letlukego.wordpress/ LETTER FROM LUKE O’DONOVAN Comrades, I will try to be brief; those of you who know me know I have a tendency to blather on and, though there would be a certain poetic humor in my imprisoning you all for the duration of a lengthy speech, I will save such annoyances for when I can be present and can counterbalance them in person. I’ll try to keep to what seems important. I must begin by acknowledging the astounding show of support I’ve been receiving from close friends and absolute strangers alike. Although many across the country have provided me with invaluable support, I will single out, for a moment, what has come from the Triangle. Though I can hardly say I’m surprised at it — as many of my closest friends and most respected comrades call this place home — what I’ve received in support from you has been incredibly inspiring. From dance parties to brunches, there has been no small sum of money sent my way, but the value I place on these actions far outweighs even that. My thanks could never be quantified. From floods of letters to news reports, I’ve received a plethora of smile-coaxing material, and too many books for me to receive. I’d ask not to be sent any more books for some time! Even letters, an essential form of support, are getting to be too many to answer. One of the major functions of prisons is the inscription of a certain discipline upon bodies contained within them. It is by rendering prisoners in their weakest possible formation, that of the isolated individual, that prison is able to achieve this. Letters cut through that isolation, allowing prisoners to hold on to convictions that are necessary for any opposition to the social order; convictions that would otherwise be lost to rehabilitation. It’s for this reason I’d like to encourage you all to continue to write prisoners, even if I personally might be too busy to respond. There are many who haven’t got the type of support I do and so feel the pressures of prison more acutely. I would like to make explicit, here, that I place no value on charity work and reject the position that imagines something essential and revolutionary about the prisoner. Prisoners are no more the revolutionary subject than workers or people of color, and there is nothing essential about criminality that ought to be ascribed value. So, I urge you, don’t shy away from theoretical or political topics in your letters, be open with your intentions and oppositions. These are the types of discussions that can turn a correspondence from an act of charity to an act of war and change we imprisoned correspondents from victims to combatants. I’ve alluded to a war above, a war many of you have acknowledged is going on and within which many of you have decided to become partisans. I am an anarchist and a communist and a part of what that means is that I have committed myself to living and creating a form of life which is made impossible by the current social order. My entire life, like many of yours, will be in conflict with that order which will no doubt lead me back to the situation I’m in now. For this reason the truest form of support for me, the only form of solidarity with me, is any act in conflict with this order, an act that contributes to a strategy of the destruction of prisons and to the abolition of imprisonment. As long as a single prison stands, there will be those who want me in it. Don’t let my mention of strategy be lost in passing; don’t let it be ignored. I realize among anarchists there is a reluctance to think on the level of strategy. We must abandon the aesthetic romanticization of misery and rebellion. Don’t let it be said, however, that I argue for a cold and rational strategy which has numbed me. Beauty, poesy, and sincerity are among the things I love most, but my love for them is a mourning love. The beauty of misery has been lost. Beckett wrote the eulogy of misery, and no medium has expressed it since. It is not that misery and beauty have gone from this world, but that we have. There are no poets these days because poesy has been caged. There are no poets. They have become strategists; they are all off at war for the sake of poesy itself. This war is at stake in every action we take. Each action confirms one ethic or another, and it is only by elaborating our own that we might become anything but liberal subjects, that we might choose our own side. So, let us realize that the enemy with which we contend does not stand as a subject facing us, but exists as an environment hostile to us. We must therefore live a life at war, within and against this environment. For the proliferation of worlds, for the Faeries, for the desert to bloom, build the Commune. Build the Party. Caged but never tamed, Luke O’Donovan
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 09:31:47 +0000
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