Reclaiming Public Reality
1997 version. Originally published in The Cherotic (r)Evolutionary issue # 1 as “Nonlinear Bits” in 1996.
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We went to the movies…Pasolini’s Arabian Nights at Berkeley’s alternative theatre. Eating candy, drinking Coke, rubbing each other, pleasure maintained almost until the end of the movie, then quiet coming, thrilling gentle pleasure explosions. Just an ordinary night at the movies. Rubbing for enjoyment, just like eating popcorn. Taking public reality back into personal reality is the magical effect of such public acts, which are made invisible to the surrounding reality by the personal everyday nature of such acts, instead of being reactive confrontations. The reason closest to the surface for such acts in public places is the physical expression of enjoying of friends and lovers and humans just being together. But these invisible private/public acts of pleasure become a powerful force for effective political/social/cultural change when they collide on their own with life-denials. The effectiveness of such personal pleasure acts, which are in reality sexual or cherotic magic, is in the fact that they are not reactive, confrontational, or an exhibition of specialness or difference. Not wrapping ourselves in the glamour of being kinky, perverted, or evil and thereby falsely creating ourselves into an elite above the common human. Being reactionary always chains you to the old reality to which you are reacting.
Instead, these acts of personal magic are creating the alternative reality which we want, reclaiming freedom by acting free, calling forth yin energy by using yin energy. The fact that the feminist movement in the ’70s and ’80s on the whole didn’t use this channel of change created limits to the transformation of gender.
This is reclaiming public reality, returning it to personal freedom. We have done these rubbing good feeling acts of humanness and subversion at baseball games, in the middle of the sidewalk in the afternoon, on trains and planes. For months, five of us sat in the middle of a coffeehouse, playing cards, drinking coffee, kissing, rubbing one another into a pleasure trance. Just everyday human living.
Because our attitude to our playing is that it is just everyday human living, we were invisible. No one saw, noticed, or complained. Because the art of invisibility is tricky, I am stopping short of advocating such radical acts unless you are prepared for any outcome. Such invisible action does not have to be at this degree of revolutionary intensity to be effective. Every time you kiss or hug or laugh or smile out in the “public” world, every time you wear colorful sexy revealing clothes, or do not wear a bra (or just wearing one), or any lusty joyful act, you are performing a very powerful magical/political action the effects of which can not be deleted by any linear means.