Sources
Evelyn Plasch, Shelim Alvarado
What happens every day when you wake up? Sometimes, when I wake from sleep I come to realise that the brain has been temporarily disconnected from the receptors of consciousness and everything outside of my body. Waking up, the real world slowly comes back in. I soon realise what needs to be done. I consider the tasks of the day ahead. Usually I get out of bed and make a coffee to become stimulated immediately. Dormant communications come to my attention as I receive new correspondence. The body is now present. What will I wear? What style do I have? I often sit and think about waking up and what spending time in silence feels like. Contemplation. I come to realise I am inside domestic space. I think about its limits. The walls, like a shell, are a physical boundary. My body is enclosed. These physical proportions suit the shape and movement of my body, it facilitates a living being. Looking at the closed apartment door I try to think about scale: scales of matter that start from the sub-atomic. I am aware that energy, life, moves through molecular cell structures into amoebas, into evolution, into long periods of time of which we have no perception of. Of scale, a long perspective. But, what does scale really mean? Scales of time, the scale of the room, the scale of my body and how other bodies occupy similar spaces. What does your space look like? And when does space become geography? The geography of organs, of the landscape, of light that travels and the electricity that shoots down the cable, power in turn becoming entangled. A hat on top of the brain, layers of the onion, and what about psychology then? Hopes, fears, thoughts, personality traits, the things which make us who we are and why we connect with certain ideas, traditions and behaviours. Then it’s time for work. I move outside and every day the street is a reality: the logistics of life keep on going, the trash gets taken out, the weather, social life, transport, headphones in. What music I listen to is usually a conscious choice. What food should I eat? How much nutrition is taken into consideration, it’s sustenance. This is all based on the pretext that I am in control of my own life, my thoughts, my individuality and my perspective. I recently read that the idea of historical consciousness came about around the turn of the 19th century when Hegel said that the ways people orient themselves in time is bound by the historical and cultural contexts they inhabit. So, humans eventually formed themselves into civilisations and cultures as a larger development, leading to the perception of themselves as humanity – a subjectivity that can realise itself as something more complex and larger than individual human beings. Like how children don’t understand what it’s like to be an adult – the whole species of human beings forms a history with phases of development. They learn from their accumulated experiences about what they are and what is the world around them – coming-of-age, for ages. Hegel’s philosophical developments were likely connected to the onset of the steam engine which spurred the industrial revolution. Later, Marx said that change is the only constant in the modern world. Since then the speed of history accelerated, culture is disseminated back onto itself as inter-generational growth and time passes, rehashing moments as recurring symbols. War drives the need for speed. And there’s a direction to time and technology. Balancing out with physical resistance the bat as a weapon violently retaliates. Something brutal and primordial is at stake, a wolf in sheep’s clothing… there is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end. Good examples of interpretation only lead to more interpretation and an idea in the head can become very real – a strange obsession.
Freedom is an important idea for a lot of people: be the change etc. But actually, a lot of people have serious concerns about freedom, often to the point where it becomes ideological. One might see contemporary life as defined by our ideologies, even if we don’t really know what it means to be ideological. Different hats give access to various personalities: they communicate style and the desire to be fashionable. Even when we look around and see people all wearing the same things. Marc Jacobs said that “Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.” This seems like a statement that assumes individuality is a form of freedom, yet to look fondly on the idea – I imagine he’s asking us to respect and love each other as individuals rather than building hierarchies on style. Be it banal or unglamorous, it always seemed serious to me to think of the uneventful as enough. Not to call out what trivial concerns I might have as hysterical, but to attempt to become more aware of the multi-layered codes, communications and frequencies as sources detached from something much more immediate. After all, the phone is a mediation of reality and the “everyday” is its own frequency. A life less ordinary?
Right now, although I may later regret this, I can say I sustain a specific kind of freedom when becoming aware of the prosaic: a new perspective emerges where what might not have previously seemed important or meaningful suddenly gains value; or even better, it becomes a boring facet of reality. And that is something I often long for. In fact, I actively engage with boredom as if it were a civil right, where I obtain my own specific kind of freedom. This profound change in speed can allow me to temporarily withdraw from all the things that interfere. And in these moments of boredom I am able to really experience a frequency of nothing being worth my while and altogether beautiful. A profound source of relief.
– Richard Sides –
