interludes or, the unsettling question of how one deals with the self
Originally uploaded by lokman.
interludes, inbetween moments signify those periods in our lives where one is in transition from one point to another point. often regarded as dead moments, most people tend to get bored, try to kill the time or wait, wait, and wait. examples abound: our time in the plane, waiting at the bus stop, queueing at customs, insomnia. it prevents us from being productive citizens, from being functional, from being ‘somewhere’ where we have ‘better things’ to do. neither here, nor there, caught in limbo .. who we are, what we do, are unsettling questions we are forced to face.
temporary reliefs have exploded over the past few years, and included the ability to connect with anybody, anywhere, at any time. text messaging when you are standing in line, calling somebody on your cell when walking to your next destination, one can at least transmit one’s spirit, one’s voice if not the body, to somewhere else, thanks to the wonders of technology. alternatively, one can not only expand but also contract one within oneself, in order to avoid the existential unsettlement of the inbetween: the portable videogame, the ipod. sugar coated candy surrogates for the neither here nor there reality that is too boring, too static, too alone and too not-happening.
is it really that bad? what do we lose out on? what are we afraid of? once life offers us a glimpse of reality beyond the narcotics of a mediated life, what else is left? a vast emptiness surrounds us, amplifying the noise, but not the signal, that is in our lives. what is meaning, and where is it left? forced to deal with this question, most people seek to indulge in having the mundane live them, as opposed to living the mundane themselves and, carry the responsibility to change, assuming having a capacity (and its burden) to do so.
so the next time you are waiting, be comfortable with your thoughts, perhaps grab a blank paper and pencil, and contemplate this: where is the signal amidst the noise? what have you said and done recently, with whom? are you aware of your own living, your own breath? whose life did you touch recently, and how? perhaps it’s time (time!) to start living life, as opposed to having life live you.
June 10th, 2006 at 4:04 am
the mundane life. easy enough continuing to indulge in self-fulfilling pleasures to balance the humdrum job which enables affording of those same indulgences. running around in circles. a dog tethered to a leash. temporary diversions bringing you back to that vast emptiness. my work, there is no panacea for that disease i keep telling you about!…how to better it is the question.
June 11th, 2006 at 5:58 am
[whose life did you touch recently, and how? perhaps it’s time (time!) to start living life, as opposed to having life live you.]
well said. this rings even more true as life in hong kong, and the people around me, are so mediated that i’m a little overwhelmed.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:21 am
Uncanny that your post echoes the book I just read, which is Guy Debord’s _La Societe du Spectacle_. Towards the end he writes:
“The Spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world, in that the self, under siege by the presence/absence of the world, is eventually overwhelmed; it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the REAL PRESENCE of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances [my note: e.g. the "appearance" of being somewhere, going somewhere, being someone, etc. -S]. The individual, though condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality, is thus driven into a form of madness in which, by resorting to magical devices, he entertains the illusion that he is reacting to this fate. *The recognition and consumption of commodities are at the core of this pseudo-response to a communication to which no response is possible.* The need to imitate that the consumer experiences is indeed a truly infantile need, one determined by every aspect of his fundamental dispossession. In terms used by Gabel to describe quite another level of pathology, “the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the margin of existence.”"
Incredible that those words were written in 1967. They ring even truer today.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
dude. i’m so bored…, I must be experiencing one of those moments…