We Are and We Are Not. — Heraclitus
Culture often functions like a cult through which we live out our beliefs and celebrate (and inflate) ourselves – and it is the glue that keeps the necessary consensus for that social contract we call society.
As much as “natural signs” such as thunder and fever will persist through time, above all we demand interpretations. We just don’t understand, and assuming we should, turn to specialists – “meaning” now stands for what escapes us; the more esoteric, the more we crave for those answers. Within the digital realm of 0011010s, nothingness could have been accounted for but denial and “transcendence” are keeping us hostages to “plenitude” and its wishful thinking.
Only what implodes may survive, for a short while.
[These are not theories to be debated: having survived three weeks of intensive care, the “off button” is now a fact, a close neighbor.
In an effort not to disappear completely and to be somewhat relevant, we argue and state our positions, be it our love of beauty or our ethics. I only hope here to leave a trace of what I now know.
As I returned home after a long summer away in the hospital, it was clear that had I not made it, some sorting would have had to be done: what to keep for sentimental values, what to keep for financial reasons, and the rest – most of it – being just “stuff.”
The arbitrary permeates our lives and we go along. Before “the big departure,” there are other ways to live and to leave – Gauguin, Rimbaud, R.L. Stevenson are a few that did.]
