January 22nd, 2006 by Alexander
I remember one time we were sitting with my brother in a small park. We had just bought some snacks and were enjoying them in a crisp and sunny autumn noon. Just as we were laughing on some inside joke we had made up, I realized we were the only persons in the park. Not a single child running towards the swings; the benches empty, the birds chirping alone and the sun shining only on our puzzled faces. Where was everybody? The adults at work, the children at some daycare center. If they were lucky, they were with their grandparents, who could, being on pension, potentially take them to the park. If not, they were home alone, vegetating in front of the television.
My brother and I were fortunate enough to belong to a family that didn’t coerce us to “get a job”, as if getting a job is the solution to all your problems, and had some financial means to support us. We were free to laugh away in the park – but we were laughing alone. I remember another time, I was in a relationship with a woman that, like most women, had to work for a living. Many times I wondered: What is the use of personal freedom, if you cannot enjoy it with the people you love? Most of my girlfriends, friends, family are working in some job that takes most of their time and youth in exchange for some pieces of paper that can buy a lot of things, but they can never buy lost time or youth. So in effect, they are exchanging something invaluable with something valuable. That’s not a bargain – it’s a rip off. We call ourselves free, but we are not. You are not free if you can vote your masters every four years. Nor are you free, if you are living in a society that expects you to exchange the most fruitful years of your life in some obligatory drudgery (and everything done out of necessity becomes a drudgery) only to emerge at the end of your life, unable to enjoy the fruits of your labors, not only due to your physical incapability, but also because most fruits have by now turned sour. Add to that inflation and low pensions, and you barely can afford any fruit whatsoever.
Something has to be done – what are you going to do about it?
March 20th, 2005 by Alexander
We incomprehensible ones – Have we ever complained because we are misunderstood, misjudged, misidentified, slandered, misheard, and not heard? Precisely this is our fate – oh, for a long time yet!…It is also our distinction; we should not honor ourselves sufficiently if we wished that it were otherwise. We are misidentified - because we ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our roots ever more powerfully into the depths – into evil – while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more broadly, imbibing their light ever more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we grow – this is hard to understand, as is all of life – not in one place only but everywhere, not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing.
This is our fate, as I have said; we grow in height; and even if this should be our fatality – for we dwell ever closer to the lightning – well, we do not on that account honor it less; it remains that which we do not wish to share, to make public - the fatality of the heights, our fatality.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, section 371 (trans: The Joyful Science).
Perhaps if this fatality were more public, we wouldn’t be that incomprehensible after all.
Would we lose our distinction? On the contrary, we would get more chances to distinguish ourselves among our peers, the only distinction that really matters.
To attempt to make public that which is elevated.
Should we publicize the elevated or elevate the public?
Would a bit of both keep us static? Like an elevator that goes down in order to come up but is held static by the weight of its passengers?
In the end this blog may be nothing more than the experiences of one who through a cosmic contingency got in an elevator. He has been living there ever since, playing around with the buttons, going up and down, even left and right, stopping on strange floors and basements, and experiencing all kinds of people, creatures and landscapes.
Until someday, somehow, he became an elevator himself and could make his own buttons, go to his own places, on his own speeds, dispense with fixed cables, make more doors that open in many different floors simultaneously, accept an indeterminate number of passengers, sometimes everyone, other times none, but always knowing that not everyone could go to any floor with him…in fact, he stopped being a standard elevator, he became something else, something different – himself.
Has he lost a sense of direction?
For some perhaps. But it can’t be otherwise, direction is necessarily relative. The seeds should not decide what is good for the adult tree.
