Excerpt of a letter from Subcomandante Marcos to Angel Luis Lara, 12 October 2002.
the butterfly
Rebellion is like the butterfly that flies out towards that sea without islands or rocks. It knows that there will be no resting place, and yet it does not waver in its flight. And no, neither the butterfly nor rebellion are foolish or suicidal; the thing is, they know that they'll have a resting place, that out there is a huge old island that no satellite has ever detected. And this big island is a sister rebellion which will set out just when the butterfly, that is, the flying rebellion, starts to falter. Then the flying rebellion, that is, the sea butterfly, will become part of that emergent island, and will be the landing point for another butterfly already beginning its determined flight towards the sea. This would be no more than a mere curiosity in biology books, but as I-don't-know-who said, the flutter of a butterfly wing is often the origin of the greatest hurricanes. With its flight, the flying rebellion, that is, the butterfly, is saying NO!
No to logic. No to prudence. No to immobility. No to conformism.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, will be as wonderful as seeing the audacity of that flight, appreciating the challenge it represents, feeling how it starts to agitate the wind and seeing how, with those drafts, it is not the leaves of the trees that tremble, but the legs of the powerful who until then naively thought that butterflies died if they flew out over the sea.
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And there are times that butterflies from all over gather, and then there is a rainbow. And the task of butterflies, as any respectable encyclopedia will tell you, is to bring the rainbow down closer so children can learn how to fly.
the chair
The Revolutionary (like that, with capital R) scorns ordinary chairs and says to others and himself: “I don't have time to sit down, the heavy mission commended to me by History (like that, with capital H) prevents me from distracting myself with nonsense.” He goes through life like this until he runs into the chair of Power. He throws off with one shot whomever is sitting on the chair, sits down and frowns, as if he were constipated, and says to others and himself: “History (like that, with capital H) has been fulfilled. Everything, absolutely everything, makes sense now. I am sitting on the Chair (like that, with capital C) and I am the culmination of the times.” There he remains until another Revolutionary (like that, with capital R) comes by, throws him off and history (like that, with small h) repeats itself. The rebel (like that, with small r), on the other hand, when he sees an ordinary chair, examines it carefully, then goes and puts another chair next to it, and another and another, and soon, it looks like a gathering because more rebels (like that, with small r) have come, and then the coffee, tobacco and the word begin to circulate and mix, and then, precisely when everyone starts to feel comfortable, they get antsy, as if they had ants in their pants, and they don't know if it's from the coffee or the tobacco or the word, but everyone gets up and keeps on going the way they were going. And so on until they find another ordinary chair and history repeats itself. There is only one variation, when the rebel runs into the Chair of Power (like that, with capital C, capital P), looks at it carefully, examines it, but instead of sitting there he goes and gets a fingernail file and, with heroic patience, he begins sawing at the legs until they are so fragile that they break when someone sits down, which happens almost immediately.
Shamelessly taken from here
The whole thing here (in .pdf)
