A BLOG POST ACROSS TIME
May 7th 2023
I am leaving again to go back to Berlin just as I did a little bit over a year ago. It is a strange feeling to be leaving again.
At this point in time all I can think about is the bullshit that needs to be done in the next week. But it's okay because I am going to be awesome.
It is my final week in Chicago
Apocalypse
I don't know how to spell apocalypse
I hope I never learn
The last 4 months have been an absolute ?
Im not terribly sure what happened. I wish I had more to say about life but it feels too intrusive to those who live it with me.
My hair is freshly blonde again and I am ready to tweak
It's been over a year since I started this blog. The Fame that started this blog was 18 years old and very opinionated and angry. It seems as though i have grown to filter my 20 year old self just a bit more for the sake of myself and the people around me
June 11th 2023
Im in Berlin now, its been a few weeks- revisiting this blurb is quite funny. Life was so absolutely painful but filled with a lot of joy- moreover joy, but instead a tender admiration for the people around me.
Though I try to be less cynical:
I have since thought a lot about the apocalypse- How are we meant to cope while facing of the end of our world? How is an environmental transition cathartic to our vices in pre apocalyptic life? It is easy to fold oneself in the collapse of our livelihood, our futures. If we are constantly on the edge of the cliff in almost all regards, can that waiting become its own apocalypse? The time we spend patient for this unfulfilled decimation becomes the very detriment of the crash we may never see. It is very easy to conceptualize the pain of apocalypse itself, to obsess over zombie movies and fictional horror of world ending disaster. To put ourselves in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is much easier than conceptualizing it in our tangibility. Regardless of its content being fictional, it is a constant reflection of the state of things. All content (weather or not it is intended for consumption by the masses) is a direct mirror to the way that things settle at the point of its conception.
I am in my own apocalypse.
Is it possible that I created it for myself? For-sure.
On Purpose? Completely.
There is value to the pain apocalypse brings just as there is within utopia- if fear of catastrophe is a dread of pain or abandonment, I would recommend doing as I. Create your own apocalypse, let everything crumble beneath you. For the sake of growth and understanding, it is only vital.
Not until I read Trisha Low's "Socialist Realism" did I consider dreaming of utopias. The pessimist in me only allowed to see the cessation within agony. How Low depicts utopia with a feeling of a could be hope-fullness; it is the unattainable ideal of Eden. "Honestly? Theres no art that makes me feel more than a steel trap approximating some vision of heaven". (1)
She later writes of queer nihilistic poets after spending time with them at a MLA Panel: "Perhaps the queer nihilists are right, and non reproduction has become the only ethical response to the condition of our world. Perhaps freedom could only become a reality then- the moment the world ends, when the structures all fall away. I think about how tender it would be if there were just some worldwide agreement for humans to stop having babies. An Agreement for our species to die out, slowly. Just a gentle apocalypse." (2)
There is utopia to be found in apocalypse.
I would like to believe that the we are in apocalypse just as we are in the movies, it just doesn't look like a brain eating virus from mushrooms or Rick Grimes beheading walkers. We are in apocalypse in the sense that things are just as secure as we are allowed to see.
Within apocalypse, there is freedom lost and granted. Though it is vital to critique freedom as it is understood in the context of Adorno, who inspires my understanding of will within culture incarnate.
"Freedom as they know it.—People have so manipulated the concept of
freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and
richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.
Attempts to change this are seen as shameful intrusions into the realm
of the very individuality that by the logic of that freedom has dissolved
into an administered void. But the objective spirit of language
knows better. German and English reserve the word ‘free’ for things
and services which cost nothing. Aside from a critique of political
economy, this bears witness to the unfreedom posited in the exchange
relationship itself; there is no freedom as long as everything has its
price, and in reified society things exempted from the price mechanism
exist only as pitiful rudiments. On closer inspection they too are
usually found to have their price, and to be handouts with commodities
or at least with domination: parks make prisons more endurable
to those not in them. For people with a free, spontaneous, serene
and nonchalant temper, however, for those who derive freedom as a
privilege from unfreedom, language holds ready an apposite name: that of impudence."(3)
(1,2) TRISHA LOW, Socialist Realism © Coffee House Press 2019
(3) Theodor Adorno Messages in a Bottle © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980
Translated by Edmund Jephcott
with Love, Stay Awesome and go fuck up your life
FAME 💋
