1
Anarchist individualism as we understand it – and I say we because a substantial handful of friends think this like me – is hostile to every school and every party, every churchly and dogmatic moral, as well as every more or less academic imbecility. Every form of discipline, rule and pedantry is repulsvie to the sincere nobility of our vagabond and rebellious restlessness!
Individualism is, for us, creative force, immortal youth, exalting beauty, redemptive and fruitful war. It is the marvelous apotheosis of the flesh and the tragic epic of the spirit. Our logic is that of not having any. Our ideal is the categorical negation of all other ideals for the greatest and supreme triumph of the actual, real, instincti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In anarchism, beyond the two different philosophical concepts, the communistic and the individualistic, that divide it in the theoretical sphere, there are two spiritual and physical instincts—indeed, of life practically and materially experienced—which serve to distinguish two temperaments that are wholly common property to both theoretical and philosophical tendencies. Although both children of the same social suffering, we have two different instincts that give us two different forms of suffering, of hedonistic origin.
There are those (communists and individualists) who suffer—as Nietzsche would say—through an over-abundance of life and those who suffer from the impoverishment of life. Those communist and i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The social thought saturated with the revolutionary dynamic that the social-political concept of libertarian communists radiates breaks through the universal depth of human pain to intertwine in an almost monistical embrace with the higher and vaster psycho-spiritual concept of anarchist individualism yearning for the definitive and radical Anarchy.
But Anarchy being a “final absolute” in full harmony with the infinite idea and communism a “relative” social, juridical passage flowing into economic empiricism—therefore prelude and promise but not full musical harmony and epic finale—it happens that the flourishing children of the two theoretical currents of social becoming continue to wrangle, still... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
Black flags in the wind
stained with blood and sun
Black flags in the sun
howling of glory in the wind
We need to return to the origins. To drink at the ancient fountains.
We need to return to heroic anarchism, to individual, violent, reckless, poetic, decentering audacity...
And we need to return with every bit of our modern instinct, every bit of our new conception of life and beauty, every bit of our healthy and lucid pessimism, which is not renunciation or powerlessness, but a thriving flower of exuberant life. We are the true nihilists of reality and the spiritual builders of ideal worlds
We are destructive philosophers and creative poets.
We walk in the night
with a s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I was lying on my purple bed — I don’t know for how long — , but I couldn’t relax. My temples throbbed, my forehead burned as if with fever, in my brain a jumble of murky thoughts whirled, and, cursing, I vainly implored Morpheus to gather me up in his arms.
Suddenly, I saw the door of my room burst open, and gently, an Unpredictable entered.
I looked at her: her beautiful, deep eyes held all the secrets of the sky and all the mysteries of the seas. Her hair was long and blond. The perfume of the ripe pomegranate wafted from her mouth, awaiting the eager bite. Her rosy hands were fine and transparent, and her tiny feet were white and graceful.
Who was she? I don’t know. Only she was differe... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dedicated to the rabble.
The fall of peoples and of humanity
will be the signal of my elevation. — Max Stirner
The restless, questioning spirit of the new human beings can no longer nurture themselves on Socrates’ historical hemlock and Christ’s legendary cross.
These two sacrifices, which have now fortunately fallen into the deep chasms of a shadowy past, were — undoubtedly — consummated completely at the expense of vigorous individualities, straining and throbbing manifestations of free life.
And I profess that, in contrast to Socrates and Christ, Diogenes himself seems to me to be a truly great innovator, since his wine cask has a different and much deeper meaning than Socr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) So the wisdom of the putrefied cowardishly neither sneers nor scandalizes the idiot chastity of the good little girl.
I am a precocious adolescent who after having completed a long voyage through the phosphorescent labyrinths of the most frightening depths, go back upon the vertex to sing in the sun the sacrilegious and proud song of my still young and therefore free life.
Someone has said to me: “You will be maiden, then wife, then mother!...” So, I responded, with a question: What are you trying to say, maiden, wife and mother? I won’t say here that which was answered to me; I only know that to think of it I laugh, yes, I still laugh. Love understood as a mission!? The maiden wife and mother? No, no, no! I... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) My freedom and my rights
As much as my capacity of power
Even the felicity and greatness
I have only in the measure of my strength!
(From a book I have written that will never see the light)
The expropriator is the most beautiful figure, male, unscrupulous, and virile that I have ever found in anarchism. He is the one who has naught to attend to. He is the one who has no altar on which to sacrifice himself. He glorifies only Life with the philosophy of Action. I met him in a distant midday in August while the sun embroidered in gold the giant green nature, perfumed and festive, singing playful songs of pagan beauty.
He said, “I was always a restless spirit, vagabond and rebellious. I have studied people and t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “I love you most of all, when the joy flees from your oppressed brow; when your heart drowns itself in horror, when the horrible cloud of the past extends over your present.”
— Charles Baudelaire
I am a strange, cursed poet.
Everything that is abnormal and perverse has a morbid allure for me.
My spirit — a venomous butterfly with divine features — is attracted to the sinful scents that waft out from the flowers of evil.
Today I sing of the perverse beauty of a “female” — of one of our females that I have never possessed and will never possess...
Now she wanders, nameless, forgotten and ignored, through the twisted paths of life, with such a deep, d... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I have always been the one that I was, and I will always be the one that I could be; for two relative subjects alone are true: the sun could not become the moon, but if by some chance it should become it, it would no longer be the sun. So who is it that wishes to divert my course?
Do not dam the river, if you have good sense.
Let the joyous violence rush along its tranquil bed. Don’t you see how merrily it sings as it hastens towards its ocean?
I say to you, wise ones: Do not make tragic what can be cheerful. That would be an injury to everything, but the worst harm would be at the expense of human beauty.
And let this be said once again to the too-long ears of the ancient aristocracy, for it is not only a ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
I am an individualist because I am an anarchist; and I am an anarchist because I am a nihilist. But I also understand nihilism in my own way...
I don’t care whether it is Nordic or Oriental, nor whether or not is has a historical, political, practical tradition, or a theoretical, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual one. I call myself a nihilist because I know that nihilism means negation.
Negation of every society, of every cult, of every rule and of every religion. But I don’t yearn for Nirvana, any more than I long for Schopenhauer’s desperate and powerless pessimism, which is a worse thing than the violent renunciation of life itself. Mine is an enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flam... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Crime is the vigorous manifestation of the full, complete, exuberant life that wants to freely expand itself and rejoice beyond every rule and boundary, not recognizing obstacles either in persons or in things...
And it is precisely this, this esthetic side of crime, that redeems it, exalts it, and raises it into the clear and sparkling light of a genuine work of art.
T. Brunetti
I
The black news of the Torinese newspapers of last September 26 had to and wanted to concern itself with the capture of five of our best known comrades who fell into the slimy clutches of the police while – according to “precise information” that reached the same – went out in a “very elegant car” ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “All who appear suspicious, hostile and dangerous to the good bourgeois,” Stirner said, “could be brought together under the name ‘vagabond’; every vagabond way of life displeases the bourgeoisie. And there are also intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling place of their fathers seems too cramped in and oppressive for them to be content any more with its restricted space and so go to find more space and light far away. Instead of remaining curled up in the family cave stirring the ashes of moderate opinion, instead of accepting what has given comfort and relief to thousands of generations as irrefutable truth, they go beyond all the boundaries of tradition and run wild with their impudent critici... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The people who desire to be themselves
never know where they are going.
..................................
The final outcome of knowledge consists in recognizing
that the soul of man is unknowable.
Without being an imitator of rabid Papinian[1] cynicism or a superficial and perfumed "voluptuary" like Guido Da Verona; without feeling the ironic skepticism and the sorrowful bitterness of Mario Mariani on my lips; I feel and affirm that life cannot be at all worthy of the name if we do not live it as Artists, as Rebels, as Heroes.
Schopenhauer, in his powerful and frightful volumes of metaphysics, is anxious to show us that Life is sad and that for this reason it isn’t worth the trouble of li... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “There existed nothing more than Beauty and Strength but the brutes and the weak invented, to equalize themselves, Justice.”
Raffaele Valente
I believed it was a frightening dream and instead it’s a bloody reality.
I am besieged and compressed within a twofold circle of the obsessed and mad.
The world is one pestulant church covetous and slimy where all have an idol to fetishistically adore and an altar on which to sacrifice themself.
Also those who ignited the iconoclastic pyre in order to burn the cross on which the man God was nailed, they have still not understood either the outcry of life nor the roar of Freedom.
After Jesus Christ, from the pit of his legend, spit on the ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) No deals. In integrity, in fullness, in beauty, living resolutely -Wolfgang Goethe
Those who have not descended at least once into the abyss of the darkest sorrow or amid the delirium of the blackest despair, who have not courageously spoken face to face with death to then find in Crime the supreme inspiration of the moment that exalts and purifies the strong, heroic victim who loves, who craves, who desires; I am certain, they will never understand me. Anyone who has spent his pitiful existence in the environmental mud of common and vulgar mediocrity, where the resigned, powerless moles vegetate, emasculated by all the cowardly conventionalism, cannot understand — even if dressed in red — the satanic cry of those who... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) To the friends of Nichilismo
Memories
“My youth was just a dark hurricane
passed through here and there by brilliant suns;
the lightning and the rain wreaked so much havoc,
that few vermilion fruits were left in my garden.”
— Charles Baudelaire
In a distant spring, gleaming with green and sun, my youthful spirit wandered gently through the divine forests of the sky. One day, a sad day in autumn, it came back to me, disconsolate, weeping. A groups of Angels with large, black wings accompanied it silently. It told me: “God is dead! The great Pan is dead!” The Sun went dark, rivers filled with mud, and plants trembled. Darkness wrapped the Earth in her funeral shroud. Then... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I have left the life of the plain forever. — Henrik Ibsen
1
Even the purest springs of Life and Thought that gush fresh and laughing among the rocks of the highest mountains to quench the thirst of Nature’s chosen ones, when discovered by the demagogic shepherds of the hybrid bourgeois and proletarian flocks, quickly become fetid, filthy, slimy pools. Now it is individualism’s turn! From the vulgar scab to the idiotic and repulsive cop, from the miserable sellout to the despicable spy, from the cowardly slave afraid to fight to the repugnant and tyrannical authority, all speak of individualism.
It is in fashion!
Scrawny pseudo-intellectuals of tubercular liberal conservatism, like the chronic de... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) GOD: The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart.
HUMANITY: An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and imbeciles.
COUNTRY: Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent-slanderer and scoffer at heroes.
FAMILY: The denial of love, life and liberty.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
“Verily, there is yet a future for evil too. And the hottest noon has not yet been discovered for man.”
— F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra[1]
I am alone, I am alone! Alone and distant...
But what does it all matter?
Yes, what does it matter to me?
The vast and boundless wilderness stretches out around me, and here — amid the sun’s golden rays — firs and pines sing their strange songs composed from symphonies of silence and the music of mystery...
I am singing too.
I am singing the song of my bleeding truths for all the bloodstained minds. I am singing the song of my greatest, most desperate noon: I am singing the dog day poem of my hott... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There are those who maintain that the human being is by nature a social being. Others maintain that the human being is by nature anti-social.
Well, I admit that I have never been able to clearly understand what they meant by their “by nature,” but I have understood that both sides are wrong, since the human being is social and anti-social at the same time.
Need, want, affection, love and sympathy are the elements that push him toward sociability and union.
The craving for independence and the desire for freedom push her toward solitude and individualism. But, while individualism operates and is realized against society, society defends itself from its attacks. The war between “societarianism” and... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dear “Libertario”,
Twenty-two months by now are passed from the day in which the most brutal and viscid of all monsters attempted to sweep me up also between its lurid and bloody maws. Yes, even I was destined to being transformed into a humble instrument of bestial servilism; even I was destined to sacrifice myself (Oh, the sacrificial beasts) on the most stupid and grotesque altar of all the human phantoms; even I was destined to being transformed into a “piece of human material”...
But I do not believe in destiny.
Not even in fate do I believe! No! I believe only in my capacity of potential! And it is only in name of this that I answered with an arrogant and scornful “NO” distinctl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) To comrade Carlo Molaschi with strength of mind and serenity of thought
I
I don’t want to dictate moral maxims to my “neighbor,” or teach anyone anything... I leave this task to the missionaries of all faiths, the priests of all churches, the demagogues of all parties, the apostles of all ideas.
I only want to howl my extreme rebellion against everything that oppresses me; I only want to push far away from me everything that the religious, socialist, or libertarian priesthood wants to impose on my individuality without me having freely accepted and wanted it.
Digging into the underground of my depths, I have been able to penetrate the mystery of my “I” (emotional—spiritual&mdas... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
A spasm... A palpitation...
The Dawn rises from the brown bed of shadow and unties her blond braids in the laughing green morning.
Beautiful Dawn!
May she rain golden light on the white buds of the mysterious morning...
A morning of Life and Death, of love and perversity...
Yesterday evening when dusk fell and the vagabond spirits left the earth of Death to enter through paths of Silence and meditate on the luminous mysterious of the night, I created from Nothing the perverse object of my purest Love.
Now I have killed the Woman I created.
And I killed her because I loved her too much...
Her corpse lies at my feet, hideously twisted, with an everlasting red wound in her snow-w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Man owes his arm to the Republic, his intelligence to the gods, his person to the family; but the feelings of his heart are free. So wrote Plato. But I don’t agree with any of this except what relates to the feeling of the heart; the rest, aside from being very questionable, could also be detestable.
Troilus wrote: I don’t want to be myself, or have knowledge of what I feel. And I note with bitter sadness that there are so many who have carried out this terrifying curse of his, and, what is worse, who want to impose it as the gospel of life on their children.
The one who has found himself again hears songs of freedom and victory echoing in the depths of his spirit.
If God did not exist, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Until the day will come we remain highheaded and all that which we can do we won’t allow to be done before us
— W.Goethe
We make the pen red hot in the volcanic fire of the spirit of our negating; We dip it in our vigorous heart, swollen with rebellious blood and, in the atheist light of our spirit, we write, we write... We write then, rapidly, without going through literary research, without repugnant theoretical ideologies, without bigots and the sentimental mush from hysterics and politicos, wrapped only in the mantle of our furious passion!
We write only words of blood, of fire and of light!
Screech, graze o my coarse pen of fire and of energy upon the white candor of this sheet, as a viper to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Translator’s Note
In order to preserve the poetic integrity of this text, I did not conform it to contemporary standards of “political correctness”. I have also translated the introduction to the 1993 Italian edition of Verso il Nulla Creatore, which was the basis of my translation. A brief biographical note and a reminiscence from Novatore’s comrade, Enzo Martucci are included to give a feel for the man and his life.
Translator’s Introduction
It is difficult to find anarchist works in English that are at the same time “individualist” and explicitly revolutionary, that emphasize the centrality of the aim of individual self-determination to a revolution that will “communalize m... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This is the hour of my nocturnal thoughts.
My Demon sleeps.
Sleeps in the dark twilight.
of this soul of mine
The red Demon
of my infernal joy.
I Smoke...
I Smoke desperately,
intensely. Always!
Always! Always! Always!
I wished to think, to write, to sing...
But my Demon sleeps.
Sleeps in the dark twilight
of this soul of mine
The red Demon
of my infernal joy.
And the thoughts do not come...
Not even the laughter and the malediction!
And this is my black hour
Of black melancholy
* * *
I watch, distractedly, my cigarette.
Slender, pallid and warm
Like a sick lover.
I watch it being consumed very slowly
like my life and my dreams:
like the life and the dreams of all ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Premise. Even through the exterminated moor of the barren desert flowers germinate. Wild flowers that emanate sinful perfumes and that stick their thorns to bloody the same hands of those who collect them, but yet they that have their grandiose history of joy, of pain and of love. I repeat: they are flowers strange and savage that arose from the creative nothing, were fertilized by the sun and later slammed by the the hurricane, cruelly so!
These flowers are thoughts germinating in the meditative solitude and deep in my spirit while towards the outside, in the world that no longer belongs to me the madness rages furiously furrowed from the electrifying fire of the lightning that breaks implacable.
And I, impenitent vagabond, w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) To “the Goliard”[1] of Umanitá Nova[2]
“I strike you without anger or hatred, like a butcher, like Moses struck the rock!”
— Charles Baudelaire
I
Oh, good “Goliard”, come — come to me!
Come and listen to the sublime verses of my perverse, cursed lyre. Come and listen to the laughter of my melancholy...
What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of ?
Could you be afraid of the livid, yellow fires of my sulfurous hells?
Could you be afraid of the mysterious winds of my symbolic peaks?
Don’t you understand me?
“Couldn’t I be a false chord in the divine symphony, thanks to the consuming irony that s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)