Still suffering from complete block, but to brake radio-silence a half-thought thought will have to do. The cheap J.P. Chenet and Depeche Mode have me for the rest of the night.
When it comes to people, introductions and definitions haven't changed that much through generations. "Meet Marcus, he's a doctor."
It's a gross generalization actually, but the image is there; Marcus, elbows cocked and hands hidden in the pockets of a white lab coat like they rested now concealed in the pockets of his jeans, a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a comforting word on his lips, healing people.
Eventually I discovered he didn't listen for heartbeats and breaths and out-of-tune organs, he didn't hold the hand of solitary death, he didn't even use a stethoscope unless it was to judge the level of excitation he'd manage to instill in his lover, a lab assistant from the third floor.
He still stuffed his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, but all while contemplating the protein that defined his medical career.
"Diana... does something with computers." As a generalization it's accurate but unevocative. These days, most everyone does something with computers, but trying to elaborate on the specifics falls like the story of an odyssey through ever-changing seas on the ears of a desert rat.
Cut off from the past and unsure of the future we are alone in the universe and we are all wearing blinders. It feels like the ultimate isolation, an unfortunate and necessary side-effect of acceleration. The horse runs faster with blinders. The horse runs faster when it can only see the carrot ahead without the distraction of other horses at its side. The horse runs.
In the case of humans however, the run is conceptual, we chase after our own ideas trying to keep an understanding their meaning. The confused inhabitants of a planet of Frankensteins looking at the monsters settling in; there are so many and so many reflections of them we have to choose the ones we recognize. There is no return to a basic pattern, we have progressed too far and embraced too much, we have embraced the monsters.
There’s a story here, which could be important or might mean nothing: a night in the hotel room somewhere near Münster and near a river, poisoned with mushrooms and feeling the pulse of the universe and the breath of the earth. ‘Shine on you crazy diamond’ crooned in the background and I wanted to die because no moment could surpass this complete loss of self, this belonging.
But we live because we must, not an obligation but a necessity. We return to the reality of bank accounts and electronically signed letters in the mail and chip cards and jobs we cannot define and internet friendships and pre-packaged mystery food and global crises and local statistics and all of a sudden mathematics seem real.
