Sublime Rage

SUBLIME RAGE: OURS, NOT YOURS They often came out at night, after putting their daytime, social public suits to sleep. After brushing the teeth in their mouths, after kissing their partners, their children, goodnight. It was rumoured that a great number of them embraced a vegan diet, but what they ate during the day didn’t matter; deep down they were carnivores, for the sickness made it so that their hearts became laced with a second, heterodont dentation, hungry for the pain of others, and fit to consume their blood and flesh. When in active mode, a second set of nails, small but blade-like, that is to say, razor-sharp, would also emerge from inside the skin of their eyelids—claws camouflaging as eyelashes, ready to snatch their prey. The majority of times, they, of course, did not do so directly. Though they did sometimes come out in the open, they mostly preferred to dwell in the shadows—to operate from behind the closed doors of their apartments, from the home office, or the basement, for example. Fully immersed in the blanket of digital dualism, they searched the infrastructure called the Internet (and which we now know was little more than an enormous market) for potential victims.While they frequently engaged in swarming behaviour, they were not a community but an aggregate, rather, of individuals—alienated, alone and lonely, though rarely admittedly so. Although few ever stood in their presence, it is said that, while in attack mode, their eyes became filled by blue-light fire to the point of blindness… Speaking of eyes, those who contracted the disease would, in the early stages, begin to experience a strange pull that often led them to adopt a position of voyeuristic scopophilia—to derive pleasure, that is, from witnessing those others, mature hate-vamps, attack their victims. And the more cruel the treatment, the more complete their satisfaction. With a little bit of help from one’s friends, family and therapist(s), one sometimes managed to contain the curse, and to remain at that preclinical stage. Still, this stage and role (of the silent accomplice) was not a minor one, for the hate-vamps adoOored an audience. After leaving the scene, they, to be sure, barely ever remembered the names of their victims. Archived for posterity as a series of lolz, their full-of-terror laughter would turn silent. In the morning, they would get up, brush the teeth in their mouths, wash the pain of others off their hands, and drive themselves to work. Nobody knows exactly how their species emerged. Some say it was mask meanness, but evidence shows they had been around long before the eruption of that last epidemic. I, for one, speculate that they were bitten by Marx’s Vampire a.k.a. Capital a.k.a. the World. For, let’s face it, the World was a fucked up place. Of course, the cool-headed rationals thought all would be well if we could just keep calm and carry on—“just serve the World, it’s gonna be alright!” they kept saying—but the truth was we were all travelling through anger’s dominions now. And not one body was safe. Especially not theirs. Them who documented death with steady fingers, them who read Myriam Gurba write: “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,”¹ or Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord series, without flinching. Them who whistled while driving refugees back behind the border fence. Them who dug deeper when the earth went dry. Nobody liked them and they were the first to go. Yeah, you had to be a sadist or a masochist to happily partake in the ways of the World—to feel anything other than your blood boiling and rising to suffuse your heart, lungs, and nervous system, the way it does when you turn furious. Like Solange Piaget Knowles and a great number of others, I too had a lot to be mad about. Be mad, be mad, be mad. Losing sleep to dreams of another, better reality, I dragged my tired body around and found myself composing funeral scores at work, in the shower, or while waiting for the bus to arrive…Against the hate-vamps were fighting the awake, also known as The Raging Ones, for whom “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”² I joined this army in the summer of 2022, and began to breathe again. Up until that point I was living under the illusion, shared by many, that rage—by definition, an unchecked intensity of anger—was something to be ashamed of, a bad feeling.³ It had not yet occurred to me to put my rage to work. The Raging Ones showed me how. Needless to say, the unaware and cool-headed rationals all thought we were like those others, those vamps filled with hatred, but they couldn’t be further from our truth. Yes, we were killjoys, mongrels “bent on eating the the ice-wormy hearts of gringpos under the post-mercury retrograde full moon”⁴ … angels of destruction. But ours was a rage mastered, a rage carefully sculpted into arrows strong enough to pierce through everyone’s antennas, causing interference, causing the noise that was our call to liberation. And we didn’t hide: covered in stardust, we took to the streets, dancing the pain away until that moment when we felt ourselves reemerge as parts of a single body, moving in anharmonic unison.⁵ If a good look in the mirror was often enough to destroy the hate-vamps, nothing could destroy us—one of us maybe but never us, this Undercommons,⁶ who were never afraid of the World since we knew our joy to be so much more contagious than its hatred. This is why the disease never got us… In 2051, we finally managed to destroy the World, and began to make gardens of its ruins. Our alien ancestors returned from Saturn on the Galaxy Express 999 the year after, and the rave/age of happiness on earth began. I left my earthly body in 2072, but the pleasure I took in the company of The then-Raging/ now-Raving Ones accompanied me into the cosmos. It made the dust I became all glowy, and I returned to adorn the bodies of our offspring only a few decades later. by Lilly Marks [1]Myriam Gurba,Mean (Minneapolis and Brooklyn: Coffee House Press, 2017), n.p. [2] Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger, ”Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol.25, No.1/2 (1997): 280. [3] See: Arts Against Cuts,Bad Feelings (London: BookWorks, 2015); and Sianne Ngai,Ugly Feelings (Cambridge,Mass; London: Harvard University Press, 2007). [4]MollyMcArdle, “’I Arrived at the Revolution via Poetry’: An Interview with the Mongrel Coalition Against Grinpo,”Blooklyn Magazine, July 22, 2015: https://www.bkmag.com/2015/07/22/iarrived- at-the-revolution-via-poetry-an-interview-with-the-mongrelcoalition- against-gringpo/ [5] FredMoten and Stefano Harney, “Base Faith,” e-flux journal #86 (November 2017): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/162888/basefaith/ [6] FredMoten and Stefano Harney,The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe; New York; PortWatson:Minor Compositions, 2013).