Grass Cracking the Pavement
Naked Punch, before a mere product, a literary object, or a
static commodity, is first and foremost an action and a stretching-towards.
It is certainly a testimony to the culture of this age, but
it describes and discloses the multiplicity of progressive voices
transcending the role of mere recorder; Naked Punch openly addresses
and brings to analysis the contemporary social and cultural
sphere, it refuses to accept, it brings into doubt, it asks
questions.
Just this characteristic of movement lends the publication
its political dimension.
It is necessary not to stop. It so happens that a body left
motionless, in static self-satisfaction, has the rather annoying
tendency to rot. The germs of what we may unashamedly call evil,
seem to be sleepless workers perpetually at play, waiting for
others to fall asleep, rising high at the church bells of profit,
setting to labour as treachery can be perpetuated, betraying
society and sublimating its role in one of personal imposition
and red-handed material accumulation.
Questions. The Cartesian daemon taking on the mantel of the
saviour. That holy “why?”, that holy dissatisfaction and that
most holy experience of insufficiency, that refusal to follow,
that leaving of the queue, that departure, and that undertaking
of a new route. Lu Xun; “it is walking men that forge the route”.
For a question holds immense power; a question discloses error,
makes error come-alive, creates the conditions for error, renders
it visible, tangible, a question provokes bodily reaction, it
stimulates awareness, increases the gaze, it situates person-hood,
participates in the creation of the social multiplicity of conscious
person-hoods, it moulds the skeleton of alert society, it challenges
consensus and awakens the consenter, it liberates vital forces
subdued and restrained, it breaks deadly silence… its screams—the
dawn , the wake, and the breeze.
Questions, like grass cracking the pavement. That vegetation
within the city walls growing unplanned, those weeds dotting
a brick wall, the climbing green engulfing an old house – a
challenge to consented planning, the development of a force
both external and in opposition to the established order, a
living and vital energy that is in continuous expansion, a power
that is not stuck, a force that is not a thing but a movement
of growth, plastic and malleable, in self-doubt, in process
of becoming, always to-be.
Grass cracking the pavement. That natural uncanny. Alien life,
life outside of control, life that does not obey and surrender
to dominion; and life that physically breaks and disrupts the
familiar order, that technological and societal laying of the
table; life, that, through the anarchic liberation of a patch
of earth, raises problems.
The seed of dissent—grass cracking the pavement.
Fukuyama’s claim to fame is the ridiculous contention that
the end of history has finally been reached with developed Western
liberal capitalism. There may nonetheless be a partial, albeit
unintended, terrifying truth in this statement.
The West is morally stuck.
Political variation, belief in what went for the name of “progress”,
has in its fall from grace placated sentiments of reject, sentiments
of not-being-enough, the will to shape and to transform – sentiments
bringing in their wake a most fundamental perception of the
wrong to be amended. The capacity to see wrong, the perception
of the wrong forcing our bodies to stand up and walk, decisively,
towards eternal Spanish windmills; but to have moved, to have
caused a smile, to have assumed an armour because of that, that
No followed by that energetic stance…
And who gains? For a pacified mass of entertained, falls at
the first winter breeze like the dry leaves of an autumn tree…
Lorenzo Marsili
Rome, January 2006