I belong to the former, or as Stefan Zweig would say, "yesterday's world". That world is slowly disappearing, in fact, faster and faster, not only its public figurations, the shapes comparable to the eye, but also, much deeper, the internal modalities, the ways in which human thinking takes place, are changing. It is probably a matter of cycles and so-called "progress", although to someone who is in the course of things, everything seems like disintegration, decay, sinking into the world of oblivion. Literature has this weak but pleasant role of stealing things into oblivion - be they beautiful or ugly, true or false. It's just about making them feel like "Ours".
It is not even a matter of someone physically and nominally belonging to a certain world - let's say, the world of industrialization or the world of electronics, nanotechnology - each world, if it is presented through its aesthetic and spiritual artifacts, can be experienced as its own, that is what beautiful art tells us. Creativity bridges distances, even those that seem completely insurmountable. It is still a sign that some things in this world remain unchanged, despite the feeling that everything is "collapsing".
It is possible that industries and workers will disappear, but how can I imagine performing any physical, construction or other work, without a man in a muddy work suit with a sweaty face? What, after all, is the meaning of that ubiquitous and obvious in all its forms, the important term "techno manager" or "brand manager" or "restructuring consultant", which has been extremely important and indicative here in recent months? I already belong to those who are unable to understand the phantom enigmatic of their work and meaning.
Man in transitory times, in times of changing epochs, can be saved by the ability of imagination. Imagination gives me the right to think, when I want to, of department stores, which are almost gone, of scout camps, not out of nostalgia, but out of the need to situate my being in the memories and experience that belong to it.
Now I understand all those aunts, grandmothers and uncles who talk with inexorable persistence about some kind of consumer goods and forms of life that always seemed vampirically retrograde and repulsive to me. Now I, too, probably belong to that world of vampirism, with, of course, the belief that I am still not as monotonous and boring as my ancestors. But there is time, how many years of living still need to be spent sucking, squeezing the juice out of what is already long behind us.
It is possible that man, meanwhile, naturally begins to invent many things due to lack of matter. Falling out of the flow of time can be a stimulus for the imagination, and someone, besides ourselves of course, can profit from this dishonorable act of lying. But in the end, in the world as it is, who asks us about the lie or the truth, when the lie almost has its absolute sovereignty, its persuasive superiority?
Therefore, one has to put up with the disappearance, when there is no one who could rebel against it anyway. After all, why should I wake up against the disappearance of factories when they are powerful systems of human exploitation? Meanwhile, memory poeticizes everything, even slaves on plantations surrounded by their owners who hit them on the shoulders with whips can seem poetic to some. I don't know a single canvas with that motif, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The world has broken up into tiny fragments that lie hidden inside the individual being like a tiny egoistic desire that is no longer interested in anything else but its selfish maintenance in the light of joy. We let things ebb and flow, thinking to ourselves that all is well until, for example, open-air markets, or markets in general, disappear. Farmers may even disappear, and the production of food on the ground and in so-called "natural conditions", from this point of view, the only thing important is the preservation of the image that we care about, because it acts stimulating, pleasant for our senses, creating a sense of contact for "original life", as we actually need it.
(lupiga.com)
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