I passed through a hustled cafe from the rain in London, and I settled. Unfolding the laptop, restarting to work on some repetitive stuff from a transitional job. I easily got distracted by reading and writing nonsense again.
I guess I was fooled by some modern therapies and thought I could just meditate away those disturbing currents waving inside me. I read and write and finally become excluded everywhere. I would die for one more place and time of me being welcomed. The existential crisis hits the hardest when it has fucks to do with down-to-earth struggles. People are either innocent and ignorant, or silent and relevant.
I’m not up for a serious debate, yet not down for a smart joke about it. Not prepared for the former, not willing to come up with anything for the latter. Or maybe just one remark I ever found funny: McDonald is the only inclusive spiritual (and dinning) place people can feel saved from the torching gaze of judgement from outward. (Plus all the public toilets that ever sheltered me … allowed me.)
I don’t like to pass down or circulate negativity, but I’m pushed into so many hopeless conversations. And most of the time the conversation is already impossible before I start it. The truth is, when I reproduce what I have embodied I feel wrong. I am just steered by great things, great systems, great philosophies, great myths of education. Steered, but still I’m on my own in years.
Void years, empty and solid. Exactly like the scripts in the new drama Beef. “I’m inhabited by a cry.” I need a nice long cry. So do you. But some cries deliver the other kind of histories of shame.
Humans live different temporalities. Easier theorise it than live it. Simple case in the stupid novella Normal People explained: for some scholarship is a self esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what they can believe about themselves - that they are special. But for some scholarship is a gigantic material fact so suddenly they can just live a life.
I read these paragraphs in here in the thickness of breath. I felt words. Not because they were skilful as some white privilege check of memory studies, but for my own sensibility to how I was treated. That was how they effortlessly twisted a knife and broke me from within.
Normal histories. Normal people. Normal dreamless days. Normal cloudy rainy routines in this racist and classist country.
I visualised a dearest friend, clever and kind, stylish and progressive. Looking at them I was tempted to question. How does it feel like - proposing your intellectual solutions with your up-to-date woke culture to those who don’t have choices? How would you finally learn to unsay the very civilised kindness? How would you manage to address their problems of depression or mania when they are far more massive than individual neuro-diversity bullet points? How would you make up for what you’ve lost when you could have heard them first and most in the settings of charity? How far dare you go to recognise their voices that are so incompatible with the aftertaste of your almond milk latte across Soho properties? That doesn’t work through fairy tales of self-care sessions - as if it were the same page of life we’ve learnt.
So to you my friend, to your brilliance: Do not go gentle into that good life.
April 2023
London