new media center_kuda.org

HUSH! CAUTION! ECHOLAND!

Another Failed Revolution 

Our searching out the centre was easy
our drift to the periphery was not
- Gilles Ivain (adapted)

Mad love. Instant electric. Delusion existing ensconced in reality. A truer real. Mutually willed. Both fall into the dream. It's a shared dream. Both bolster and run with the dream state as it is saturated by the dappled daylight beneath the trees, as it sits close on a decrepit pier, as it gasps at the phantasm of the actor’s props. Look! There is the sun! But why am I somnambulant with the retentive blink of the moment before? Why do I grasp onto what is occurring as if to suspend time in the reveille of a dream image? Do I want to make of the dream-work a mode of production of a universal Angelicate? Is it so as transform this moment into a monument; to ensure it replays and replays in the vale of an imminent and strategic parting?

Mad love. A courageous flash. Orgone. Of course, it comes with its own self-defeating idealism. A penchant for the Surreal translates into a woman becoming the Word-Girl … a cipher who stands for my ideal who stands for my abuse. In this world of smug genocide, having determinedly lost touch with its rules of unpresaged dissembling, our phantasies become a labyrinthine links to future revolutions; and the marvellousness of being there in the waking dream makes us inviolable, victorious and yet fragile. Yes, no more nightmares. Yes, no more impotence. But, the disorientation of sense and language that ensues, amounts, when the time-frame has returned to its empirically verified setting, to nothing more than our being arraigned to appear in the Courts of Materialism. 

Mad love. Full disclosure. Erotic experiments. A sub in retaliation against submissiveness. An unconscious sadist with flat affect who repeats back those tentative endearments as if they came from the mouth of Hoffman’s Olympia. Another unconscious sadist revels in a kick-sheet and abreactive language that has fallen out of time, out of use. Anti-aesthetic crudity and untimely humour become the scarring recrudescence of traumatic undertows that summon the spectre of male violence. Then, the declarative language of love, all too readily offered to appease an inner ache, to seek the security of no longer being alone, eventually becomes, at best, some kind of incantatory love potion that rightly refuses to be swallowed.

Mad love. Beholden to beauty. Style. Myth. A bust-up of internal logic. I could not believe what I saw even though I will touch it. It is here, now, an uncanny presence, but I would rather wish to put out my eyes, those eyes that, by the minute, peer into this insomniac sensorium and passively watch, while writhing, the tactility of perfume. How Oedipal could this blindness be? What guilt could it appease? It is not so much the guilt of an illicit yet passé perversion as our having visited Uchronia, of our having had an inkling of how to amalgamate the senses, of our having come near to inhabiting those two most fulfilling yet repressible affects: madness and passion.

Mad love. Fragility. Doubt. Delectation. We passed from one movie backlot to another. From the Boulevard of Crime to 1712 Alameda Street, from the repopulated Leftist Bunker to the Rue de Martyrs. Everywhere there are secret forces that could undermine us, the sectarian forces of the non-communised psyche who nurse their collective fear and distaste for traumatic suffering. Where could we have taken refuge except in a long-lost novel entitled Chevengur? Where could we settle when that burgeoning fear of intimacy eventually brought about a disdainful shutting-in? How to preserve mad love amidst the lust for the two at once of the one that knows? How could we have lived on in this timorous and translucent befogging? By means of the Law of Hospitality?

Mad love. That fecund conjunction of disgusted suicides, impeded erotomania and disarmed revolt.

Mad love. To finally accept the matheme: Psyche = Gemeinwesen.

Note

The above text was recited during a performance at the Belgrade Museum of Modern Art on 8/2/2025 as a contribution to the exhibition : Aktivitet, 100 Years of Surrealism. 

The following text by Victor Serge was pre-recorded and featured as the intro and outro to the lecture-performance. This text was scrambled/deconstructed/granulated by Ilia Belorukov of Kuda.org

Decor: Anti-Wall book cover projected as a backdrop. Author lays asleeep (or on analyst’s couch) at the foot of the backdrop. Space bathed in red light. Centre stage there is a music stand on which the text is propped.

Sequencing: Rigid form of ‘holding.’ Dream scaffolding and/or theraputic boundaries.

1) Silence
2) Serge text
3) Silence
4) Serge text scrambled
5) Silence
6) Recitation of HCE text
7) Silence
8) Serge text scrambled
9) Silence
10) Serge text
11) Silence
12) End

My dear comrades, I am afraid. I am deathly afraid whether it is worthy of a revolutionary or not. I live alone like an animal among all these woods and all this snow, which I loathe – because I am afraid. I live without a wife, because I don’t want two of us waking up at night to ask ourselves if this is the last night. I wait for them every night, all by myself, I take bromide, I go to sleep in a stupor, I wake with a start, thinking they’ve come, crying out « Who’s there ?» and the woman next door answers, « It’s the blind banging » and I can’t get back to sleep. I am afraid and I am ashamed, not of myself, but of all of us. I think of those who have been shot, I see their faces, I hear their jokes, and I have migraines that medicine has not yet named – a little pain the colour of fire fixes itself in the back of my neck. I am afraid, afraid, not so much afraid of dying as of nothing and everything – afraid to see you, afraid to talk to people, afraid to think, afraid to understand …

: from Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Penguin 1968, p.86.