On Rainbows and Space: A Manifiesta to Inclusively Explain a Particular lifestyle

I'm a firm believer that life (as i know it) runs it's course through episodes.

They always have notable beginnings and noteable ends. I wrote this last winter after three months of walking barefoot as often as possible, fearlessly screaming more, and learning how to be a solitary voice. I learned about monsters and faulkner's insight on femininity and what having an experience was and how to teach the babies and about valerie solonas.
i have been shut out of where i signed on to live, assuming it to be the perfect environment (the arts and social change house -- i should have run that shit and i just wanted to run it to the ground for its exclusivity) and totally unable to even have a decent night sleep without fearing the disturbance of others, myself, or my work.
so while hayley mason was shouting from the rooftops she climbed on about rainbows i was shouting about space and together we began to piece together what we believed was the separation between our way of living from what we called "the man village" (from the jungle book. 'i don't want to go back to the man village! i want to be here in the jungle!)
eventually everyone has to encounter or live within the man village, but that doesn't mean you can't fuck some shit up in it.

i'm going to begin to post this in sections. there are six, including the preface.

Preface: Finding the Space to be Angry

In the Summer of 2008, I watched a film about Valarie Solonas, “I Shot Andy Warhol”. She was a homeless prostitute, a lesbian, a victim of child molestation, and most notably the writer of the S.C.U.M. manifesto (the Society for Cutting Up Men). This woman was driven by anger against men and privilege. She had a chance encounter with Andy Warhol, and thought that since he ran the apex of intellectual counter-culture-- the Factory -- that through him, her work, her art, and her design would be heeded and acted upon.

However the particular elitism of the Factory drowned her out, ripped her art from her, and used her for their own design – chewed her up, spat her out, left her humiliated and with nothing. Sitting in a living room with my male lover, some close friends, and a bottle of whiskey to share among us, I watched and sympathized with Valarie. Throughout her whole life, she was left dangling on a fringe of society. No one gave her any room to stretch, breathe, wiggle into security. So she tried to make her own room.

“Yeah, he was controlling my life, I had to do it,”
Her character told the police man immediately after the shooting, placing the bagged gun in into his arms. So I got angry for her. I got drunk for her. I started to yell at the screen:
“I would have shot Andy too!”
I started telling my friends:
“He was controlling her life. She just needed for someone to hear her,”
I told my lover:
“I hate men. I don’t hate you because you’re a man – but I hate men!”
I passed out for the rest of the night. The movie finished at 4pm.

I couldn’t take it. She was totally crazy. She was absolutely bat shit, but then again, I would have been just as crazy if I was allowed no space, no voice, no protection.

"It's not when you realise that nothing can help you- religion, pride, anything- It's when you realise that you don't need any aid"
-William Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury (80)

Those who are deemed crazy are ‘driven’ so by, as the rhetoric implies, an active, signified connotation. There is no fault of the individual for his agency performed in response to this drive. Even still, ‘crazy’ is what they call you when you pose a threat to comfortable standards. Why are we not threatened by the ‘dysfunctional’? We are made aware by the definition that to be dysfunctional signifies that one is literally unable to function in a society. If we are ‘driven crazy’— given that under this label, one is allowed a particular space to use that is no one else’s— why not push at the walls you have been blocked into? Working in that space— pushing in that space— is still function; it is still your capacity. Why not claim what you have been allowed if you are allowed nothing else? How else will the world hear what you say, respect what you do, or be ‘driven’ to function with you?

It is with this goal that I write my Manifiesta. I gave this name to my progeny because this medium (from my consciousness to your consciousness), as Marshall McLuhan would put it, is an extension of me. My images and words have every right to be interpreted by any definition or representation that you may associate them with, respectively. What can be considered by communication, if not the bridge that was built between two conscious beings? You may not ever reach what lies beyond the bridge, but how can you expect to comprehend or experience a different environment any other way?

What is deemed monstrous is often based on context, without the consideration for the form – the medium, the bridge. We make the progeny (the context we assign) hideous. My Manifiesta explores my own conception and responses to the rhetoric of monstrosity, agency, and being. Therefore, I will be working with my own personal definitions. That being said, my work should be taken as a literary device. I say this because Valerie Solanas didn't retract from the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, and claim that her work was a literary device until after she was doing time for shooting Andy Warhol, and in case I ever get that angry I don't want for it to hurt my work. This device is for me to extend myself celebrate of my methods for living. This is my wildness, my craziness, my flirtation, my challenge, and my good time with the world.
I want for reading this to feel memorable.
I want for people to look back and think “that was so intense. I almost threw up, man”
Welcome to my party of (and for) a cause; I hope we get to dance.