When they said, “Rachel, one must be this or that,” she replied that she is neither, or both. When they said, “Patience, parties, movements, and a well-established hierarchy are necessary for our triumph,” she said, “We need instead riots, total war, and the destruction of the totems that have created your priestly relationship with life.” When they demanded orthodoxy, she said, “being ruled is being ruled, control is control.”
Thus I wrote in the foreword to The New Reaction, Rachel Haywire’s recently published collection of essays (Arktos, 2015). I only know Rachel from her words, and most thoroughly from the words in this book; but Rachel has been around the nomos for a long while, popping up in one unruly place after another to burn a bridge or two and then move on. As said some perp on Amazon, Haywire got in tight with some nazi dudes and then posted a bunch of porno on their sanctified website. Now, I have no care in the world to know if it is true, only to say I’d be disappointed to find that it is not.
What’s funny about the episode is that the slavish crusader who wrote the single-star review for The New Reaction used it as evidence that Rachel is … a racist? The fact that he said nothing about Futurism, drama, theatricality, radical autonomy, chaos, order, or orthodoxy tells me two things: 1. That he’s a clod that doesn’t have a proper relation to Rachel’s body of work and therefore has no business dismissing her book on a public site, and 2. That he didn’t read my foreword, which I can assure you, is worth whatever price the book demands, whether cosmic, physiological, or monetary.
I perked up on Rachel when she wrote a scathing exit letter, of sorts, that castigated men on the Right political fringe for being less manly than she is. This letter was passed around the various web-based revolutionary cadres, and the crazy hyper-masculine squadristi, who won’t lift a finger to actually change anything they complain about all day, were ready to assassinate the poor girl. So, I checked it out, and immediately became a fan. Rachel and I don’t share a vocabulary or even methodology – nor do I with Greg Johnson or Alain de Benoist for that matter, but we do share a common defiance in the face of slavishness. We share a desire to start a fight, because that fight just might be the fuse that ignites an overcoming so profound that we will be unable to turn back to the bridge we just crossed.
What did Tyler Durden say? “At least Rachel is trying to hit rock bottom.” Poor Tyler Durden. The true lesson of Fight Club isn’t that megalomania and mild tyranny is the risk run by anyone who escapes, but that men who become-fight club no longer have a need for Tyler Durden. Maybe that will be Rachel’s ultimate Zarathustran sacrifice as well. Followers demand something that only a slave could demand. As do leaders. Usually that something is docility.
This lesson escaped me when I was becoming-ultra at the price of becoming-academic. I couldn’t understand the Ultras’ brazen disregard and contempt for authority – especially because they were nominally fascists! At the time, though, I knew next to nothing about Futurism. I must have thought that arditi and Decima MAS were soldiers, lining up for reverie, tearfully saluting a flag, and taking orders. I found out later that the MAS took very few orders and hoisted their own flag above La Spezia, fighting on long after the pacification of Italy – not for a flag or an abstract grand narrative, but for themselves, for their brothers, for the thrill of battle. Less Fascists than men who fight, who embraced what war had created and unleashed in them – a defiance in the face of slavishness. For these men there was no turning back, no return to the normalcy of bourgeois life; war for them was not an abnormal intrusion into the peace and prosperity of their quotidian existence – the quiet after the storm – but was instead unhindered dancing in the storm itself, dodging the thunderbolts attracted by their bayonets and high leaps.
This affect is a style of life. Memento Audere Semper. Remember Always to Dare. It is why I write – at least as a goal. Write as a man at war, not as a priest in a tower. Write with a relationship to words that would make the boys in the MAS proud. Write like Marinetti with a dagger between my teeth and an uncorked whiskey bottle spilling from my whirling hand. But Zarathustran that I am, even if I reach the goal, I am soon ready to burn it and move on.
Complacency, what Z called, “bovine contentment,” is for priests and other Last Men. Let them have complacency. We have moonlight to murder and warring hygiene to offer the world. And we will know how few are with us when we see our old friends in retreat. Memento Audere Semper boys, for you are not who you were five minutes ago, and you never will be again!
Overcoming the last man starts at home and it starts right now.
