Wednesday 27 February 2013

I can honestly say that I have not yet learned to get past this in Life:


Pride

Do not ask me to love the world
For I hate it.
Whatever lesson you wish me to learn,
I shall not learn it.
And even if you lavish me with pearls
Of wisdom to be attained
Still I will turn my back away.
For every sigh, for every failed sign,
I will turn a blind eye and swear,
And I will not break the boisterous resolve
That has coursed my veins since birth,
This I promise I will not even when,
Thrown out from the womb of a world
You force me to embrace,
The convenient excuse of Youth wanes.
I will make you watch me grow old and bitter,
Accused, pushed against the ground,
Hating the world as passionately as the first day,
Having learned nothing.

This is arguably the hardest Life Lesson I've had for my self so far. Few out there suffer from such a bad case of PRIDE as myself.

Sunday 17 February 2013

Une ébauche of Emptiness


On the first day, there was no one.
On the second day, there was no one.
On the third, the sun shone through
But still there was no one.

On the fourth, there was some rain,
And no one was around.
On the fifth day, there was no one
And the streets were empty.

On the sixth day the same emptiness went,
Up until the last day
When there was no one;
 No one was there.

------

 29/01/2013
[...]Everything in my life is a big heap of crap right now and I knew how empty it was even when I was working. I knew that the job was the only thing that kept me occupied, deflecting my attention away long enough from the real emptiness of my life. In all seriousness, we all live more or less immersed in a cocoon whose layers are added throughout our existence to make living more bearable. Remove those comforting, deflecting layers and you are likely to end up staring, just like me, at an incredibly dark and empty void. Or maybe it’s just me. I have reached a stage of such ‘nakedness’ that to me existence has taken the colour of stupid for the most part. And it’s cold, and it’s empty.
Remove all the hobbies, the pastimes, the work, the gossip and other social activities; the TV, the movies, the music… what is left? Silence and a void. Your own self, and your flaws, weaknesses, mistakes and regrets. Try staring at all that for as long as I have. [...]

28/01/2013

[...]Sometimes I really feel as though I’m living trapped inside some sick simulation, that I am but a pawn surrounded by drones that are under even more control than I am. It feels so much like this reality I feel and experience every second of every day is just one giant illusion or puppet show put together for my benefit… does that make me sound like a solipsist?

Why does it matter, tell me,
Whether the fields are blue, or green,
Whether it matters to live in sin
Or if it was all a lie to see
Through you, through me,
Through every one of us here?


22/01/2013

I still feel very lost in this world I struggle to recognise. Sometimes I look around me, so to speak, and wonder in disbelief how come the world looks so much more different from what it was like when I was little. Comparing my perception of what the world felt like to me back then (in the late 80's/early 90s) and what it looks like today makes me feel as if I’m staring at an alien world, in a way… it’s difficult to describe. I was telling my mother the other day that even though I’m not 30 years old yet I already feel obsolete, beside the point, lagging behind – you name it. This fast-paced world in which we’re all immerse, or stuck in, keeps moving faster and the moment you forget to keep up that’s it, you’re made to feel stranded like an old man lost at sea. I said to her: “I’m not even 30 yet and I feel the way people in their late 60s or so used to feel at some point when they looked at the younger generations and couldn’t – or wouldn’t – adapt to the changes anymore.”

I feel like I’m suffering from adaptationitis, or something crazy like that: an inflammation of my capacity to adapt caused by a lengthy period of over-adaptation efforts, much like an overdose. The constant overflow of information, the fast-changing technology, the contradicting ideologies being pushed from all corners, the politically correctness hard at work transforming the way we are allowed to relate to one another, the struggle to make a living, the increasingly pronounced impression that everyone else is keeping up or incredibly talented while you lag behind… all of it is making me shut down. I know I can’t be the only one feeling that way, and though we live in a so-called increasingly interconnected world we’ve never been more disconnected from one another. More and more we communicate according to the current format which consists of saying not what we really think but what is the accepted, censored version validated by the majority – but that majority is itself an illusion because it is the MEDIA that propagate the validated versions of what must be expressed socially. Transgress that, speak your mind against the validated versions and you will find yourself at once vilified. [...]


10/01/2013

You’re free only so long as you don’t test such freedom. The freedom society likes to boast about these days is as true or authentic as pigs flying in the sky. It only exists in theory, as a fantasy people like to tell others, but as soon as one tries to take their word for it and decides to live as though they were really free, they’re in for a really rude awakening. There is NO freedom in life, only enslavement to one condition or other.
The best we can ever do is move from one condition of enslavement to another, hoping to make the new one better than the last, but to believe in freedom is like believing that pigs can fly. If you don’t believe me just do what I did: shun social rules, leave the rat race overnight to do as you please for a while and then try to get back into the fold… you’ll probably find out that by the time you decide to get back into the mainstream fold, good old society has already labelled you as some ‘unreliable rebel’. The end result? The sheep won’t trust you and will want to keep you out because you’ve broken away from the norm and actually dared check out what life is like outside the box. (and I'm not talking 'travelling around the world' like some tourist) [...]
09/01/2013

[...]There is something about the way things are changing across the world that makes me feel like an obsolete model. Perhaps it’s linked to this era of constant consumption, the fact that the world is centred on industries that must constantly come up with newer things all the time… I’ve started to feel it for myself… and it’s a horrible feeling, that of being past your sell-by date even though it ought to be too soon to feel that way. But there you go. Back in the days, you felt out of the game around the age of retirement, perhaps, but now you can feel left out even before your first grey hair.

Everything is going so fast… it’s a constant race for new things. The word I hear the most these days has to be ‘update’. We live in a world of constant updates… update your I Phone, I Pod, resumé, Facebook or Twitter status, the TV, a program, a computer… you name it. You even have to keep up with your style and the way you brand yourself in the world – not just the world around you but also the whole planet nowadays. Beware if you fail to keep up with the constant updates: you’ll be left to feel like a lost puppy before long.

But the worst part of all, to me, is the fact that while we are made to sell ourselves by making brands out of our very person – just like any other consumer good or commodity out there – the audience in front of which we are constantly made to perform is no longer local but increasingly global (internet). So when you fuck up and the whole world can keep track, where the hell do you go? It used to be the case that when you fucked up in the past at least you still had the option to move to a new place and start afresh… it was always hard but feasible. But now… Now even that is taken from us. [...]

07/01/13
Everything we don’t have control over must necessarily be a trivial factor. That means that birth itself and circumstances outside our own control or choice must fall in that trivial category that weighs little in the bigger picture. The understanding lies beyond these trivial points, and if we can see past them then we are onto something bigger, a truer glimpse of a greater meaning.

Et cetera...


Friday 8 February 2013

Memoire


I remember a frozen city,
I remember streets and faubourgs,
The detail of architecture, sublime,
The world then was a vastness unknown.

This city, frozen in my heart,
Has become a crumpled photo
Blackened by time, torn by tears
Fallen from my cheek so often

That I no longer remember
How many times I've cried
For something that once was
Now frozen, forever, not in time

But in mind - so futile, fragile,
That all that ever was to me
Will someday be erased
And the frozen city that was mine
Will be no more.