To demonstrate

from paris-luttes, 02/11/2026

Yes, there are many of me within me. I take my feet in both hands, I put my shoes on. I check my armour, my gear. T-shirt, shorts, water bottle. I set off on the assault. I am someone else, thus armed. My head, my body—I’m going to rid them of the world’s grime.

I pound the tarmac, I pound the cobblestones, I stride through the city to write with my feet: I am here. I run, I watch the city pass by, I slip away from it, I leave it behind. Here we are, partners; I do not endure it, I look it in the eye and I see: its eyes answer me. Rise up! I am not who they want me to be. I am who I am, and I see the signs of the people just like me.

The people have marched, have walked the city just as I have. The most combative among them were chased by the police. They are young; they, too, are fit and healthy. The robotic men, the tools of those who want us to be as they want us to be, those very ones—those helmeted robots, heavily armoured and armed—charged at them, assaulted them, tear-gassed them, or even maimed them, or even rounded them up, or even imprisoned them, or even killed them. But they—armed, like me, with nothing but their trainers, armed with lightness—even when suffocated, even when wounded, even when maimed, even when locked away, even when dead—they remained free. And our freedom will outlive us. What history will remember is our freedom, our honour. And the injustice, the dishonour of those who have used their wretched power—their usurped power—to destroy our homes, our country, the way we live in our country, and to send their robots to stifle our voices.

My voice is silenced, but our feet remain. I stride through the city and hear the shattering of glass spewed from the bins that the people’s anger has overturned. I run; my run is a fire that lifts and purifies my anger. You shall not have us, you shall not have me, says my path. I thank the people who are rising up, just as with every stride my old body rises up and regains its youth.

I run amongst the rubble. The old world crumbles beneath my wind-swept soles. Our rulers look askance, they who cannot even govern themselves. Drugs circulate in the circles where they shut themselves away, they whose minds are occupied only with the endless repetition of the same. This is the time of tyrants, tyrants to be deposed. The demon Money reigns over humans, stray animals abandoned by the wisdom of the Earth. It has taken possession of cohorts of souls, bending them so thoroughly to its will that they can no longer even tell day from night. Illegitimate in the eyes of Life, they have spawned the fallen spirits of tyranny, pawns who have become parasites upon the entire planet.

Keep running, planet! I run with you and I love you. See, streams flow through me, breezes caress me; I was born to run, not to die! From my muscles spring forth greenery, beasts, stars. For as I run, I walk with all living things that tread the earth; I walk against the walls of the circles within which the rulers and their lackeys alienate themselves. The makers of artificial books are alarmed by the artificial intelligence that ridicules them, and I laugh—yes, long live technology! I belong to the world that marches on. May it wipe out the forgers and bloodsuckers, the white-collar cannibals, the show-offs who unbutton their shirts to reveal their meagre chests, the non-living beings thirsty for glory and money.

Our home is our country, our country is the world, and these people are driving us out of it. Just as Paris was besieged during the Games, with barriers everywhere, police everywhere, the army everywhere, public spaces seized, movement restricted, running or walking amounting to navigating a maze like in those children’s magazines where you have to search for and trace a path with a pencil to the exit, this is what cities have become in their darkest form when the people demonstrate there and one must escape the traps, escape police violence, escape the bans on gathering or moving here or there, and then the ban on demonstrating in city centres, with those in power behaving as if the country belonged to them, our country, our home, for every country belongs to those who live in it; a ban on living in it, with those in power behaving like colonisers towards their own people because, in their eyes, we are the ones who are nothing, whilst they, for their part, are among those who have succeeded – succeeded in selling off the country, succeeded in destroying the country, succeeded in seizing the country to hand it over to all the mine exploiters, of our country, this goldmine that those in power have handed over to them to ravage; listen to me, I am running, I am panting, my old body rises up just as the people rise up, and we rediscover our youth; I rediscover the youth of my country, free and inventive, inventing their lives despite the contempt shown towards them by so many of their country’s elders, the future of this country despite the arrogance, despite the deafness, despite the blindness of so many who sit idly in this country, so many who have grown stale—of whom I might well be one were it not for my running, were it not for my defiance, with my feet and my body, against the labyrinths of power.

The insurgents are queens and kings, standing tall on their own two feet. The method? One step at a time. They march, they erect barricades, they entrench themselves and find other ways through. Thus the spring: torrential at first, then widening its course until it reaches its estuary. I run, I walk, I see the people rising up, moving forward; I feel like crying. Because it is within me that the surging crowd rises up, it is in my flesh that the torrent wells up and seeks to overflow—through my throat, through my eyes—I, a poor creature swept away by the joyful pain of unity.

Whoever walks through the city manifests the life that springs from cosmic accidents. Stand up, you wretch; it is time to tear yourself free from the traps that bind your ankles; now it is through the body that one must dream! But go forth wisely; do not let them sacrifice you or ruin you on their stinking altar; go forth with resolve—wisdom and resolve will prevail, and I see that you possess them; I admire that you do. It is through the body that we must go to inhabit the home they deprive us of: our city, our country, our planet. The streets are ours, and so is the countryside. To hell with the ministries; we belong to the earth—our dead are our roots, from which we draw our strength; our generations, who have taken the names of letters, are our fruits and must return to the beginning. I run; my heart pounds against the cobblestones; my cheeks are red; and I breathe the epic breath of revolutions. The living surge through my muscles, the peoples surge through my voice; it is not I who run, it is not I who speak—I am but a vessel, a vessel carrying art into animality, a surge of forms and colours in fur and plumage! Let us ascend to bliss.