Lorenzo Lamas – South Stockholm’s Book Of Death
(This is a translation of Södra Stockholms dödsbok, published by the mysterious and notorious Högdalen Business School. The original text can be found here.
Lorenzo Lamas, guest professor at Högdalen Business School, presented us with a broken text, the first part clear and concentrated, and in the second part a stiff genre-formalism sets in. The reason for this is probably that the author wanted to publish the text in some glossy business magazine. However, this forces me to modify the text, delete some repetetive and stereotypical parts, save the essentials, and so change a little bit of the meaning, or at least change the form in which this mix of theory, satire and lived literature is presented in.
South Stockholm’s Book Of Death can be read as a continuation of a theme common to christian, muslim and buddhist mysticism, that is killing your own self, your ego, “cutting the head of your personality”. When this mystic practice meets with the de-individualization of present day society, and is put in contact with the revolutionairy activity of the working classes, it’s fucking dynamite.)
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South Stockholm’s Book Of Death
Death is nothing to play around with. You have to handle it carefully. Not like Antonin Artaud who one day in november 1947 declared war on his own organs. That is clearly taking things a bit far. But it can be good to kill yourself a little bit now and again.
Next to the suburb where I live there is an old grown-over landfill. I go here often, sometimes in the middle of the night, when I feel restless or unsatisfied in some way. I feel like that pretty often, so I consequently spend quite some time here. The top of the landfill is the highest point in Stockholm. I am sitting in an old car-seat right by the edge, looking down over the south of Stockholm. I go here when the world is turning to slowly, to fast, when you never call me, or when the five last missed numbers on my cell phone ends in zero zero(1). Most often when the world is going too slowly. I get stressed of not being stressed and I have to produce all the time to feel good. Do things, find new artificial needs, new kicks, new drugs and new people to fall in love with. I am completely empty and have to find things to fill up with all the time. Once upon a time this scared me. It felt “unnatural”. I was not “myself”. But now I have killed “myself”. Now I am my desires. No more and no less. Since I have realized that is has to be this way I feel so much better, in fact better than I have ever felt. I can die and be reborn all the time. I don’t have to be anything I don’t want to. Least of all I have to be normal. I can be whoever the fuck I want to. I can die and resurrect as Lorenzo Lamas, a b-actor with writer-ambitions and a strong homoerotic image. The only things I have to pay attention to are some basic needs like eating and sleeping.
It is exactly at this point you have to be careful. Not to go to extremes. I suspect that was exactly what the french playwright and actor Antonin Artaud did that day in november in Paris. Artaud however had an extra big reason to be mad at his own organs. When he was a kid he had a brain fever that never really let go. He had a headache his entire life. Besides that Artoud suffered from cancer and died a couple of months after his declaration of war.
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