La nostalgia...

Ho passato tutte le estate della mia vita
facendo proposti per Settembre. Ora non piu.

Ora passo il tempo ricordando le proposte che facevo,
e che sono svaniti. Un po' per pigrizia, un po' per dimenticanza.
Ma che avvete contra la nostalgia ?
E il unico svago possibile per cui non crede nel futuro!

I didn't copy/paste that tidbit up above. I didn't put it through a spellchecker -- not the kind that "start-up"-ed recently, ready to abuse the thesaurus to "improve" the stolid prosaicism of stolid people, nor any other. I didn't check it in any way. I didn't even read it, truth be told. I just wrote it.

I wrote it as it came to meⁱ ; it's from an old film -- though not that old really, yet as old as a twelve year old Elizabeth Taylor : older than her grandmother, older than dirt, oldest since forever. I'm sure you don't know it, didn't see it, whatever. You wouldn't understand it if you did see it. You never understand anything. You never have -- which'd be the problem, of course ; but it's the problem of other people. We call theose other people "you" to not have to be bothered with them anymore. Not any more than can't be helped, anyway.

The spirit of the time is ubiquitous, all-pervasive. I am awake in the early morning, content yet troubled. The birds are singing their enthusiastic cacophony, the occasional cicada burrs, the Sun, well risen, lights in bright youthful tones the bright youthful jungle all around. It, too, is older than dirt. In fact, it's the originator of all dirt, much like the eager young pleaserⁱⁱ's the genitor of her antecessors. Somehow, don't ask me how, it's factual nevertheless. There's a windowpaned wall in this tower of mine that readily substitutes for a painting.ⁱⁱⁱ Sometimes I sit down to watch a film and I end up watching out that window instead, it's literally better than any painted peisage I ever did see. Not that I despise Manet or anything ; but there's limits to the human hand. What do I see in it ? It's just a few hills, green melting into a bluish haze of cloud and distance, floral reds and yellows drizzled about ; pastoral whites and graytone of little cows scattered here and there, now and again. There's nothing there, or rather, there's nothing else.

It reconstructs itself, somehow. The cows are never in the same place, obviously. It's not even really the same cows, over the thousands of jugera^iv my eye readily surveys multiple farms take their cows to pasture in different places at different times, I merely perceive tiny tips and fleeting flutters of large unperceived phenomenological universes underneath. Yet of course they're the same ; it's the same painting over and over again. The same hillsides covered in the same trees of the same leaves, they just keep changing but it doesn't actually change anything. Does it ?

The spirit of the time : we're well sick of the other. Far from last century's wanna-be-ish gargle^v's idle enthusements, the other is actually foul. Unwelcome. Undesired. Like midges in butter, this other like any other. Like little articulated carpaces in your flour, moving about distressingly, inappropiately. Like undead mice, bothering a cat by their very existence, disparate and disentangled from any particular activity. Beyond speech, beyond reach, the other's outright vile just for (allegedly) existing at all. This conclusion reforms itself, repeats itself, echoes itself off of itself. It's overpowering. Irrespective of whether it was attained through my extremely complex tooling or merely brute-forced through the troglodyte's simplicity, whether it's "the virus" or sophisticated philosophy, whether regarded through an early monocle or a sophisticated pair of contemporary binoculars -- the hillside's the same. On it, cows graze, and the other's an eyesore.

I can't right now think of a different time. A time such as when the other'd be a welcome sight ; a time when, far from an outright eyesore, the other was a sight for sore eyes. There was such a time. Wasn't there ? I think there must've been, I'm almost sure of it ; yet, like Augustine's notion of beauty, the moment I try to put a finger on it I find myself forced to regretfully take notice there's nothing there. Servants -- meaning, women too internally crippled^vi, too mentally destitute, too thymically dry to kneel properly -- are okay, I suppose. Though really, best in moderation, better still in sparsity. One's better than two, and two preferable to four, in any case best with none than with any at all. They'd better wear uniforms, to make them more like objects than others ; they'd better keep their gaze down, they'd better be quiet and always have something to do. Otherness sterilization, all of it, they're being boiled like yuca root, to get the foul other out of them as much as possible ; while at the other end of the spectrum, picking up the phone went out, as predicted by Facebook & co back in 2015, sometime around 2017 I guess ? "Calling people is too intimate ; if you've not seen them naked it's probably an imposition" or somesuch, then&thereabouts.

There's no solution possible -- besides a change of mood, of course, though I can't foresee such a thing. The dislike of the other, the (quite natural, and naturally arising) sastiseala of its unwelcome if inexplicably perpetuated presence, these aren't the sort of thing that goes away. Like slowly drying, browning vomit in a nook of a public bus, it'll perdure. It'll be there, in its place at the end of the windowpane, at the juncture between synthetic rubber and synthetic wood, for as long as you're there to see it. For as long as your life's slowly draining, browning, crumbling away on that busline, now and again meeting the one bus, for that long you'll (at the same now and again) see the stain. Indelible. Not exactly permanent, merely immune to the future.

The children are, of course, different ; but their alienation from their own existence (or whatever'll be left of the simulacrum by then) a topic of historical discussion later. After a time, once their own life's browned out, wilting away before their very eyes. Once they too hold in their outstretched hands what used to be, what used to think themselves their entrails while that particular mask of shock and despair crumples their faces... then it'll be time to talk of the children. So far there's nothing to credit the future ; all we're left with is some attempt or other at reconstructing nostalgia.

1. No kidding, it reconstructed itself, in my mind, by itself. I heard it a few times, years ago ; then over time it reformed itself in my mind, cleared itself by itself of impurities, re-distilled its original form, and I woke up with it. I'm sure it's exactly correct, if not formally. Notation varies, but substance is, apparently, not only fixed but self-healing, it re-emerges as itself seemingly by itself. All it needs is the environment of a working brain, a human mind, what I suppose was traditionally deemed the eternal soul in this part of the world. Whatever it is you & the rest of the barbarian hordes do not have. [↩]
2. And how! Have you seen that little bitch ?! [↩]
3. Nor is it alone in playing this strange game. There's a mirror on a different wall, in a different room, so anchored in its unassuming place that, when one's seated on the corresponding couch across the floor, the thing turns into a painting, as if by magic. Vermeer's suspected of having painted with the camera obscura ; I've dispensed with the intermediaries and simply use mirrors directly. It doesn't work as well at night ; but then again no painting does much better. [↩]
4. As much land as a team (yoke, jugum) of oxen can plough in a day. [↩]
5. I'm not going to even bother digging, I'm sure there's some place or other I pissed all over Levinas-Habermas-Boton-what's-his-face-idiot-my-slavegirl-asked-about-yest. They're really not even worth naming, 20th century French wanna-bes & their pale immitators in the colonies. [↩]
6. Some of these call themselves "men" -- but we, of course, know better. [↩]