Let Us From Now On
In a discussion held in the shadow of death, we promised each other that this would
not be just another magazine in which the reader dies in the end. And here we are,
promising our readers everlasting life. And this is no metaphor. There are no
metaphors. The living really die, and they die because of the dead.
Read this magazine and banish your dead from your head!
This is a chain-magazine. If enough of the living read it, we will all live forever.
If enough of the living free themselves from the tyranny of the dead, we will all finally
direct our spiritual, material and scientific, resources to that which each of us wants and has been shy to demand: Life.
Indefinite Life Extension.
And we remembered we can do nothing again
Save from fleeing
Refusing the order of the suns
And their end that pursues us
Let us from now on escape from the end that pursues us from the beginning to the
end. Let us from now on refuse that end. Let us from now on reject any negotiation
with the dead, for three primary reasons:
1. The dead pass on their dead heritage for the validation of the living in an
omnibus law; everything or nothing.
2. The living do not have even one representative among the dead, while the
dead have countless representatives among the living – parents!
3. Broadly speaking, the dead have never excelled in maintaining their lives.
This is why they are dead and we are not.
Today's population consists of seven billion living human beings and a hundred
billion dead ones. The dead are the vast majority. We, the living minority, demand to
take part in the decision making process of decisions made long time ago.
And in the gardens the dead
Just play dead
Just to get a sneak-peak
In the underwear of minors in summer
We are taught to learn from the mistakes made in the past. This false expression,
"mistakes of the past”, goes to show us that, alongside great achievements, some
mistakes were made here and there. But the great achievements of the past are only
great in comparison to the farther past. For sure, there has never been a single just,
wise and humane day in all of human history. The whole of the past is one great
mistake!
How could the dead have blinded us from seeing the clear fact, that traditional
societies shorten the lives of each of their members? It is a clear-cut fact, that those
who follow their ancestors should expect a similar fate.
Unlike the dead, there are no interpersonal or international conflicts between the
living . All interests are in line with the one common interest: prolonging life.
The lifestyle should serve life. The living should serve life.
The living should write life.
Let us from now on write the prolongation of life.
Let us from now on write that which is common between the living: being sentenced
to death while insisting to stab each other on the way to the gallows.
An especially long knife willed to us by the dead is the will.
Heredity is not inheritance! Let us abolish the barbarian custom of inheritance
according to blood kinship, which is not at all different from the barbaric blood
vendetta.
All wealth is created by the cooperative thoughts of the living, and therefore belongs
to its living contemporaries. And yet, the best way to acquire wealth is to be born
from ovums and scrotums that have already acquired wealth. It is a specially
challenging enterprise, to be born into wealth. We, in our foolishness, were born from
proletarian sperm. Oh, youthful follies! Why, other scrotums have been accumulating
wealth for thousands of years! Genes pass hereditarily, wealth passes hereditarily.
What, then, is immortal? It is wealth.
Let us not kill the tycoons; let us kill the dead who have made them so.
Let us from now on deny all cemeteries!
Let us from now on pass a one hundred percent inheritance tax. The nationalized
wealth of the dead should then be directed to the welfare of the living, that is, to the
space program, the culture program, and the space-culture program.
The solution for the occupation is the occupation of space
Onward, onward,
Outwards
Out of the narrow borders
So long hostile citizens,
Human beasts
However, nationalizing the wealth of the dead will not solve all our economic
problems, of which the main one is the economy itself.
A money-based economy is neither competitive nor free. Free competition? Yes! But
not over money. Let us from now on compete over thoughts.
There is a coffee shop on King George Street that is open 24/7. This is why its owners
did not bother buying a chain for the chairs outside. And so, on the Day of Atonement,
when everything is closed by will of the dead, a nigger sits there to guard these chairs.
The nigger sits there all night long, all night long the nigger watches over the chairs. A
human being! The jewel of crowns, and here he is, being a human lock. What a waste
of our time.
Be it the human lock or the venture capital fund CEO – every work that is done for
sheer greed despises its owner. Thanks to mechanization, one third of labor in Israel
today (to be honest) consists of writing e-mails. And we say: if we are already writing,
why not poetry?
Let us from now on aspire to one hundred percent unemployment!
Let us from now on make good use of our time in this world before bringing other
life into it.
Raising children is a Petri dish of tradition.
This magazine opposes raising children, seeing as how each child has a parent.
Parents evade the present in favor of their childrens' future and the past of their dead.
Educating children is admitting a double failure: not only that we did not actualize our
archaic ideals, but that we now impose them on our children, who will live in another,
wiser time.
Therefore, our stand on the occupation of Palestine is as follows:
Let us from now on occupy all the lands of Greater Israel, and by this we mean the
land that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates and the Tigris, including
Jordan, Iraq and the north of Saudi Arabia. This is the only way in which Israeli poets
will be able to live three hours away by plane from their parents, as is customary in
the West.
Parents feed the body but starve the mind. Children, refuse the Shabbat schnitzel!
Earth is one big orphanage. Let us acknowledge ourselves as orphans. Let us bare a
breast to each other, hoping our orphan friend will lick it, not suckle on it in fear, like
his predecessors. We want this magazine to end in sex, not in a family.
But rejecting tradition does not mean rejecting the past. On the contrary! It is in fact
the literary parents that dismiss most of the past as "prehistory" that has nothing to do
with our lives, while glorifying completely random eras, just because they know, by
heart, the first four lines of “Howl".
"Here lies the end of thought! Here lies the end of history!” they necrophile the poems
of the dead in front of our fucking eyes.
The end of history! In 02011! The very thought of new thoughts exhausts them. Their
head is dead!
The revolutions of this time and age do not fall in their revolutionariness from those
of the twentieth century (oh, the twentieth century!).
Let us from now on read the poems of the dead but rethink their thoughts with the
upmost suspicion.
What I propose is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of
our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is the matter of
thought, and thoughtlessness – the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or
complacent repetition of "truths" which have become trivial and empty – seems to me
among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very
simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
Let us from now on think what we are doing.
Let us from now on think what we are writing.
The heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of "truths"
which have become trivial and empty also characterizes the two, seemingly opposed,
death camps of contemporary Hebrew poetry.
To our right are the autobiographizing poets. To these narcissists we say: a poem that
deals solely with the life of its author brings forth the death of the author. A wholly
autobiographical poem does not interest the reader, who has a life of his own, thank
you very much. The autobiographizing poets have no interest in the lives of their
fellow living, and without them, their precious lives will be lost, too.
To our left are the megaphone poets (poetophones, certainly not megapoets). These
poets do take interest in the world, but only in the world of the dead. The megaphone
poets poetize for-and-against the opinions of the dead. We too are against: we are
against all this for-and-against, not necessarily because of the answers' character but
because of the questions' lack of character. Let us write poetry that takes a clear
political stand on issues that no one knows are issue, but are the main issue here.
Poets! Do not bother the living with the words of the dead. You are boring us to death.
And in any case, in 5,000,002,011 years from now the sun will go out of its way to
swallow the Mizrahi identity.
We are bummed out by the ancient poetry written today, just as the scientists in NASA
are probably bummed out by the equipment on board the Voyager. The launched
Voyager cannot be retrieved. The next Voyager should be launched. We have a
photograph of Earth from Pluto's perspective. We still don't have a poem from
anywhere near there.
Semantic engines, go!
And finally: a famous proverb, which we have just thought of, tells of a baby who
grew up all alone on an asteroid. Over the years the first astronaut child writes a text,
and contemplates on the question whether or not the text he wrote is poetry. Maybe,
he thinks, I should count the number of syllables in the lines or measure their length
on the page. This idiotic child does not for one moment think that he is the one who
has thought of the concept “poetry” just a moment ago.
P.S.
Any dead who are nonetheless interested in sharing with us their thoughts on the
magazine are invited to come to our editorial meetings, which will be held every
Friday noon in the Mashiah kiosk, 15 King George Street, Tel Aviv. Disregarding this
invitation will result in a similar disregard on our behalf.