Tuesday, 05 March 2013
By isis
In travel
tags: france travels
Sometimes life is a bit strange.
A dear friend of mine, from France was recently denied their visa into the
United States. Words can’t justify my rage at this; that there still exists
borders, that some pompous, fascistic bureaucrats on a powertrip atop their
damned Hill would dare say that a friend of mine may not go with me to my
land, where I am from, where they callously and childishly dictate their
useless and unconsensual laws. It’s my land, you fucking bastards. Mine. Not
yours. You are the ones who are unwelcome.
But as I said, strange things happen.
Dijon, France
I didn’t plan to move to France. My friend, the one who I intended to bring to
San Francisco, couldn’t come back to the States with me, as I mentioned. And
so I found myself in Dijon, France, at the house of another anarchist
hacker. @ioerror is always saying that every
great cypherpunk is afflicted with a terrible maladie. Our host had the
terrible misfortune of having ears which are way too sensitive, so much so
that they cannot leave their home, and the sound of a glass clinking is such
torture that they use earplugs and wrap a towel around their head to do the
dishes. I found myself here:
Our host, with earplugs and a hat on their head, is laughing quietly at an SMS
from some dude, requesting
“ Born in a hopless world”
to be tattooed across his chest.
“ A world without hops, like one without the Tor network, would be a sad
world indeed!” Our friend joked.
The next morning, they brought me a steel tray, and announced, “Ton petit
déjeuner” . On it was a sealed vial of some transparent reddish liquid,
labelled with chemical numbers in French and with some Latin, a three
centimeter hypodermic needle and a syringe, both wrapped in plastic autoclave
packaging, and an alcohol swab.
“ I don’t know why the French do not believe in B12. Perhaps because there are
no vegans here.” he said.
I slowly pushed the needle into the muscle of my right thigh. All three
centimeters, through the skin, then with that strange popping feeling through
the centimeter or so of fatty tissue, then with slight pain — but a really
wonderful pain — all the way, as far as the needle would go, into my
muscle. I pulled back the plunger of the syringe a bit to test if blood came
into the chamber. There wasn’t blood; I hadn’t hit a vein. I emptied the
syringe into my leg, and felt a sticky warmth spreading very slowly from the
place. A cold sweat started in my hands and face, and I set the syringe down
onto the tray, laying back onto the black leather couch with my pants at my
ankles and a spot of blood blooming on my thigh.
That afternoon I found myself at Les Taneries, one of the largest squathouses
I’ve ever seen. An old leather factory in the centre of Dijon, with a building
the size of an airplane hangar attached to it.
Complete, of course, with the usual iconoclastic accoutrements of a old
squat. In this case, rows of mobile individual living spaces in various states
of disrepair parked along the main hall of the hangar.
In side rooms, I found a few other gems of anarchist squatter living: several
geodesic domes, a climbing wall, a silk-trapeze practice studio, a bicycle
repair soup kitchen, and a room where the walls were lined with trampolines
(including the ceiling) with a punk literally bouncing off the walls on a
crappy BMX bicycle. Most of which I forgot to take pictures of because I was
way to excited about climbing and playing on them.
Grenoble, France
Later that day, we made it to Grenoble.
Grenoble is crossed by two rivers, le Drac et l’Isère , “the lion and the
serpent”, and all the wonderful historic, Baphometic references that go along
with it.¹
¹ The iconography
derives from biblical texts, in particular Psalm 91:13: super aspidem et
basiliscum calcabis conculcabis leonem et draconem in the Latin
Vulgate. Literally: “The asp and the basilisk you will trample under foot, you
will tread on the lion and the dragon.”
I thought of it because, in current day black
masses, mostly in the Ordo Templi Orientis and Argentum Astrum orders,
Aleister Crowley’s Liber
XV is followed and those in attendance are expected to eat cakes made with
the menstrual blood of witches, and announce, “I believe in the Lion and
the Serpent, mystery of mystery, whose name is Baphomet.”
