hey Bill, it's Jordan, remember, i met you in NYC a few yrs ago and translated that "warning to students." MY LAST MEETING WITH GUY DEBORD Ricardo Paseyro (*) Translated from portuguese by Jordan Levinson Two months ago, Autumn inundated Auvergne with rains. Between Bellevue-la-Montaigne and Champot, you can finally see the rustic house appear; the high walls that surround it bear the proud mark of the centuries. Carved into the stone, an old symbol -- a masonic symbol of recognition. You could hardly make out the dilapidated roof, much less the patio; beyond these constructions one could glimpse a pine forest. Calm, silence, solitude: prying eyes did not venture out to the residence wherein Debord and his wife Alice Becker-Ho would receive friends with open arms. Without foreseeing that I would be the last to stay with them at that house, I went there with Georges Monti, director of the publishing house, "Le Temps Qu'il Fait" (the moment's weather -- tr.). Debord had wanted to give him a curious pair of unpublished texts. Guy put down his drink, but didn't get up -- in spite of this, his refined courtesy made the kind of strong affection connecting us even more visible . A good knot doesn't just untie itself. We went through a few books and spoke of the recent and long journey that he had made to Venice. And so began a number of days of communal feasting, readings, inquiries, bursts of laughter, and corrosive descriptions of the puppets that mediated society pumps out, dumbs down and devours. Guy's intelligence, taste, and spirit remained intact. Though he was too lucid to believe in a happy future, no bitterness entangled his memories, he censored nothing, and didn't separate his literary work from the action he took in his life. We admired together the craftiness of the present institutions, which recuperate, without assimilating, the great, fearsome artists -- the ignored, the marginal, the guerrillas, the precursors. Debord anticipated a good deal -- his own suicide would feed the smooth-over machine. The same who every day glorify the big-name conformist poets, the silly fools of fashion, the "nitpicking philosophers" -- all those bulimics of television, magazines, newspapers, awards, medals, eulogies and checks, glorifying us now in their graveyards. Are they doing this to neutralize us? He had already answered this question in his refutation of certain judgments concerning his films. "The specialists of the cinema said that my film's revolutionary politics were bad; the politicians among the left wing illusionists said that the film was bad cinema. But when one is at once a revolutionary and a filmmaker, one may easily demonstrate that the general bitterness concerning it derives from the obvious fact that the film in question is the exact critique of the society that these people did not know how to fight against, and a first example of the cinema that they do not know how to conceive of." Carefully prepared, his suicide would not bury any secrets: Debord refused to the sickness the right to take away his independence. He was not a "mysterious" man, he was a rare,being, impossible to dominate, coerce or manipulate. His freedom alienated no one -- not even life, which he loved, nor death, which conquered him. With a lively passion for the true poets, a translator of Jorge Manrique, and attracted to outlaws, Debord wrote me a letter full of premonition, which I should have understood. "I've found at last the reference in that decent book of Byron's. I will cite the passage. 'Cervantes and Quevedo both knew Alonso Alvarez de Soria, the Francois Villon of the hampa (underworld) of Seville... The last poem of Alvarez was written not long before his death, provoked by the same sickness of the throat that would kill Pedro Vasquez They give me three hours to live They will escort me to my death And, having seen that the road is long, They insist on not leaving early. Ah, how sweet this time that is left to me sounds; Who owes so much, indeed little can he pay. Debord asked me, "This glorious Alvarez de Soria, has he ever been published?" Leaning over the Seine -- Where Alice Becker-Ho would scatter the ashes of Guy Debord, throwing them from the edge of the Vert-Galant -- I would answer: no. Like it is in these our days, in those times as well, fearless publishers were few and far between. *Author of the Eulogy of illiteracy
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