inertia that indicate a general disintegration that we feel is immanent. It is unreadable, much less possible to write. It is a good-bye for a good day. Do we even need to bother to say that all this has a 'me' for a subject? But subject only as far as dinner conversations go, by the way. Oh hello! Doctor! Dinner! You there! We have to do this, we're sorry. It is not a question of saving ourselves for we are already gone, and all the moments when we appear to be busy, taking a bath, walking to the supermarket, boiling something on the stove, those are just events that happen in-between, when our bodies become idling motors, taking a break before going back to the essential work of going away. We have had enough of editing, chasing off the fragments that sail in with a gust over the open waters of our brains, contorting ourselves one way and another, pretending that we have the intelligence and judgment to operate according to structure. We must, absolutely must, enter into something unedited. The worst display of the self, it makes one shudder to imagine the arrogance, but before you know it this will dissolve into words and records of words.

In my backpack, structured organization doesn't have the same meaning as objective demonstrations, and I think it's better just to put on a cool head, the same one that flies through a window, or from a flag, the trusty old "Ché head."

Three examples, two short and one long:

I.) We smashed the cash registers and I put them in my backpack.

I.) Omelet-a busy expressway in the countryside, two lanes in either direction. The traffic is constant, not especially heavy, creating an uneven yet rhythmic mixing of the sound of tires flying over the joints in the concrete pavement, and the quick blasts of air left behind by each speeding vehicle. After twenty seconds this sound induces a tranquilizing effect. And is there a late afternoon, winter sun on this day? If so, let's hope for a pale mist in the damp, near freezing, air that will soften the light. Pastures, bordered by electrified fences that are supposed to contain grazing livestock. Small woods, ex-forests sharply cropped, unfold across the background. The further the highway recedes into the distance, the less outstanding it seems. In no time, the sound of the highway becomes absorbed by the surroundings - damp grass and whatnot.

II.) Everything and everyone around me is dead, rushing at top dead speed, stopping only every-so-often to check the pulse of their immortal hypocrisy. Things are so dead that the only way to give a sign of life is by approximation, to become a mass murdering hero of the dead. But I can't do that, it would require too strong beliefs in property, credit, professionalism, success, social rank, publicity, holding a place for yourself in the line. All I can do is try to escape my duty, to avoid doing the one thing I am supposed to do-kill myself.

II.) Hamlet-pacing around the picnic pavilion, he stops once or twice to take in the thundershower before heading back to the table. He heads back decisively, but it seems beside the point for the sound of the falling rain on the tin roof is much more decisive. And then a soft, muffled sound of thunder. Already seated, he appears to be modifying the diagram he was working on, from birth to the present, the causes and effects of a number of years. Scribbling hard on the page, he reduces his causal chain to a less complex, visually pleasing figure (that of a snake). Later that night, he will stand at the edge of the pavilion and look up at the night sky. He will wonder if he will ever see a blue planet the size of the moon looming near the horizon. Or a vortex-like swirl of stars from a nearby galaxy hanging directly above the crown of his head. Briefly, for an instant, he forgets about every varied cause for every precise effect and imagines his head spinning in a destroying circle around the nearest, available star.

III.) I always avoided the front lines of combat. Sometimes I would try to lose my fellow demonstrators and run away to a calm spot to smash my head against a wall, because that is the thing I am most likely to do; otherwise, I would just watch the others or gather stones, and end up feeling as if I'm being ordered to watch the others and gather stones. I prefer to smash my head in, on my own, and with the others it is not the same … the same intensity … how else could I measure my freedom if not by that, a suicide attempt in middle of the riot?

III.) Ham omelet-In a clearing in the forest, fat little aliens shoot-off toy rockets …they are distracted, bored … Hamlet diverts them (with a stone?)…he runs and steals their egg-like object …the aliens don't pursue him, instead they quarrel amongst themselves.
There is something that should be done that isn't being done.

I saw a girl sack a building with her tits hanging out. A pervert protecting his car sprayed my crotch with pepper spray. My pants were soaked, so I took them off and found I had an uncontrollable, burning erection. As I was trying to get back to the front lines, asking people where the action was, I was told that helicopters crashed through peaceful activists by the beach. Someone else said there were tanks in groups surrounding the train station. I got tired of asking, I became very passive, I wanted to read a book, or play with the cables strewn all over the street, follow tangled phone lines until they ended, kick up sheets of paper, collect coffee cups-I didn't want anything, just to catch my breath and stare at my reflection in the broken windows of a bank.
Let's say you can grab everything a protester has already (by staying in the moment) and make him into a metal pipe to be thrown at banks or cars (if you want) or you can have an external pressure (by speculating on aggression) to think tactically about whether to walk alone or grouped together. Walking alone you become an open face, slipping through lines and formations, you can smile at anything. Staying grouped together you can do things, and then become your own trap, but the beauty is that it's impossible to move as a group without really starting to laugh for once.

How on earth do you meet someone today? There's no end of introductions, of situations and circumstances where people decide to present themselves to each other, play a clearly defined role, are judged well or poorly in the performance of that role, automatic ways to measure up to someone else and then say, "I know how I fit in the picture."

When they try to run, they've already lost, because they can't shift direction as easily as the inclinations that take hold of you. In sex there are people who prefer it from the front or from the back, and in the riots some people prefer to become predictable in their movements…

All these meetings in daylight, under spotlights, this using of others as coordinates for navigation is one of the most extreme forms of torture for those whose coordinates have been blown to the winds.

And that's the moment when it could be helpful to have a fire extinguisher, as you time a coordinated peaceful march from which the hoped-for spontaneous joy can no longer be what it means for the others as they wipe the first rounds of tear gas from their betrayed faces. You, the immobile organizer, are there to stretch out bodies from one end of the situation to the other. It is life where you think you are dying, that you are a crowd, but somehow you find an opening and count bodies in case of having to bar them in. You feel you could have a confrontation with a cop, so you run through a hundred of them just to know what it was like to be dressed in black with the police.

Every meeting, every glance, every kiss, every kick, every point of contact barely covers a wheezing nothingness that offers nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on to, in short a nobody's nothing. So then, how do people meet today? How can people meet in total darkness?

You have a few stones, and a large, open field. You turn trashbins over and roll them out.

Tomorrow we celebrate "A day without teeth" or "A day of tenderness".

Some of us were just into gratuitous destruction, which is to say that we weren't there to destroy symbols but to demolish some disappearing pleasure. At a certain point, products themselves can knock down shelves, break whiskey bottles, open jars of jam, and launch tear gas rockets at us. It's a type of being-together that takes on the contagiousness of a fire.

There, under the shade of our mutual affection, we could try to establish our affection, with a kiss, a caress, furtive or daring. Even a half-hour of silence, only for gestures which could assuage our wracked bodies, pass directly through our bodies, an impossible healing effect when faced with our constant communication. Why? Because it's a shame that people who love each other so always fail to use the things that could work between them differently.

My mother raised me to be transparent ... to always say what I feel, what I was going to do ... to talk, to always communicate if there's any problem. We would have these quality time, mother-daughter meetings after school on Tuesdays, where I could say anything I wanted, and then she would try to give me advice, tell me what to do to solve my problems. The thing is, none of this ever helped me. Actually, it made me feel worse, and hopeless. It's as if her constant demand for communication poisoned all communication. It felt like I was a case, a case that was her daughter that she had to always be aware of and steer in the right direction. And this system of advice, these fucking mother-daughter meetings, they made it feel like I could never turn to her for help, it made me feel completely distant from her. It's a weird thing because in all the movies I grew up with there were always kids accusing their parents of not spending enough time with them, saying that they were never there for them. And I was suffering from the opposite, from being too 'there' for my parents.

Pulling ourselves together out of scattered, useless parts. There really is no other treatment we can think of. We put some plugs in our ears and they seem to help, reducing at least one of the senses, like pulling a nightcap over the eyes, and then going to sleep. Invocation of a social, psychological realistic mysticism, the nudity of being caught without the pants on versus the nakedness of the sexy round ass that pushes people into their cars, subways, metros, desks, workshops - that useless ass that stopped shitting in order to gain a set of wheels, that mobilizing ass. Nude pilgrims, we set out in our ships, to run away from the shadow of that nakedness. But Pilgrims, watch out! Our crows nest is only for the crows. We are not going back to anything, to any source, and if anyone dares sight land on this voyage, we are lost.

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