2/ Left-handed blows

"All the decisive blows are struck left-handed."
-- Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street


2/ Left-handed blows

Left-handed blows are ideas that tear vents in the facade of accepted reality. They blow convention to smithereens. They knock the entire universe exactly one foot to the left – or the right. Left-handed blows have nothing to do with politics, and yet politics is controlled ultimately and entirely by left-handed blows.

Left-handed blows come from Rimbaud, Basho, Benjamin, Apollinaire, Joyce, Kerouac, Lao Tzu, Beckett, Trungpa, Eliade, Whitman, Gautama, Molly Bloom, Emma Bovary and many others known and unknown. They come from crazy people, enemies, allies, lovers. From the sun and moon, from the planets and stars, up from under the earth.

Left-handed blows come like lightning, like water, like dreams. Left-handed blows sometimes curve all the way around and appear to come from the right. In any case, left-handed blows always come from the void, from the far reaches of the dusty nebulae, from inside the chest.

They are magnificent, astonishing, ultra-simple, silent and empty. Left-handed blows are beyond interpretation, even this interpretation.