Wartempo 2020
CW for discussion of everything going on in the americas, fascism/colonialism, war. Stay safe.
Writing this at the start of May.
Wasting time again and again, from crisis to crisis, it feels like time has slipped out of joint and we’re riding the last seams of the wave.
Things take too long but pass by and never come back.
Probably just paranoia again, numbers :
I’m 21 years old coming to 22 in 2020, double double which turns to 4, death-number, this old superstition from a culture I don’t belong to, orientalism is cyberpunk right ? Weaboollshit.
Magical thinking turning to despair, is this useful ? Is usefulness any use ?
“What happens when you turn to what feels right?”
What if nothing feels right?
That’s not exactly true. A few things feel right. There are directions but no maps.
I try to think about something else.
“There’s no such thing as individuals” - “I am a population”
What does that mean ?
The best way to explain this is to go back to the emergence of the idea-feeling : younger me, jobless, plansless, homebound, miserable.
When there’s no active will to live left in you, what prevents you from letting yourself die ? Something to look forward to.
What did i have to look forward to ?
A novel in process. The idea of the novel was that it would be a doorstopper with 6 sections (one for each protagonists) that readers could enter/read in any order : the themes expressed in each sections would overlap, expend, refute or negate each others as the different experiences, worldviews, insights, failures and habits of the characters were exposed.
That was the plan. What I didn’t anticipate was the process of writing the thing and the way it made itself omnipresent in my life.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I was a daydreaming kid, something that was from time to time very hard to distinguish from my moments of derealisation or depersonalisation. I still daydream everyday but my reveries are generally more structured. I can snap out of unfocus to get into the present when I put my mind to it, my attention span is still pretty shit though.
Back in my teenage years, daydreams where moments were I escaped the present in motions of what if, without really meaning to. I’d be cutting onions and almost cut my finger off because I’d just thought about an onion shaped multiverse and a knife that cuts through worlds, I’d think of flies that laid eggs in dreams which then hatched bad ideas and nasty thoughts, weird superhero-looking silhouettes passing by as I lost sleep at the back of the class, I’d think of all sorts of stuff, threads that never fully coalesced into something coherent : freeflow.
The novel forced me to compartimentalize these threads of thought into 6 different categories, 6 characters with their own personalities, symbols, ideas, processes. I had to think about everything I encountered according to one character’s mode to the world at a time. And each of these characters had facets to themselves which recouped and intersected, meaning that every character was sort of multiplied, depending on when in their story I approached the world :
There was a dilettante, a detective, a journalist, a runaway, a spy, an artist.
Who were also a sportsman, a hippie, a husband, a kid, a loner, a mother.
Who were also a fallen angel, a dreamer, a witness, etc
The boxes became connected and autonomous soils for the florishing of relations between the different characters.
There wasn’t a day that wasn’t passed “as a character” or rather “as living under a character’s world-mode”. The same street would feel different depending on what character I felt like thinking through at any given time.
The days that didn’t feel right were the days i tried and force myself in one mode, unwilling or unable to realize I couldn’t at that moment. The discomfort would disappear once i’d find the mode i felt like going through on the given day.
It wasn’t just an anchor, it was a channeling system : I still felt miserable but I was miserable in motion, able to get up and go out and do things, able to feed myself. All these things that are taken for granted by most people but which can be excrutiatingly difficult for depressive and/or disabled people.
Nowadays I can see my life’s structures emerging more visibly than before, I see the most obvious rifts between professional, political, artistic and personal lives. I can sense the boundaries and the knots.
I can gather where I need to make changes but I’d be foolish to think it can happen on its own. I don’t want to control, I want to channel.
I tell you all of this mess because I’m trying to build up new characters(?), models, modes, not for a novel though.
I want to make channels for my different sides to co-exist without sabotaging one another, day after days. Coding my understanding of myself in order to make real structure emerge.
Sketches for a potential map :
The worker, at his best is able to go past the boundaries of bodymind into a state of flow. The worker is not driven by utility, rather the entire purpose of its mode is the economy of effort through all movements. The peak of the worker when he can act on the world through the effortless movement of his body, (coherent) activity is its primary mode. The point of work is to help realize society, everyday. Everyday that we work we maintain society as is, or as our work is put to use. If our work is put to different use, under different circumstances, it’s bound to generate a different society. Simple enough.
At his most enduring he’s able to sustain effort for the longest periods with a grounded focus, At his weakest he’s desensitized and forgets the limits of his self but not in the joyful self-erasure of zen meditation, but rather in the way a person in trance loses boundaries with the rest of the world, in a daze.
The worker, the maintainer, the materialist.
The Futurist
The seer, not a Cassandra because she doesn’t want to convince others, she wants to see and know. Clarity is her primary mode.
The future is an horizon, like all horizons it demands to be named in order to act on the world and attempt to bring itself about. The futurist doesn’t believe in magic but she definitely knows about emergence.
At her best she‘s able to predict, she’s able to think patterns, to see junctions, to link chains of events so as to see what will break and what will grow.
At her weakest, she’s overworked, focused on futile threads, losing time and mind in search of insights, in her cave.
the futurist, the time-scientist, the lucid one.
The Lover
The Lover at their best is able to live with passion, through Love. “Feeler”, not as a mushy bottom but as a bridge.
Not a destroyer of boundaries on the contrary, it’s very important that they understand what boundaries are, where they’re set, what they’re set for, if they’re abusive or not.
The bridge isn’t necessarily a weapon, it’s always a means of communication. The nature of the communication depends both on the bridge and what its aim is.
At their most enduring, they’re a feeler and a bridge from their self to others and for others towards the rest.
At their worst, they’re preoccupied with either refining themselves into alluring traits that can mask their internal discomfort or overbearing lack of control.
Why do you talk to others ?
The lover, the feeler, the bridge
The magician
The magician understands things on the structural level, communing with the eldritch not as some alien presence but as the logic of a higher scaled intelligence.
At their best they do what they Will, they can entertain rituals which allow the fabric of life to structure itself, they can orient the flows of desire through the attire of routine, game-designer, marketing expert. Because they understand routine as rituals entwined they are able to reorient it in accordance with their Will.
At their worst, they’re distracted and will weave flows into bad habits and worst results, at their worst they’re carried and can never carry again, taken up and away by rituals of other’s making. Complete abandonment to a game they can’t design their way out of.
The magician, the idealogue, the player who loses themselves in the game.
The writer is Ospare. Writing suit, Writing organ. A mecanism, a screen rather than a self.
These are not certainties, just pretensions and potentials. Pretending there’s structures in my mind might produce something that acts like it.
Nobody said writing was supposed to be easy.
And the day has past, like a second. Nothing truly remarkable happens that couldn’t happen on another day in your life, but this day will never happen again.
Writing this at the End of May :
Birthday is here and gone. 22 is the number, which makes 4 which sounds like death, a year of unrest. Crisis as status quo but death is not crisis, except to the living.
Tarot’s death means change.
Death is the last. For the individualist, death is the end, it’s all there is at the end of the tunnel, except maybe if some other forms of escape can manifest themselves in the form of rapture, of cryogenics, of supplements, whatever.
This ignores of course the fact of entropy, the law of disorder and destruction.
It’s ok.
I mean things will get worse but it’s ok.
Shit’s popping off in Minneapolis, Oakland, California. Damn.
Writing this the 2nd of june.
I can’t take it in anymore I think. There’s too much information, too much deaths.
It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that my brain won’t panic anymore, it’s past it. I don’t watch footage of Black People Under Police Violence because I know it probably wouldn’t do me any good. I don’t want to see Us suffer.
I do act and want to keep going but then I find myself reading people’s reactions to the names of the victims and I look back on my own reaction and I wonder if something is wrong with me. Why am I not paralyzed by grief ? Is that part of me already used up ?
Is the Lover secluded somewhere in my brain, alone and unaware ?
Some white dude close to a collective I work in talks about “insurrection” and “the rise of fascism” like the US isn’t fascist to its bones. When he says Covid-19 is a hoax I go from wanting to punch him to straight up laughing at him. Nobody corrects me.
Timely Timely Timely: the 2nd of June
Writing this on the 4th of june.
Protests planned for later this week in solidarity with the families of George Floyd and the families of all the other victims of police brutality in America (with a focus on Black victims). Organized by a collective that focuses on police brutality in France. The event is planned by a black cultural org, what would be called “porkchop nationalists” by some oldhead panthers. It’s pretty popular.
The 5th of June.
I have been trying to not think about something but it made itself very quiet the moment I started to feel the discomfort of self-delusion.
My brain playing tricks on us all.
The fact is that the American situation is ripe for a military coup. The question is wether Capital will back it up strongly. And wether that Capital will be solely insular or transnational.
“China” has been crafting its visions for the rest of the world, establishing itself as both reliant ally and scawy-scawy totalitarian country, ideal blueprint for states that try to strenghten their hold onto the population through surveillance. This might be the time Russia actually does something.
I’m starting to wonder if i’m not a bit too cynical about it.
The Minnesota council has been considering disbanding the police.
A Hole is growing is all I’m saying. There’s a vacuum where power used to move, it tried to displace itself too quickly right now and the fabric of american communities-lives has been shredded by that movement. It’s an old movement, it’s older than Trump, Obama, Bush, etc. It’s the movement of colonialism as it tries to devour itself : fascism is colonialism gone home but settler colonialism has always been too close to its imperial core to do anything but devolve into fascism.
None of what we’re seeing is exceptional, it’s one more opportunity for coalition, solidarity, uprising. It’s the same anger that recurs and reminds itself to those who could afford to ignore it before. The question is: can things go differently ? Can you sustain the effort and create the bridges required for solidarity ?
I see armchair white activists who’ve never gone in the streets in their life saying that looting is a failed strategy or “actually consumerism”, while I recognize the validity of the critique “looting is not a failsafe tactic” I still feel like slapping them across the face : people are unemployed, a lot of them immunocompromised, a whole lot of them hungry and angry af, this is not the time to make stupid observations and commentary about “the march of history”, this is the time to go and give support. This is the time to pull out strategies and establish powermaps of the opponent. This is the time for action.
This is the time to give money to those who need it, this isn’t the time for performative Instagram hashtagtivism and blackout tuesday shit, who tf started this ?
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On Violence :
June 6 :
A protest in support of Adama Traoré and Georges Floyd, no mention of Breonna Taylor or Tony McDade.
I don’t know if the people who organized the protest forgot about them or if I just didn’t hear the names; their loudspeaker is lame.
Is there more people than I hoped or less than I expected ? I can’t tell, I’m just happy to see faces I haven’t seen in a while.
It’s an optics protest anyways ; plenty of press people at the front, lots of slogans, at some point some folks try and riot but it dies down. When the protest gets to its endpoint, the organisers ask us to disperse. A group of 100-something people go into the city for a “manif sauvage” which is slang for “unlawful gathering”, cops do what they do.
I’m not against violence as a method but this protest was clearly not made for a fight against the police, some of these people disagreed and decided to just go and fuck some shit up.
Later, after having a few pints in, I look at footage of the Philly crowd. The contrast makes something a bit clearer : Life hasn’t ended in France, basically.
Things are trying to start again, even though delivery workers are as common as ambulances in our streets, a lot of people go out without masks, laughing, joking, living.
The cigarette huksters at the subway stations still try and rub themselves against you to give you a taste of Spain-imported tobacco, security guards still look at you like you’re planning to rob the place every time you enter a supermarket, police still do their rounds and harass young people.
The state is trying very hard to turn covid19 into a bad memory, one bad day of (more than) 29 087 deaths. Protests about police brutality and sustained colonial violence is just another day.
They wish it was a pause, they wish for it so bad.
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Fuck 12, Fuck the state, Fuck Capital, stay safe, stay close, don’t organize on fucking twitter. Check out blacksocialists.
Black Lives Matter. Black Trans Lives Matter. Black Queer Lives Matter.
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