Wishfulness is conscious defeat. Hope is delusion.

Hope is fast food for the demoralised. Hope is unburnt fat. Hope – an addiction concurrent with the mainstay pathologies of civilisation – sugar-oil-drugs-gods etc.

Hope is the desire for transformation. Hope is no good matter. Transformation is spin. Spin is counter to the rotation of material life.

Hopefulness is mind over matter.

To trust the pathological stakeholders of civilisation – monotheists-governments-corporatists – is hopeful defeat.

Spin is the first cousin of hope. Spin is fast text. Spin is the art of selling something hopeful which ends up wasteful.

Hope is waste.

Waste is the non-compostable by-product of the centralised – the civilised. Waste has no bounds.

A city’s reliance upon the importation of resources impoverishes its citizens who in turn impoverish and toxify the land.

The Cuban says: the food has to be walking distance. 2

In the rich nations the reliance upon the importation of resources occurs through the outsourcing of its brutality – forests cleared, soils contaminated, air polluted, soldiers shipped, oceans vacuumed of life and used as dumping grounds.

It is hopeless.

image: Jasmine Salomon

Freedragging is the practice of hopelessness. Freedragging is monist. We practice hopelessness with the acceptance that material life is all we have and when it is over it is over.

Hopelessness becomes inspiration – inspiration, the tenacity to act independently of governments and goods and gods.

Anxiety is hopefulness transfigured into fear. Fear empowers the authority of governments and goods and gods – the debts of which demoralise and enslave.

This entire cycle is wasteful and hopeful.

We are enslaved to amaterial structures - taxes create borders – borders create gods and armies – the killing schedule proceeds on our side’s behalf.

Hopelessness as practiced in freedragging is liberation – which manifests materially as poetical terrorism – the material transference of which is non-delusional play – civil disobedience.

Freedragging is aerobic poetry of the body – freedragging is pitchforking.

Freedragging is anaerobic poetry of the mind – we two worms forever crawling.

We are materialists because we are purely mind and matter. We need two good meals a day and the ‘irreducible complexity’ 3 of the sun, soil, seeds and water to have this.

The Cuban says: catch your own water, grow your own food, say hello to your neighbour. 4

The earth, air and water as lung, heart and brain.

The aesthetic-athletics and ethics of freedragging are indeterminate and mutable. There is no authority here. Authorship is immutable constraint. Authorship is court journalism – the dutiful reportage of greenwash.

Freedragging is the poem written by the body – physical graffiti kicking in the street. As soon as it is written it is gone. God obsolete.

In nature change is recurrent. Seeds grow publicly and find opportunities for autonomy. We defend this.

We practice in the space of the everyday. We ripen and fall like public fruit, bletting on the street.

We understand enslavement when we freedrag. We understand the conventions that enslave – paying interest upon interest.

In small collectives we act for ourselves. We do not need supermarkets. We share water and grow food.  No need for governments. We defend ourselves.

Cage says: We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government. 5

We drag each other through the city and jump into building skips, our stockings ladder.

Oil peaks. Lying on the footpath our hands in the soil turn it over.



This work is compost-ready.


1. ibid, What Is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?
Joan Retallack.

2. Roberto Perez, visiting Cuban permaculturalist, speaking at
Daylesford Town Hall, Victoria Australia, 3 April, 2008.

3. from Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and  complication’,
as revisted in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press, 2006

4. ibid. Roberto Perez.

5. ibid, Anarchy (1988), John Cage.