attemptingthoughtfulness

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

I think I have it. This time for real, I think.

Maybe I won't think this tomorrow.

I'm stuck in time. I guess this one'll need some explaining.

I'm stuck in the feeling of temporality. Of "this is going to end", of "this doesn't really matter in the long run", of "I'm not doing it to stay, I'm doing it to leave." Since highschool I've chased temporality, I've chased events of change, of jarring, breaking change where you lose everything you deemed important and stop talking to anyone (I’m pretty sure that’s my toxic trait.) I’ve chased events of change you can't return from, of change that is incommensurable, categorically uncomparable to where you onece were from the bottom down.

I keep thinking "once x happens" in the sense of: "once I have a steady job", "once I've found the right career for me", "once art school starts sounding good", once the change comes. It's quite literally living towards an end. A little like the living dead in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

I wonder if that’s why I feel detached from the world. Everwhelmed yet detached. And, obviously, this feeling of temporality didn’t grow in a lab, it’s obviously personal experiences, social experiences and certainly the pandemic hitting into my mental health.

I can’t really put it into words, but I guess this is it. Temporality, stuck in time. And maybe even this will pass.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

thoughts from my 14-day-trial of Crunchyroll starting yesterday at 11pm.

I’ve been thinking about intellectualizing my love for Haikyuu!! (yes, the high school volleyball sports anime). Like, thinking or writing about why I love it as much as I do, why it’s been the thing that has given me the most joy in the past literal years and I am genuinely unsure if that’s a good idea. Since- I guess, I wonder if it’s constructive to think too much about the things you love? Which probably goes hand in hand with the fear of losing that feeling through the process of examining it.

Let’s be clear, scientific thought, processes of analysis or intellectualization are always quite violent. They cut something up into pieces, they reduce it, dissect it, objectify it to be looked at, to be studied. They take so much for the sake of knowledge, without knowing whatever that flimsy excuse for violence even means.

So, yes, I guess on the one hand I don’t want to undergo that process due to the sheer force it puts onto this genuinely honest feeling of joy and run my favourite tv show through it like a meat grinder. And, again, on the other hand, I can’t think about that feeling itself too much, in any capacity, not only the scienc-y way. Because what art you love, what media, what stories you resonate with ultimately say more about you than they could ever say about the thing you love. And thinking about, looking at who you are in any given point in time is a quite horrifying thought.

In the most simplest of terms, frankly in too broad a language to be actually meaningful, Haikyuu!! makes me feel things. That silly high school volleyball sports anime makes me feel in a way not too many things have made me feel in recent memory. I don’t have bad days, I have a low rumble of exhaustion, a step towards an edge of utter resignation always with me. I have, for all intends and purposes, mellowed out in that regard. For example, I finished two massive projects, one very frustrating and one very important to my friend and I felt nothing, not relieve, not joy, nothing like when I watch fucking Haikyuu!! and that’s fucking fucked up.

You see? There’s that turn on the thing you love I’ve been trying to avoid.

Don’t worry, I’ll rewatch the whole thing and forget how strange and honestly worrying that is within a minute.

See you around.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

genius and sex and fuck and ah

Let’s talk about genius and about sex. A while ago I wrote about Sheldon Cooper from the series The Big Bang Theory in regards to sexuality and infantilasation. Sheldon is, all things considered, also the way we sometimes think of genius figures - or people with high “IQ” - wherein we deny them emotional intelligence or ascribe an inability to behave in accordance to societal norms specifically focusing on emotions and social interactions onto them - putting him, specifically Sheldon and generally the male genius, into a category of “(STEM) science nerd” rather than the traditional image of genius - or do we?

Now, what do I mean when I write about the traditional image of genius? Well, traditionally the category genius is pretty narrow in the sense that they are figures of exceptionally broad and deep expertise in all kinds of fields, they’re artists and virtuosos, capturing the universal divine Beauty of God’s creation in their work, they’re scientists, discovering and unravelling the world we inhabit, and so on.

The startingpoint that sparked this post was this question that formed in my mind: Why do we consider geniuses asexual and yet why do they fuck. I mean, actually literally fuck and are characterized as being good at it? The short answer is: because they aren’t asexual - and they aren’t really geniusses. Let’s talk about that.

The origins of this are two-fold, the first one being the body-mind dualism. A genius is rational, he (deliberate use of “he”) uses his mind to gain knowledge and create art and he - this is important - does not succumb to low life desires and “animalistic” impulses such as food and sex. Sensuality and feelings have no room, no place and have to yield to “facts and logic”. Note the separation of “anima rationales” from those creatures lead by bodily desires. I also cited food specifically because this very interesting New York Times Opinion-piece on the position of food in morality and philosophy makes a very good case on how we conflate an inability “keep our hunger in check” with moral failure, that conflates the fat body with lavishness and excess.

The other thing about the genius figure is, however that they do meet the challenge of food and sex should they arise with ease and intellect because they’re a genius. They have far surpassed humanly realms. To make them human again, they do feel desires, they do have needs but they definitely overcome them and cannot be conquered by “a woman” and other “lower desires”. They are obviously usually white heterosexual cis men with heteronormativity enforcing a sense of heterosexuality and therefore sexuality.

I guess that’s the theory: geniuses do have desires yet them being geniusses denies them acting on it because they are simply too intellectual and busy to entertain those lower needs. They’re not asexual, they are just above sexualty in general which implies they have to be sexual in the first place.

The thing I find interesting then is this: stories about geniuses still feature elements of struggle - or at least idiosyncracies. Some examples I came up from the top of my head are: L from Death Note with sweets and sleep deprivation; Sherlock Holmes with rampant misogyny and drug abuse (and disregard for people, if we’re counting various media based on him); Da Vinci (in the tv show depiction of 2013) with addiction, pan(?)sexuality and just a whole garden of idiosyncrasies (que me watching the first two seasons to remember what that show as about). The latter being part of the misunderstood and suffering artist trope where their embodiment of bohemia and avant-garde puts them into tension with the people around them.

Despite their super human abilities we tell their stories with flaws, with addiction. Things they should have surpassed yet haven’t probably because we need a compelling hero to root for and, here’s what‘s interesting: they probably aren’t genius. Not in the sense of divine talent and skill. They have to have flaws to be human, to stay human because they are human. They have to stay human. Therefore geniusses have idiosyncracies, yes, but they work out towards a good resolution, they are too fast, too beyond for their time yet not understood and, deeply flawed and deeply human.

That’s at least what I read into it. Their obstacle is other people, it’s humanity and it is their own humanity that pulls them down to eath.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

vertigo

About a year ago I woke up in my childhood bed, I was disoriented, exhausted and turned around in my sheets when suddenly the world got thrown off kilter. Every time I turned my head, even a little, the world around me would spin out of control, like I had just been spinning on the spot for minutes and I just felt nausiated, motion sick, was barely able to stand on my feet, not to speak of walking straight. I later learned that this phenomena is called “benign paroxysmal positional vertigo” or BPPV which happens when crystals in the ear fall in the liquid channels that are responsible for your sense of balance and direction and create additional turbulances or more movement in the fluids.

My physician told me I’d ought to get used to it, that it happens, that it’s just normal. That I’d had to turn my head much more and much more rapidly so that, at some point, the vertigo would stop because my brain had learned to ignore these false signals. She also told me that it usually returns every now on then. And every now on then I’ve woken up to vertigo.

If this was some kind of narrative, if I believed in narrative fulfilment of human lives, I’d try to think of vertigo as a metaphor, of illness as metaphor. I’m currently reading Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. Funnily enoght John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed begins his foreword in a similar way. There’s something about vertigo, about losing control of your position relative to and within the world’s bounds. I’ve been trying to write about illness as metaphors for the past year(s). And how they’re obviously not, how matters of live and death are obviously not but somehow still are, how we can nothing but understand them through metaphor and how powerful that makes us.

I’ve been struggling to work on it. There’s much work to be done - and there’s always more work. And it’s kind off putting me off. I’ve been kind of putting it off.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

one art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

I’ve been thinking a lot about Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The one about loosing and about her mastery of its art and craft. I’ve been feeling lost a lot these days, not purposefully, not actively, not masterfully. Just lost. And how the practice of losing - purposeful, active - might be helpful - or at least apparently not hard to master. Losing and letting go. Its practice, I guess, ultimately comes down to knowing when to lose, to let go. Purposefully. I guess it also means knowing when to not-lose.

I guess the reason my brain has been returning to that lovely poem is its ambivalence - or the ambivalence I read into it. I lost two cities, lovely ones. I used to have a point for this but I forgot.

A critique of neoliberal capitalism might be that we don’t live in a world where loss is very encouraged. I mean, I’m not sure if neoliberal capitalism has taught me this rejection of loss or rather the inability to properly deal and interact with it, or if this is infact what powers neoliberal capitalism. People’s inability to master losing. I read the poem as its author’s failure to master losing. As its author’s coming to terms with losing. to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

How unfortunate that my second association writing about loss is that webcomic meme.

I wonder if all loss has to be self-inflicted. Or rather, if all loss has a momentum of return. Ironically. What I mean by that is that, I guess, it makes the self, the one losing, realize their vunerability. I wonder if loss has a momentum that causes selfreflection in realizing one’s loss of something. And I guess I thought of self-inflicted because I wonder if it’s characteristical for loss to have been of one’s own making or at least have an element of self-blaming. I wonder.

I guess that begs the question if deliberate loss is even possible. And if you can therefore even possibly master that One Art of Bishop’s poem. places, and names, and where it was you meant. I guess it’s clear to me that you can’t. Which is why I keep returning to this poem.

I barely know anything about Conan O’Brien. I also barely know anything about Nietzsche. (I guess more than about Conan O’Brien). But there’s this sentence that I think about every once in a while:

Nietzsche famously said ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ What he fails to stress is that it almost kills you.

I lost my point.

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

....

I had already written and published this but I suddenly remembered that another reason why this poem might have been on my mind is that incredibly sad League-song for the Arcane show. And that made me think about how I tried to approach loss from these kinds of aspects, and how Wittgenstein proposes that we only ever know what a word means through its usage, how words have different meanings and value. And how, I guess, this method of wordplay, word-games?, doesn’t only tell us about the words we’re using but also the people and their values using them.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

“ah well“

My favourite mug broke today. I didn’t think of it as my favourite mug, at least not until the moment of its breaking. When I accidentally pulled it down the table. It fell truly unfortunately. The handle shattered in four major parts and some smaller splinters. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces from the floor after its dissemination across my clothes and items scattered floor, picked one piece up from the top of pants, another one from the sleeve of a jacket. Household maintainance? I barely know her. I’ve barely been home for someone living through a major pandemic. Let’s not think about it.

I started glueing the pieces together with the suspicious Vietnamese superglue that gets kinda warm when it dries. I try not to think about it. It can dry over night.

I’ve been thinking about playing games again - a sequel of my favourite game got released recently! - but at this point I can’t find myself to commit to anything. I used to be glad that I stopped gaming as much as I used to during high school since it took up too much of my time but at this point I’d actually really appreciate a few hours on the computer mindlessly playing away. Which is why I am playing cookie clicker. Which feeds me a seemingly perfect balance of anxiety and satisfaction. Big number go brrrr. 100 000 billion seems absolutely meaningless at this point.

If I ever get a quote tattooed on my body it might be the release note of cookie clicker on the 08/08/2013. It reads: “made the game in a couple of hours, for laughs. kinda starting to regret it. ah well.”

It’s an “ah well”-kind of situation. I’ve been overwhelmed with a sudden social life, an increasingly annoying internship that seems to be consistantly asking me whether or not I am still doing it, a job I can’t work for until the second half of January, university and creative projects upon creative projects. Why am I like this?

I don’t want to think about covid because- Obviously I don’t want to think about it. Fuck, I wanna get that booster.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater

Okay, I will admit it. I am in love with technology. (cue “Rät” by Penelope Scott). I’ve lived off the back of technology, I do digital art, graphic design, editorial design, academic reading, academic writing, bullshit writing, research and shit-posting on my laptop and on the internet. I’d become a brand-endorser for Microsoft all day long. (That laptop has done so incredibly much good work for me, I’d sell my soul to Microsoft). It’s genuinely a space and place I grew up in and have educated – am educating! – myself at. But that doesn’t make it less awful. It barely makes it tolerable, even.

Somehow we live in a time where most people have a good sense – if not a thorough understanding – of social forces, of socialism if you may (cue “The Internationale”), governing the world we inhabit and experience. We understand that the attention economy is a result of neoliberal market forces, that big technology – as big as its promise may be – is intertwined with exploitative, colonial, patriarchal practices for the ones working in tech and the ones producing the devices we use for tech, that the way the internet is shaped, in fact the way it’s structured all the way down to its history and infrastructural systems, is first and foremost capitalist and Eurocentric. We know this very well. Our internet is efficient (the not energy kind) and it’s good at making money for private companies. Even if you were to suddenly put all internet infrastructure into the hand of a government (reminding ourselves that this idea is also incredibly rattled with problems and questions of privacy and freedom of speech!), the underlying infrastructure just wasn’t made to be publicly owned by the moment of its conception. It’s not a coincidence that the one of the fastest internet connection exists for stock exchange.  We – or at least I – cannot try to imagine an internet that does not rely on privatized infrastructures (cables, routers relays etc.), privatized hosting, privatized platforms, privatized everything.

Right now I’d like to believe that nothing encompasses humanity quite as much as the internet. It’s so incredibly completely made from human hands and controlled by structures we as humans have made, it’s quite astonishing. And it’s a foolish endeavour and suffers from all the consequences of being human made, of being created in times of war, of capitalism, of ideals and concepts that we could criticize all day. Historical ideals of wealth, power, man (in the sense of species but also in the sense of gender), aesthetics (body and colour) and what else it is I have surely forgotten to mention.

So, in this hypothetical thought experiment on Earth B where the notion “trickle-down economics” (add mental image of two hands doing quotation marks) has never even occurred as an idea and liberalism (with its ideals of freedom and markets) exists as liberalism B (with its ideals of freedom and without markets) gets thought of by not-slavery-profiteer John B Locke, do I still get to enjoy Dimension 20 on YouTube?

Well. I guess not. I also don’t get to enjoy the declaration of human rights, as much critique that you might want to add to that one as well. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”, that’s a quote, right? (Theodore Parker, if anyone was wondering. I have no idea who he is, but that’s a one good and hopeful quote.) And, I mean, yeah, hopefully? But that also means the moral universe does not start off at a great place. In fact, it starts off pretty awfully? And it’s not like any of those states are static, they’re highly dynamic, highly mobile and highly influential in the way the impact other events and inventions. And, like the internet and the declaration of human rights, they are sadly not inherently bad.

I think, that’s somewhat remarkable despite its immediate result being the overcomplication of every problem that has ever occurred on the face of the earth ever. We cannot throw out the Baby with the Bathwater. For ideal reasons, like the fact that I really love technology, that I really love working within the spaces we’ve created despite their many, many problems (which is obviously a privilege, holy shit, it’s a massive privilege). But also for practical reasons. We cannot uncross a river. These things, structures and ideals exist in this world, they have influence in this world and they will not, cannot disappear from one day to another. That takes effort, it takes time, and it, not to be too pessimistic here, might not be possible to ever fully get rid of.

I have wondered a lot about the emancipatory dynamics of achieving goals within confined structures since it’s only ever gratification given out by a system but never true emancipation. There is no disruption to the structure, no movements towards a “outside the structure”. It’s a little like representation for white institutions, maybe? But sometimes I wonder if there’s an “outside the structure” at all? And, yes, people might cite counter cultural movements all day long, but ultimately those I can think of (punk and hippie movements) have suffered from patriarchal structures and, at least from what I read about the hippie movement was mostly lead by white middle class people who had a safety net, who could return into their financially secure lives at every point. I wonder if there’s an outside.

Let’s assume there is none. At least I don’t really think there’s one? Let’s assume the arch of history beds toward justice. How do you achieve emancipation within a system of oppression? I have done zero reading on this – and if I could think of an answer to this in a unfocused tumblr-post we would have solved it already.

I guess the dualism of “us” vs. “the system of oppression” is a little too reductive. Systems consist of humans, they are made by humans, they are human(s), which means they’re never set in stone and never just inherently evil in the way we construct enemies. And this system in particular is connected to infrastructure, medicine, art and human life in such an intricate way, we cannot deny it. Sounds familiar, right? That doesn’t mean they can’t have bad traits and values, bad logic and ways of reasoning. It just means that they’re a lot more fluid than that reductive dualism I’ve created makes it seem. But they’re not as fluid as this description makes it sound either, there are massive incentives to keep things exactly like they are and lots of steel rods holding up all kinds of social structures, keeping them in place.

In that way the internet does function as a microcosm of problems since it’s, as I stated above, entirely human made and inherited many of the flaws of our humanity and human history. And there’s no solution to it, it’s just too human to have a right answer. And yet we need to eat away at it, we need to cultivate it to be better. To, as Melania Trump(‘s PR team) has put it, be best. And that means to identify and think about problems complexly, and to talk about them with people from various social perspectives. And to try and fail to find new, ever so slightly better ideals to set goals towards.

Thinking about it as a slow process might feel like the best way of thinking of it, but this is the moment I remind myself that it’s an inherently privileged perspective and that I do need an incentive to hurry, yet there are people on the short end of the stick and, don’t get me wrong, there are people dying from any inability to cause change. Especially considering that we could pretend that there’s no temporal ultimatum, and there clearly are some (cautiously glazing towards the suspiciously slowly yet rapidly approaching climate crisis).

I don’t know what to do – if I did I would have told you instead of writing this rambling collection of thoughts. But we cannot throw out our baby with the bathwater.

---------------

This was written to meet my 2k words a day quota.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

the neutrality of doubt

I just thought of the most important thing I learned in my first semester entry philosophy course reading Thomas Nagel’s introduction to philosophy.

Modern philosophy introduced the mind-body (or: inside-out) dualism based on radical (Cartesian) doubt. The idea that there’s an outside world that exists separated from your own inside world. Cartesian doubt then tries to basically bridge the gap between both of these worlds: how do I know what is outside when I only have access to the inside? This idea has obviously been the basis of much theory, but let’s just say there are problems with this dualism (some noteworthy rejections of this dualism: Hegelian dialectics, pragmatism and phenomenology).

When Nagel introduces this idea of radical doubt, he immediately also talks about a problem with that scepticism: solipsism - the idea that you cannot have any kind of certainty about the existence of anything outside of yourself, “I think therefore I am.” Nagel, then, very crucially notes that believing you are the only real thing (i. e. person, consciousness) based on this reasoning is an unfounded assumption: you can neither prove the existence nor non-existence of everything and everyone around you.

I think that kind of doubt is very interesting because it is seemingly neutral but is ultimately a leading question that forgoes a conclusion implicitly in its doubt. Nagel very easily explained this to me by shifting the focus of the question from “what do we know does truly exist” to “what do we know does truly not exist.” Obviously proving a negative is impossible but the entire point of solipsism (or scepticism) is that proving a positive is too! Proving (in this dualism) is impossible. (Most modern thinkers “solve” this problem by assuming the existence of God. In fact, if you were to put it cynically, Descartes had to prove the existence of God to say that no God would create a fake world. Despite the idea of enlightement disentangeling itself from religion, even Kant will say that we just need to assume the existence of God or nothing works, I think there’s something profound in that.)

Anyway, a smilar thing also happens with denialism of natural sciences; where spreading doubt and asking for “definitive proof” is not in the business of proving anything but inherently a leading question. (I am thinking of examples like oil companies spreading doubt of global warming through own “scientific” studies, the tobacco industry lobbying hard and publishing papers on the health benifits of smoking, and, of course, most pressingly: vaccine hesitancy.)

I guess what I’ve been leading up to is that ultimately all doubt is biased and subjective. That doesn’t mean it’s bad but I feel like we often times believe doubt to be something neutral and objective; “just asking questions” or “clearing up something for everyone”, but in thinking about it like this it feels like Nietzschean perspectivism all over again: Whoever believes there is one neutral objective perspective is lying to themselves. There is not “objective” and “objective” is not a useful frame. There are thousands of perspectives on one issue and only by acknowledging those perspectives and thinking about their biases we can learn to understand the world more complexly - more accurately.

And I think doubt might work in a similar way, where the questions and doubts we have are leading, are a perspective, are never neutral.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

I have an abundance of thoughts on the 2011 adaption of Hunter✕Hunter - and therefore probably the entire franchise -, but frankly none of them are worth diving into.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

of dualisms and paradigms

(I should be preparing course work, but let’s get through this real quick.)

I recently participated in a course on artist portfolio-creation which was- I guess, it was fine. It was clearly not intended for me and I participated with the interest of a critical observer more than anything. Something I realized was this: a lot of those artists really, really don’t like The Digital. Their work centered around “leaving The Digital” and “going back to The Real” - only slightly exaggerated. And, as a so-called Digital Native, that bugged me a lot, so let’s think about why.

I guess my leading qustion goes as follows: Are these places inherently and undeniably bad? This might be my bias speaking, but aren’t people who criticise The Internet/Social Media actually criticising the neoliberal mechanisms that have created those production- and attention-foucsed structures? Because, I guess, I do believe that you can curate, create and experience meaningful and important things here. I am not saying there are no problems, don’t get me wrong. Yes, as a product of, within and steered by capitalist interest, it can be not-so-great; platforms, internet-providers, creators, etc. are all, to a degree, tied to an efficiency and production paradigm that is inherent in those very infrastructures.

However, the answer to me seems to still be, that this thing is not bad from top to bottom. That’s probably why it annoys me so much when people - artists - don’t go beyong “digital = bad” and “analog = good”, a false dualism that is neither focused on improving digital spaces nor criticizing analog ones. Golden Age Thinking is not helpful, and it feels a lot to me like it’s not much more than that.

In writing this I somewhat came to the conclusion that the next big step art - and everyone around, I guess - has to take is how to tackle this problem. Everyone can see that big and corporate digital spaces have created massive problems. The quesiton now becomes: how do we create digital spaces that don’t do that? How do we create structures - from the bottom up! - that are not focused on paradigms we have deemed to be harmful? Because these spaces are new, they have new hierarchies, a new set of rules to be played with. There is space for trial and error, space to experiment.

How do we create art within those newly confined spaces and outside of market paradigms to build meaningful and positive experiences? And these, to me, are questions worth pursuing in art.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

“if home is where the heart is then we’re all just fucked, I can’t remember- [...] the good old days”

(taken from 27 by Fall Out Boy - which was actually the first Fall Out Boy-song I ever listened to.) OR “chasing suns”

Today I went down to the lake, that one big lake nearby. The lake I fell in love at, the lake I’ve learned to swim in, the lake I owe a lot of wonderful summer days and childhood memories. If I were a better writer or literature student, I’d compare it to the curch of Notre Dame, it’s all seeing eyes and it’s wittnessing - outliving! - it all. And if I were a better comedian, I’d make a joke about how it nearly burned down a few years(?) ago, like seemingly all things. But I am neither and this is not about any of it.

Today I went down to the lake, that big lake nearby. I’ve been wondering a lot about the word “home”, how there’s a plural to it (”homes”) and how we rarly if ever use it in its plural form. I’m not big enough in the digital humanities but I’d love to see some statistics on the general use since I only ever meet it in its singular form. Home. And, much as like countless inspirational (cat) posters have told us - and all the Fast and Furious-movies - home is people, it’s not necessarily stationary. I’d like to believe home is comfort, even though I probably feel “home” much too rarely to make that call. Maybe “home” just exists in opposition to discomfort, like coming home from work, closing the door behind your back, shedding out of your layers of clothes and feeling safe within your walls. I can’t tell, but I have no interest in telling.

Today I went down to the lake, that big lake nearby. When I was younger I went swimming a lot. Back in the days when I didn’t hate my body as much as I would learn to do and am still unlearning to. I shared that with my father who liked teaching me, so we went down to that lake a lot. When it was summer and we had time, we’d go down and I’d learn to swim in the cold water. One of my favourite childhood memories starts that way, by going down to the lake.

Today I went down to the lake, that big lake nearby. If there’s anyone more aware of the fact that my parents are growing old than I am, it’s them. And I get that they’re trying to recreate that time as much as I am. But the shore has changed, the fish bread has changed, we have changed. It wasn’t bad. In fact, it was quite good. A little nostalgic, but only a slight bit. Sometimes you’ll have to miss the past, relive the present. Nothing fancy, just this one and precious sunset.

Today I went down to the lake, that big lake nearby. It was nice. It felt like home.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

preservation of power

Okay, I am having a brain-situation, so stay with me; let’s start off with this: I have a strange relationship with the executive branch of government.

In school we tend to learn about the division of power in democracies like the ones we hopefully live in. There’s the judicative, legislative and executive branch of government, and they’re supposed to keep each other in check - checks and balances, baby! Here’s my conundrum: we learn about this in school. In an institution that is the biggest arm of the executive government from someone who’s part of the executive branch of government.

Let’s try narrowing down my problem more precisely; the executive arm has a lot of power, power that is given to it - its officials - by the current system of government. Not only power to change lives but also just bare bones financial incentives. The very system of government that is legitimizing that power, organizing and instutionalizing that power, infact allowing it to have a monopol on violence, education, etc., has therefore little to no interest in delegitimizing itself. It’s preservation of power.

What I mean by that is: governments, any government I guess, has no interest in teaching government critical theories. In fact, even when the legislative and judicative have an interest in doing so, the executive, which is profiting (literally) a lot from that very power, will try to preserve the status quo above and beyond any criticism from the inside or out. The system as it exists has a huge incentive to keep things exactly like they are or even persue more power instead of less - something I believe very clear in militarized police forces, that in themselves can pressure the other branches of government or the people voting for the government.

I used to hear that teachers were supposed to be political neutral, non-political or something like that, whatever that means (categories we’ll have to critique in the future), but I also learned that governments are always a question of power and who should have it. And, at that point, you cannot be non-political once you’ve been given power without either giving it up or revealing your interest in preserving it - and that can never be neutral.

I mean, obviously these are observations/opinions on government scales, which I believe is most important which is why it probably sticked with me for this long. However, generally speaking, there’s never an incentive for people in power to give that power up for whatever greater good. Systems of power or categories of value like these are very good at reinforcing themselves - and I guess we’ll have a lot of work to do to break them down, because they do absolutely need breaking down.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

writing your way out of it

I find it oh, so troubling and oh, so cynical that we often believe that art has to come from a place of pain and suffering since it usually is art that tries to contradict them - enrich them with meaning and beauty, something more lively in the face of death and despair. The act of creation, almost diametically opposed to the destruction that is pain. Elaine Scarry writes in her book “The Body in Pain” about the destructive nature of pain, how it not only robs us of ourselves and our abilities to things, it also takes our ability to express this pain, it destroys our words. And yet, here we are, trying to write our way out of it. This it that is almost hanging like a veil in the air everywhere around us yet rooted so deeply inside and personal.

I think Judy Dench once said that Shakespeare’s works contain every human emotion there is. I think she is wrong, yet I want to believe her, at least I wrote that onto the first page of my Oxford collection of Shakespeare’s complete works. I want to believe in that idealized purity that is the mythical creation of art, that is The Birth of Venus. I want to believe that these are the traces we’re leaving in the sand, that we can preserve - conserve! - pain in those vessels, mere household items, way beyond us.

I am wrong, yet I want to believe it. I’m tired and frustrated.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

and it’s your job, your responsibility, to create and cultivate those spaces

I’ve been thinking a lot about good spaces again. About good spaces, about the concept of “culture” and about people - and the refusal to do so.

I’ve been part of a truly mind bogglingly bad art project that has taken of virtually 70% of my emotional energy and I somewhat believe that it’s a microcosm in how cultures of speaking, if left on their on devices, can turn sour and how a refusal to take responsibility, a negation of that responsibility, can make those spaces seem given and natural as opposed to cultivated.

Let’s start off with this: cultivating spaces of speech and group spaces in general is work, it is hard work and I will always be immensely grateful at those who constantly work towards maintaining and developing those spaces to be thoughtful, connecting and constructive. Those spaces are rare but they exist, they need to exist because we need those spaces. We can’t do without.

Today I had a lengthy talk with the art lecturer and one responsible for the project who has been so incredibly hands off that it’s frankly amazing he has hands at all. And I talked to him honestly about how I felt about the spaces that exist within our project and the culture of isolation that he has helped cultivate by denying responsibility. Of course we also talked about how the current digital university has been a challenge to cultivating good spaces and how there are things that have to stay analog.

And he starts telling this story of this art class he once had, about how everyone started hiding their works because they were scared someone else might steal their ideas or make something better with it. He said, it’s not the digital space but a part of human nature. And I said, with all due respect, that he is wrong.

For one, I firmly believe he is wrong - and by extention even if he wasn’t, we’d still have to act upon it being wrong, everything else makes no sense to act upon. Additionally, saying something is human nature is easy and it’s an even easier way to dodge the responsibility: It’s your job to cultivate those spaces. You can’t throw people into a room and see what happens. You’re a lecturer, not a behavioural psychologist. It’s your responsibility to cultivate those spaces and maintain a positive environment for leaning, art and life. It’s your responsibility, otherwise you will leave a poinsonous culture to grow on its own terms - something that never works out, not even in the best of cases.

“I did this, but it didn’t work” is not enough here. It’s your job. Find new ways of doing it. Because it seems to me as if you are using the wrong answer to a question you wrongly asked and are pretending it is a fault in human nature that it didn‘t work. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

And I guess this has to serve as a reminder to me. That spaces are cultivated. That they exist in complex structures and that it’s my - our! - job to maintain and establish a culture of speech and a culture of company that builds up people, helps them create within those spaces and strengthen them.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

reminder to oneself (myself):

you should’a bounced.

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

until a century has passed

I recently learned about this dogma in art history. It’s not widely considered true - as most things are in The Arts(tm) -, however I liked it a lot and thought I might as well write about it. It says that, generally speaking, the meaning, value and gravitas of a piece of art cannot be acurately assesed unless and until (at least) a century has passed. I think that’s funny for many reasons, but mostly because nobody who was there to see it being made and experience it’s first unveil will be alive anymore to understand it in the biggest context there is.

And I am sure the “century rule” is a little broad and arbitrary, and I am sure there’s  lot of interesting theory around how art history should and cannot be written, however I’d like to broadly apply that idea on our present. On events that happen today, on a global pandemic, on whatever it is that is omnipresent and overwhelmingly big, and Here, and Now.

We’re still in the process of grasping with the effects of colonialism in every knowable field of life I can imagine. And I don’t think anyone could have imagined how far reaching its consequences were when the first European colonizers set their foot from foreign seas on foreign grounds.

I also don’t think that there’s an objective or a right way to tackle the writing of history - any history - and that we’re operating under pragnatic paradigms most of the time. That doesn’t change how much I like this idea, this idea that we cannot, never, grasp the here and now until it is long gone and nobody who experienced it will be there to remember it. Because we can’t under stand it, until a century has passed.

That doesn’t mean we don’t try, we don’t need to and we don’t do understand this moment to live in it while we live in it. It just means that, by the time we’ve finally understood it, it’s no longer present - and we’re no longer in that present.

It reminds me a little of that Mary Oliver poem, “The Uses of Sorrow” in which she writes: “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.”

[attemptingthoughtfulness]

working through nostalgia or that pooling feeling in the depth of the ocean

Yesterday I took down one of the first websites I ever made, some time in 2014/15. I mirrored it onto my hard drive for nostalgia/data hoarding reasons but I know it gone and I’m glad it is. It was a site collecting all the stupid quotes utterd in my class back in the days, most of it widly offensive in ways I’m ashamed to think about now, seven years later. Part of me wishes I had behaved differently but there’s no point in turning back to a place the ocean has long washed away.

I have a strange relationship to the past, in the way that I think about it yet can’t remember it. I realized my memory is really bad recently when talking to a friend who remembers most events from her life. I have climpses of fading events I knew happened with a little bit of yearning mixed into it. I rarely remember things that aren’t in the present and somehow that’s great for moving on depite the obvious loss of the past.

Tomorrow I will leave my parent’s place. I have spent here a little less than half a year due to gestures vaguely and that feeling of nostalgia has been mixed with the overwhelming, somewhat sublime experience of feeling utterly loved, that kind of feeling you only get in the face of imminent departure.

The world seems a little more shaky every day, I miss normalcy well knowing there is no state of normalcy to return to, there is only  moving forward. Tomorrow is a faceless stranger and I’m scared, I’m tired and I wonder how and when I will regain the spirit of optimism again that all the poets wrote about, when ships set their sails and adventurers set their eyes towards the sea, well knowing there is no “again”, there is just now and tomorrow.