Monthly August 2016

MONTHLY
AUGUST 2016

The heat has finally gotten to us, and you’ll be surprised to realise how all kinds of high temperatures can freeze you. I guess it was meant to reach the boiling point, as the stew had been simmering for long enough, each of my words a spot on my skin, waiting for the dirts and deposits to spurt out of me.
Redemption might be anyone’s own miracle, but it is perhaps all but a sudden revelation, a turnover comfortably for ever.
Meditating on foreignness for my Masters’ thesis, after roaming around the question for four or five essays you may have also read here, I once speculated on the shape and colours of what would truly be another language :

If existentialism evolves as a promising philosophical path for the question of foreignness, it is because numerous are the personal accounts of foreignness which have invited to transcend the very possibility of conceptualisation altogether. Foreignness as an event or a duration demands another language, another discourse than that of a universalising philosophy. The medium of creative, speculative and poetic hypotheses, perhaps ; or at least, the language of an interrogative subject, facing the task of philosophy just like he faces the foreign land, modest yet constructive in his attempt to elaborate upon his intuitions.
A language that forgets its definition, oblivious to its content ; a language eager to go all in continuously, each utterance culminating all it has been so far and still willing to risk it all. A language of creative and poetic hypotheses — or thus spoke my flow some two springs ago, but it strikes me now that the play of the paper, the pleasure of the letters would not suffice for an existence. Keeping this spirit, certainly, maintaining the same intolerance for self-indulgence, but translating it into life, lifestyle, values. Words, those we speak, and actions. Behind the play of my words was my self hiding, indeed a player, improvising decisions and behaviours, for entertainment’s sake more than for any real ideal of aesthetics or creative liberty.
No — and indeed, creativity and a continuous attention are required, but these may be put to use for elsewhat than timepassing. Somewhere in the thesis, I wrote that the (western) foreigner bursts his existentialist bubble when he “enters history”, finally understanding the word ‘politics’ and discovering the buried guilts of his people — and perhaps that was my own way to move towards the heavy but liberating realisations of my own history and responsibilities.
Control and agency, horizons of our adulthood, are finally a bit like the Socratic paradox : the more you get there, the more you realise it still isn’t in your hands. And thus if little to none is read or written these days, I keep in mind that in any case, even the freest time and brightest creativity would only place me out there : waiting for the words to channel through my mind and fingers, as if waving the hand at my soul, smiling,

finally relieved.

Samuel

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