Reality is Fiction.

What a stunning lesson today has been. What an outstanding couple of weeks. Extreme and contradictory feelings have abounded lately – exhaustion, euphoria, relaxation, eroticism, anguish, despair, faith – often conflicting, often merging. But it is not about feelings, it is about what feelings construct as “reality”, as our projections are often called. Plato´s wallpaper indeed.

This is a blog, lest we forget, so no real possibility to dissect it all in detail… Dissection will be best left to future publishing and/or verbal interaction. So come and find me if you feel like it, the world is not that big. Really. And I´m the always-available kind of fella, despite trying to maintain myself in check.

An enthusiastic ovation at the end of our morning welcome meeting. Unexpected, emotional, out of context – the kind of context where one does not clap. We must have gotten it right, the newcomers felt the need to reward us for a message of optimism, comraderie and team spirit. This is a prelude to a good year, we accepted the applause as a gift towards faith in the midst of darkness, regeneration in the midst of catastrophe.

Later on: the right shape for participatory media projects has also been assured. In twenty-four hours, a team of creatives generatively triples in number. Word of mouth, maybe? Mutual respect, for sure. A willingness to listen and an acceptance of logic. My, all this generation seems to want is to be treated with respect, everything else they seem to have sorted out. What a joy to work like this.

Later on, still – at the eleventh hour, when all seemed to have been reduced to rubble: the same exact data rebuilds itself in the corner of our brain. Suddenly, what seemed like an incoherent mess ressurects within a coherent narrative.

Powerful.
Strategic.
Poised.

The same exact ingredients can be presented as failure OR be communicated as a quasi-success. And option B it shall be. And we shall work towards option B.

Soon an accurate translation will be provided.

From social healing to spiritual healing to spiritual indulgence to self-indulgence to self-privilege.
A necessary end. A necessary amputation. An inevitable beginning.

To Be Or Not To BwW1&@%*

There is still uncertainty on my part as to this particular medium’s appropriate pitch… Surely one fundamental reason for this uncertainty is how multidimensional our lives have become.

A given individual used to be a case of dividing between h/er personal sphere and a corresponding public/professional character in a fairly straigforward manner. Depending on the specifics of the social context, these two dimensions could be more or less coincident or comfortable with each other (eg. drinks with workmates and all that), but the two dimensions stood peaceful, harmonious and recognisable.

Not so much nowadays.
The public sphere thrives with eccentricity. Family units have become complex webs of past, present and future relationships, their patterns following simultaneous logics of entrepreneurship and catastrophe, while the individual h/erself can only blossom as multidisciplinary and able of continuous multitasking.
This would not be so much of an issue should those multiple dimensions and characters fit nicely into a larger scheme of things. But as we know, it just ain’t gonna go like that.

The struggle of the 21st Century Schizoid Man is not to fit his social narrative onto the collective – as this collective itself very openly courts the schizoid. The struggle of the 21st Century Schizoid Man is to manage his wildly dissonant dimensions into a personal narrative – and to project that narrative as owning its own logic, in the face of constant and imminent collapse. The epic is no longer an option, we know that (and at this point an unhappy ending would at least be an ending), so we all settle for the 3-minute youtube videos that immortalise the trivial in hopes that, somehow, one day it will all fall into place, that the monkeys will indeed type Shakespeare.

Our madness is simply the increasingly desperate attempt to stabilise our multiple – and multiplying – selves. And, most importantly, everyone else’s expectations of those selves.

The early days of an obsolete medium

So here it is, the first proper post. The rituals of the blogosphere would expect one to comment on the hot topics of the day, in the guise of an amateur version of cnn, which, as we know, has become so much cooler (therefore more reliable) than cnn itself. Amateur cool, there´s a thought. Google it up, sex shows up left, right and centre. Am I missing some subtlety of the English language?

Fine, let us get it out of the way. I dutifully comment on Britney’s MTV comeback last night, already hailed as a monumental blunder that will go down in pop history as a serious contender for the top spot on the hit list of most monumental pop blunders ever.

See what’s wrong with this picture?

Britney’s blunder feels calculated. It feels like Britney has yet again understood what it’s all about these days. Pop Idol and the like are living proof that bad karaoke is all the rage, in the name of hysterics echoing through the nation in unison. Britney has masterfully turned herself into a zombie caricature of herself, and thus made the headlines yet again. Not a word would have been uttered at the front pages had she been in acrobatic shape.

Now for the serious stuff.

Here is a poem written for M.W. a while ago. Updated today in order to fit the current narrative loop, thus dearly dedicated to D.F. Both can be honoured to share the bill, despite never having met – both are extraordinary.
Sorry, no metrics, I’m not that good, it’s not that good – and it blatantly romaticises what may simply be the early days of old age – but the feeling is sincere and it’s here. Enjoy AYOR.

A LONGING FOR BELONGING
(for D.S and M.W
at different times, in distinct dimensions)

Having rendered my heart hostage in home-baked fantasies and sweat-drenched anxieties
for far too long,
Having negotiated and renegotiated long-term peace deals with my handful of past lovers,
no matter how briefly we crossed,
regardless of whether we ever met,

Having craved so many love stories that never had the slightest chance of even being uttered…
You have performed the surgery.
I no longer apologise for my red blood.

Every single pore of every man’s pores longs for sensuality, every day, everywhere,
a constant hunger for beauty, an insatiable hunger for unconditional approval,
a longing for belonging that will never have enough.

Yet in this constant turmoil of perpetual need
through your visceral joy and ever-so-warm unashamedness
You have performed the surgery.
You have shown me the carnal version of self-respect.

Yet another escape valve…

… as required from everyone by the world at large. This is the space for writing in its pure form. Pardon the odd inclusion of visual content, the focus shall remain on type and the meaning we are able to extract from its shapes…

Between today’s news of “the end of privacy” (MSCHarding upon returning from Ars E.) and the insatiable need for micro-narratives, here is an attempt at contributing to relevant content in the blogosphere.

Some would (will) call it pretentious, sorry, it’s the way it pours – on the ever-precarious tightrope between the confessional and the universal.