Showing posts with label The Scribbler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Scribbler. Show all posts
“Rosas y Estrellas” (“Roses and Stars”) by Raúl Martínez depicts 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Martí (center) flanked by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, with Latin American freedom fighters including Simón Bolívar behind them.
Patricia & Howard Farber Collection, New York ©Archive Raúl Martínez
“Rosas y Estrellas” (“Roses and Stars”) by Raúl Martínez depicts 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Martí (center) flanked by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, with Latin American freedom fighters including Simón Bolívar behind them.
Those last few turbulent years, it's as if we don't have feelings - guided perception- of any sort anymore. Because of this benumbed sensation we can't even properly articulate, though in non-elitist terms, the myriad of disenchantments we've to go through on a daily basis for we're mostly left with no memory of their very occurrence. Universalized disenchantment with the Order - the Dominant Group, the Political Regime, the Capitalist Economy, the Fake News, the Subaltern Cacophony, the Mediocre Public Service, the Higher Education that Principally serves as the Industry of the Precariat to state just few of our objet petit a of an existentialist frustration - is the rule rather than the exception. As a desperate act of escaping this contagious affliction, we've come to espouse fanfaronade - swaggering, empty boasting, the ostentatious display of our poorly constructed, empty-shell persona that feigns invincibility - and molysomophobia, an excessive fear of contamination - by old or new alien modes of thinking, unorthodox use of language, "dangerous" yet meticulous prognosis of the fragility of the immanent contingency of a single object - narrative or praxis - , simultaneously. Hence, we committed an inconsiderate act of concocting a mélange out of oil and water.

The only palatable way out of this conundrum, at least for the time being, apparently appears to be a massive "inoculation" campaign by way of a recumbnetibus, a sudden, wake-up knockout punch both verbal and physical. But this metaphysical vaccination outreach must carefully be under the aegis of personalities with the prerequisite courage and knowledge to call a cunt a cunt, in lieu of a stunt performance for the incurably ultracrepidarian, individuals or groups with an irresistible urge to give opinions and advice on matters of supreme importance such as this, outside of their minimalist, parsimonious, bookish knowledge (or "expert advice" as they prefer to refer to their apparent pseudo-intellectualism and the accompanying insatiable thirst to carpe the troubled diem in light of their "forethought").
The Thinking Loop A Courtesy of IBM Design
The irresistible urge to reflect - to systemically wail, to voice out the uneasily unutterable, to extemporize one's unbearable existential trite - basically emanates from one's frustration. One's frustration apropos of the burden of an imposed living, an inexplicably ubiquitous phenomenon of being tasked with a mission - to satisfy one's protectors under whose tutelage one is constantly marionetted. One ominously feels the coming of a certain serendipitous calamity to befall him, should he fail to get the pain of the menace inhabiting his conscience off his chest. Hence, the need to displace this geist pronto before it turns into an implosive conflagration.

In a world not of our making or of choosing for that matter we're consumed by the ever present fear of aphasia, a debilitating infirmity that hampers one's capacity to reveal as it were one's phenomenal existence to the world out there and repressive amnesia, the failure to remember one's apotheosis in the form of anamnesis, an unconsciously driven compendium of piecemeal personal fragments in the form of parables, poems, songs or else apologetic confessions on the deathbed.

If one's doesn't engage in the obsessive fabrication and confabulation of one's nostalgia-dominated subjective perspectives regarding most things in life that might or not matter once in a while, one is inadvertently forced to succumb to the fear of being forgotten by one's significant or rather insignificant others, those entities that inhabit the wide world outside one's domain of control, sometimes those of the cimmerii, all those phenomena that dwell in the darkest corners of undiscoverablity at least for the time being or till their hideousness gives way for an unexpected revelation to the light of the observant and imaginative mind of an eccentric persona.
However meticulous and ingenious the attempt of the kakistocrats to create a society of yea-saying acolytes is, as of now, in the Post-Fukuyamaist world, I'm pretty confident that they will never succeed in their attempts to institutionalize the youth for the youth of the 21st isn't a pet animal that could be domesticated or bestialized at will. My generation, a generation that was, is and will be condemned to give up its youth is adamantly antithetical to power - any inconsiderate attempt to centralize and confiscate the free will of my young generation, fails incessantly as it has been failing for aeons.

Per se, my quick-tempered yet questioning generation has been subject to extreme prejudice from school curricula to ways of spending their leisure time to their choice of political narratives to their religious preference, and very recently their sexual orientation. But that didn't stop them from pursuing their rebel existential quests. They rebel, therefore they are. They rebel in search of a better world to live in, a world without sado-masochistic gerontocrats. They rebel because they've been denied the recognition they deserve, the recognition that they are young on account and they are literally treated as and made into the beasts of burden, on the other. They are the ones to do, what anthropologists such as David Graeber label 3D (Dirty, Dull, & Dangerous) jobs, from organized theft to assassinations, from terrorist plots to carnage-laden coups. They sweep the floor so that the old boys could walk on the spotless red carpet somewhere in the corner of the globe as a sign of false public gesture.

So I say, rise and rise again till lambs become lions, till wolves make peace with lions, till lions become much more intelligent instead of abysmal brutes with viscera only for the somatic. And by this, I mean keep on resuscitating the spirit of youth (the sort of spirit we are constantly despised for by the de-youthed, the age bracket with relentless power, either to create or to destroy or to maintain the addictive predicament that runs by the name, status quo. Plus, it is obvious that we, as a hypercreative generation, are incline towards a cosmopolitan thought than tribalist genocides that everyone is familiar with from history.

If claiming a basic life condition of living as a human being, as a species that deserves to be treated as a valuable asset instead a what Guy Standing calls the precariat class, is a claim that gets my generation to be treated as "guilty as charged", so be it.


A genuine political solution to Ethiopian problems could emanate from genuine efforts to narrow the generational schism that is plaguing the country: That Generation vs. This Generation, The 60s vs, Generation Z, Old School vs. Post-Millenials, The Old vs. The Youth (Often treated with contempt by the old elites). In the same accord, it is high time that the concerned parties (not particularly, Political Parties) should roll their sleeves and go on a comprehensive, considerate of the zeitgeist political quest that could at least, lay the ground for a common understanding of the generational interests. It is also time to recognize that the left brain couldn't naturally and possibly work without the right. 

It is a matter of survival; to wake out of our delusional trances and self-induced insomnia and cut to the chases. In fine, it is necessary to keep an eye on the clock and the time-keeper. Or else we will go on artificially separated, as if we have never known each other. In John J Welsh's words:

The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either.

But the crux of the matter is, no matter how much we try to ignore and diffuse the real enemy of progress - class differences based on artificially engineered and authoritatively constructed assumptions - there is no way we could effectively get it of the shelf. It lurks in the shadows of our collective subconscious. Seeing and Hearing No Evil about it couldn't get it rid of the beast once and for all. It is just a sublime game of hide and seek we are trying to play, a sort of sciamachy. 

So, I say let us be vigilant about the dangers of naivety-based generational schisms and the fake attempts to address them by fighting "Wag the Dog" style wars in our generational fantasies.

A Courtesy of Atlanta Fringe


The next professors of the world will be open source-based ones. Their professorship, either as a title or a profession, emanates out of their status updates on social networks, video parodies on YouTube, Politically Correct Selfies on Instagram, ersatz critic blogs, number of likes and comments on their posts, followership of their hashtags, subscriptions to their vlogs and podcasts. And they are the "leaders" of the future of this world. Among the neologisms coined to call their WWW 2.0 titles include:


Professor Facebook

Professor YouTube

Professor Twitter

Professor Instagram

Professor Blog


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Professor of Emeritus of Old School (The well-read, provocative, unrepenting and unrecanting critic)

‪#‎GenSchismEthiopia‬


"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
 - Frederick Nietzsche

Being Young In Africa‬ is to dwell in a perilous condition of life. Being young is being the whipping kid. You are constantly despised for being, for demanding change, for moving too fast, for preserving your uniqueness... Youth is what African ruling elites want to amputate, once and for all. Refusing to be stupid as the rest could get you banished, ostracized, denigrated, exiled, demented, jailed and the need arises out of unclear political interests, you could be disposed of very easily.

Per se, being young is the same as being someone's hand to touch the fire the elites don't want to risk trying. In fine, being young is being disposable; for as Machiavelli said, "The end justifies the means"no matter how ignorant and viciously ill-organized the "power" struggles could be, to utilize the youth once and to get rid off it on other occasions has been the customary practice so far.

The "elites" strive to make a use and throw generation that hears and sees no evil, while putting aside the needs and aspirations of the juvenile majority. They want us to bury our nay-saying heads in the sand. To use a an expression from the movie "Oz: the Great and Powerful" our only rights are to "keep up, show up and shut up."
Courtesy: Nuzzel.com

One of the mottoes I advocate those in this age of instant life without "instant wisdom" is: Say Not To Conditioning through modern education and efficiency-based bureaucratic system that strives for national intellectual blindness!"

I am  a nay-sayer to whatever is nonsensically collective and statistically, a majority without common elements of solidarity, among other things. I could be an Ethiopian - by birth or politico-legal citizenship at least. But that doesn't mean I am to be "evaporated" as everybody else out there. Some people may have been trained to forget and forget awful manipulations of their intellectual existence. But I am no such a creature of sorts. As I said before, I am an adamant nay-sayer. I am no a man of apology of all sorts. Some may even try to forget an "unpleasant" memory they have had in their desperation to escape limbo, which I cannot. My juvenescent contemporaries may have been conditioned to believe in borrowed concepts. I on the other hand have taken years of initiatives to get  myself rid off moral debts to be paid to an invisible army of creditors.

In this game of ill-bred, Frankensteinian metamorphoses of individuals into an exulantic condition, I chose neither to lead nor to follow the flock. I would rather prefer a "spontaneous etiquette" towards the vast immensity of realities of the universe I now dwell in.

I didn't go to school for school's sake, just to be schoolish. Despite the choice made by my family to make me attend schools in the many years I have been to these places what I have learned above all is the art of evading the eternal recurrence of monotonous rites of passage. I have mastered, I dare say, the art of refusing the Realm of Disgust, the realm of modern education based mass control and brainwashing leading the graduates of those institutions of manipulation in to nodus tollens, a late " the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to them anymore."

Hence, I would like to emphasize over and over again, the fact that modern education though accepted as an emancipatory carnival with an anthology of Western-Intellectualism based comforting myths is as subtly harmful as the evils mankind has experienced before. That is to say the consequences of producing a controlled and conditioned by academic ventriloquists of our borrowed scholasticism are nothing less than the consequences of colonialism.

Last but not, even though this system has created a system of similarities without reasoning I don't put myself in that position of believing in my identical similarity to the rest. I am, once again, a nay-sayer to such a sado-masochistic  culture of concluding the equality and fraternity of the human race in the name of progress, modernity, civilization and the like.

 
Courtesy: DepositPhotos

Key Word
Ur…: is the non word that some adults use in different situations whenever they delay their speeches.

What you are about to read are words for all and none!

By the way of introduction this is the story of the “lost in translation” group of people inhabiting the desert of the real. This is a personal account of the self-censoring youth (my age class); the youth that voluntarily rendered its spontaneity vestigial. A vestigiality that gives a sense of psychedelic ecstasy, a sense of temporary vacation from thinking, where everything is ‘bright’ and appears luminously ‘right’ for the analysand has lost control of his willful ailments and predicaments.

Note that in the next paragraphs I care not much about the sympathy related to criticisms. I will say what I wanted to say in the manner I want to say and without castrating the “dusty balls” in the flow. I will be seeing to the preservation of relative pungency in message hereby written.

Coming back to the major issue i.e. Generation Ur (GU, hereafter), it is a generation in the age of Googled articles and systematically improvised speeches driven by the mass of overwhelming availability of ready made ancient wisdoms of the world (that is to say GU is more of a generation of discovery of the anamnesis of the ancients than invention, that needs passionate thinking, eccentric experience and ones own personal authority to signify and realize the prototype). It is a generation that says what I doesn’t mean and mean what it does not want to say. It is a generation that trembles at the sight of divergence of opinions and thoughts. It is also a generation that strives to save, protect and share the knowledge of its forefathers in the name of democratic and human rights. The people who fathered GU gave it a gift of servitude to tradition, a tradition with a missionary impulse to pass on a heirloom of ignorance. It is a progeny of the pre-1989 world of controlled ideas, institutions, cultures and behaviors.

Despite 1989 marking the dawn of new forms of freedom to access and share what exists in the form of knowledge and pseudoscience alike without obligatory attribution to to the primary source GU is machinated by a culture of self-affirming oblivion. The extent to which it could subjectively and clearly (without boringly repetitive delays in parlance) its feelings, sentiments and convictions without pruning their original propositions and primeval intent has become a rare quality owned only by a few individuals with “a rage to master.” Instead a culture of pedantic appeal to statistics and linguistic castration has taken shape, I dare say!

The monotony (sameness in tenets and appeal) in the monologues delivered, in the appeals made to the “Numbers Game”, the mainstream schools of thought, the prevalent political culture of apathy and sympathy, the robotic precision in the pronunciation of words, the unusual tendency to cling to the hundred pound words,… in one way or another reminds me of their Juvenile Generational Frustration (JGF). In my personal opinion this an Altschmerz. Altschmerz in the The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defined as “weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.”

Their frustration came from their pain, a pain that they experience for they feel deprived of their purposes and repressed in the freedom of thought they attain, but they knew not the reason for this state of affairs or how they could cut the Gordian Knot short to experience, at least negative freedom – freedom from the metaphysical limbo they are trapped in. Put differently, their emancipation comes after a journey to the land of gnossienne - “a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known [in this case, ones own inner self] for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.”

Putting aside the irony in their defensive position, they have consented to blindness unto their acts of silent acquiescence to folk psychology and the dominant frivolous mass ideology that paralyzed their efforts in trying to find out the extent of the contagion of willful ignorance.

The tragedy in this narrative is the very recognition that GU is a self-sacrificing generation of youth – whether implied and or expressed – subject to obscure and ridiculous authorities that overwhelm it without inspiring reason than a ‘blissful’ ignorance, unsophisticated superstition devoid of taste and rational temptation, rituals lacking variety and obvious guiding principles, defenseless obedience that forces it to recite generations of pedagogical ‘psalms’, worshiping ignorant and evasive culture of argumentation and conversing, left at the mercy of political elites and academic demagogues born out of ‘state of nature’-style dread of the present and frustration about the future.

Generation Ur is a generation that deflowered, is doing so and will do so in the future its “rational virginity”, its individual capacity and natural tendency to think and speak for oneself in ones own power. It has deflowered itself just to appease the ignorati and to be confused by the consequences and always trying to “run away from the pain” of explaining and diagnosing the ailment it suffers from as far as it stays in the same swamp. As such it could be argued that there is nothing more harmful than surrendering ones power in the subjective utility of language for a purpose one thinks proper, though not intentionally hurting other’s emotive needs.

For me GU is to old to talk to, to fat to flee (caught in a limbo), and to young to listen to for the charm of curiosity they should naturally develop and own in their manner of conversing and writing have started to evaporate like morning dew for they those qualities were left unattended in an arena of brainless wolves, in favor of unquestioning and conformist, hereditary assimilation which had gradually resulted in homicide – a selective and indiscriminate ‘killing’ that targeted the Self (primarily represented by the Ego), the agency that is responsible for spontaneity, the natural not premeditated recitation, uncensored for statistics sake flow of ideas, either Promethean, thinking before acting or the opposite, Epimethean. The homicide is in turn the brainchild of the new breed of freedom.

Per se, slavery is the new freedom. I don’t consider humans without self-recognizing being (just humans), creatures devoid of a sense of existence in their own way and in the image of their world views, higher beings, precisely human beings, lacking essence in their awareness of time as conscious human beings. They are rather humanoids; humanoid robots executing the social algorithms: Ignorance is bliss! Self-denial a catharsis! Mimicry is the epitome of humanness! Pop culture is the apex of rational evolution! Science and technology are the panacea to problems humanity faces!…This amounts to being the manic-depressive robot in the movie “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, trapped in the monotony of everyday life and eternal survival instinct.

In the end , if I am to make a speech, write an article or a book, act a theatrical performance for the sake of being equally conformist, ‘humane’, oblivious is the rest, then where is the point where I have the assurance that I am the sole builder, owner and manager of my individualistic ‘metaphysical terror’, the tremor to be felt in my expressive language in the spirit of its randomness, unexpectedness, owing no one and nothing? This question left unanswered (“left unopened”) as it is and unquestioned otherwise for further clarity, a generation that demonstrates its ideals and ideas out of obedience than out of necessity, curiosity, or an interest in teaching others (or else why not enlightening) has fallen into the fearful reverence of improvisations of the ignorati that gets its ideas and ideals from the individual and “burn him at the stake” for deviating from their dilettantism. To expand a little, this marks the beginning of the end, the end that signifies and justifies the need for a generation with the guts to speak about itself, for it self and to itself in a manner that doesn’t resemble in various ways the strict observance of socially ‘pregiven’ rules of engagement in the plethora of expressive thought.

If unquestionable obedience to creeds that do not ask and tell anyway could empower a society or the individual by deliberation or by chance, the strictly obedient majority (the statistics) would rule the world (hence no need for thinkers, innovators, geniuses, discoverers, statesmen..etc of whom all are individual qualities). That is to imply the mastery of acolyteship than argumentative apprenticeship of the vast majority.

So I dare say leave the shackles of blending in behind, the heavy words to the philologists and conforming to your surrounding without knowing why to the survival instinct-laden chameleon and grab your spontaneity “by the horns.”

Wrapping up: Tell the world what you have experienced in the then, are experiencing in the now and will experience in the uncharted territories of the hereafter in Sincere Subjective Simplicity (3S), for in 3S lies subtlety hiding in the open. Choking oneself with the vernacular parlance and the bitter pill of self-sacrifice is nothing more than conversational and literary boondoggling, a waste of time and above all being the center of an irresistible boredom and disgust. I am recommending an end to this masquerade of trying to unwillingly blend oneself in. I am resuscitating the spirit of randomness in coherence and natural divergence, that blind conformity in the manner of our parlance and in the composition of our texts. Hence, “spontaneous etiquette to the universe.”