7. The arousing

Destruction on the planetary level is a requirement for future development. When we step outside our planet, we will find that the greatest problem is not an absence of life; rather, the problem will be that there is too much life in the cosmos. We are not like de Sade; a man who was truly sick, though not for the reasons that people usually think. De Sade perceived the great overflowing of life and felt horror; the world is always sprouting and spawning, just think of the mould that grows so quickly on bread in your humid kitchen. The superabundance of life, nature’s constant renewal, disgusted de Sade; he was the master of abortion and non-procreative sex. His great dispute with Christianity was that the Christians advocated for life; de Sade, seeing life as sickness, opted for sodomy and abortion as a response.

We know de Sade’s anaemic children, certain French professors who never reached his steel vigour. When we see our world, our world of sterile women and simulated torture, we see de Sade’s fiction in operation; we live, particularly we in the contemporary West, in a de Sade novel: we live in the cosmos of sterile buggery and abortion. De Sade’s vision was profoundly liberal; he was a great friend to the Revolution, an early beneficiary of the Bastille’s obliteration. Mythology, always truer than fact, holds that de Sade cried out to the crowd below his cell that the prisoners were being murdered. As with all great friends of the Revolution, he was soon to be imprisoned again. You have never read his novels, but you are living in de Sade’s world now. You live in a world that hates life, because it cannot accept the necessity of death.

We, the planet destroyers, do not hold for de Sade or for the Church. We acknowledge the polyps of the cosmos; we rejoice in nature’s ability to grow, regenerate, and expand. We are not, like the Church, for life itself; we also acknowledge the horror of life grown out of control, a horror that finds its most complete manifestation in the cancer cell. We are not sterile nor are we pregnant: we are the shears, we are the pruning hook. We understand the charm of the diminutive, well-sculptured plant; the Bonsai tree is beautiful, but it is only beautiful because it is subject to repeated cuts. We are telling you that we are the partisans of the little death; we know that beauty comes about through cuts. A garden run to seed requires many cuts. Every statue you have admired in a museum is the product of thousands of little cuts; it is the same with every body that you admire at the gym. Our motto: live by a thousand cuts.

From the small to the large, I see a great blue beam shaving continents. I see us as the sculptors of the cosmos; we men who arrange the stars and cultivate the planets. We have all grown in the half-religion, Star Wars: this almost myth almost prepared us. The Tao, the wisdom of Paracelsus: nothing absolutely good or bad, except in degree. Star Wars, born of Hollywood and Judeo-Christian sensibility, could not make the final move: dark and light are the same. There is always a place for a Death Star, so long as it is not too large and appears at the right time. The dark side; well, that is us, it is Europe, it is all our fathers: it is all the smiths and shamans of our continent. We do not reject the dark side; we integrate and use it in its proper proportion: Hollywood can only give half-truths, lest we die in the light.

We will shed this dualism soon enough. We, children of Weyland, children of the forge, children of another cinematic myth, will begin the great pruning. This will be the deep adventure of beauty; we will turn the cosmos to a garden, beyond the light and the dark.