Loudly, so the police sirens will be abashed.
Softly, so your blood-sucking interrogator will lean in close where he can be asphyxiated by your garlic breath.
From within, so the authorities will begin to doubt themselves.
From beyond the grave, which affords some form of protection against reprisal.
Through the slogan NO, which, as nitric oxide, reduces blood pressure by expanding the veins during its brief half-life in the bloodstream.
Through songs, which spread by invisible spores and can grow six inches in a day.
In the voice of unreason, since all the reasonable men defer to whomever commands the most barking guns.
Casually, as if walking on hot coals.
Automatically, through negative phototropism.
Surreptitiously, linking to your co-conspirators only through quantum entanglement.
With an absense of authority, which calls the very logic of authority structures into question.
Joyously. Because otherwise what’s the point?
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- How to wake up
- How to eat
- How to walk
- How to listen
- How to wait
- How to breathe
- How to find things
- Manual: How to make videopoems, courtesy of Swoon
- How to lose
- How to dance
- How to procreate
- How to play
- How to listen: the movie
- How to mourn
- How to calculate
- How to grow up
- How to spit
- How to burn
- How to mourn, Belgian-style
- How to make a fist
- How to make a face
- How to sacrifice
- How to take notes
- How to talk
- How to dig
- How to sleep
- How to cast a shadow
- How to teem
- How to fit in
- How to sit
- How to panic
- How to exist
- How to drive
- How to question authority
- How to cook
- How to find things (videopoem)
- How to distress furniture
- How to meditate
- How to be a poet
“Why?” Is the question that authoritarians loathe.
The most powerful question in the world, Dave : )
Indeed it is. And the bane of ever parent with a 4-year-old.
Wonderful in whole, lovely in part. Love the negative phototropism, which is an idea that I’ve loved for sometime now, since it hints at, as other scientific findings do, such as astronomical obfusctory dust, or “dark matter” for that matter, the promise of the absence of light, which is mass and substance. A wonderful and true via negativa, that is followed by vines.
Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it in terms of the via negativa. Of course, my comparison raises the question: Is authority really all that similiar to light? Doesn’t that actually give it far more weight than it deserves?