By Loucaros Eleftheriou
Strangely, I implicitly understand your exile…what you mean when you say you rediscover Paris through watching French movies from the 80s and 90s. I never dreamed I would ever say it…perhaps it’s a natural symptom of maturing…getting wiser…life does that… Being back in Cape Town and stuck in lockdowns has been a double-exile for me. I would hear people often say “you can never go back (to a place the way you remember, experienced, lived it…back in time)”…and I honestly thought it only applied to the lives of those saying it. Like it would never happen to me; like I was somehow immune to it (by my blinding youth…at the time). I remember after my Father died, my Mother was seriously thinking about returning to Greece. She went to visit her sisters and beloved Patras (where she grew up) as a taste of what she’d be “moving back to”…and when we picked her up at the airport in Cape Town upon her return…she was in pieces…devastated. I was so shocked. I was expecting to receive an individual that would have been relaxed and rejuvenated and not crying torrentially as if she were grieving the greatest loss of her life. And it was. But I didn’t understand what it was. Asking her what was so devastating…her response: “My Greece is dead…my Greece is gone…” I thought she’d gone crazy from the ongoing mourning she was still experiencing from losing my Father. What she was experiencing only struck me profoundly, clarified itself, while I was driving south on the 405 in LA (the busiest freeway in the entire US) 20+ years after her death. The monstrous behemoth of all leviathans that burrow deep in the labyrinth-recesses of our minds transposed above. The 405...the biggest and busiest freeway in the US...a 10-tiered lane slipstream (each direction)... Treble or bass clef? Above or below? As it is within, so it is with-out? Northbound or Southbound? Events, life lessons, punctuated peaks and valleys...“notes” have a way of writing themselves on octaves. The pointillist-portrait that becomes the cardiogram of our lives upon the bottleneck-frustration, gridlocked roadmap threatening to induce flatline for many caught in a suspending web that impedes arrival to destinies. Or is that existential inertia Nirvana itself? The departure becomes the arrival. The waxing iridescence and shimmering incandescence alchemizing, birthing an epiphany;...I’ve just understood why I’ve always loved being stuck in dead traffic since a child.
Judie Tzuke’s One Day I Will Live in France - a song she and I would both listen to while I was nursing her through her liver cancer - quite randomly played on the radio. ~20 years after her death it finally hit me…in all its gravity-shifting profundity. I had to pull over to the curb and cried with her torrential tears making 20 years melt into 20 seconds… Amazing how music…frequencies (lost to time?)…conjures, jumpstarts indelible memories and moments in one’s life. We are byproducts of our environment:… environments… people… loved-ones …belief systems… textures… smells… music… literature… films… all that collectively galvanize the soul of the time capsule we live in…and the interdependent (sub-) time capsules that encapsulate our own developmental growth as our life’s trajectory oscillates…(makes me think of Saint-John Perse’s Amers we studied with you). You refer to rediscovering Paris through French films of the 80s and 90s…as you’d already been away “in your exile”. I feel that “exile”…even more existentially (secondary) more so than geographically (primary) and culturally [or are the primary and secondary reversed…the other way around?], this time around in Cape Town. And yes…one can never go back. We chase recapturing that ever-diaphanous, elusive “essence”…soul of our awakening in a moment…which gives a moment its powerful gravitational force within the orbit of our mind. But it’s never the same…everything moves on. Nothing stands still… That’s the irony governing the prospect of immortality in the face of our human condition (the soulful throughline of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire)… Or is it equally, if not more accurate…the other way around…?! The greatest irony of all is that even if we could live forever, it would be anything but bliss (in fact it would be absolute torture) because the world around us would continue to live…which means it would die… Everything and everyone we’d love (in time) would be gone. While we might exist physically, we’d be a cavernous vacuum internally, we would reflect nothing because we’d be a perpetual ‘outsider’/peripheral to the environment(s) we’d find ourselves within. We would forever be an alien, an outsider, a perpetual foreigner to the textures, sounds, smells, people, beliefs…environments…that collectively galvanize to give our time capsule we live within its distinct meaning that it has for us…each and every one of us. But isn’t that the beauty (and brutality) of life; the very transience of it all…that this very second would never be repeated again in its exactitude is what impregnates (or implodes?) it with all its gravitational significance?
So when my Mother grieved for her Greece…she didn’t mean Greece (the country), but her Greece…the Greece of the 40s…the time capsule that was so beloved to her…her environmental-byproduct-pulse that nurtured her soul...and that her soul fed/poured back into...
As for that song...those frequencies...it wasn’t necessarily in the context of France, the country, but France as in a state of being…a state of loving French culture and the language, which she appreciated because she knew what it meant to me…she knew what a Francophile I was during my UCT days (time capsule). …Anything foreign, Eurocentric to escape the psycho-social-sexual-religious muzzle that the Apartheid mindset had placed on me through the environmental byproduct syndrome my South African generation had been born into as “status quo”.
It’s inevitable…either you find ways to “remove the muzzle”, or you suffocate.
Freethinking is the greatest, single most important thing we have in our existence. The autonomous power in being a truly independent thinker requires that we…as individuals…keep challenging ourselves to always think…Always Question Above All. The day we stop doing that…or the day that ‘muscle upholding autonomy’ has atrophied, is the day we’ve been long buried…by ourselves. This “War of the (human) Mind” has been unfolding for as long as breathing itself. Same game, different players. Ironic to consider that the Father of Freethinking – Socrates – was himself ultimately ‘rewarded’ for his teachings of Freethinking and encouraging “Change”, with execution by poison.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― John Stuart Mill, 1867
(Also attributed to Edmund Burke and John F. Kennedy in a speech in 1961.)
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” ― Albert Einstein
(Widely contested on whether he said it, or not.)
“To sin by silence when they should protest, makes cowards of men.” ― Abraham Lincoln
(Sometimes attributed to Lincoln since a 1950 speech of Douglas MacArthur citing him as its author, but it’s actually from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.)
Communication is an integral part of our existence…how one galaxy of 37.2 trillion cells (a single human body) tries to express itself and be understood with and through its interactions with another. However, cognizance is a process that procures a given understanding/perception that is most relative to each and every one of us...engineered through multiple biological criteria and constraints (which ‘paint’ a different canvas for us all). No two given understandings can be identical to one another; but we sure can try and optimize the purpose and results thereof by keeping the platform as toxic-free and open as possible to forever encourage Freethinking and the power in individual discernment and autonomy. Even social media is a binary evil and good. It encourages, makes it possible that people are connected (can communicate with one another) transcending physical isolation; but it also has the danger of being misappropriated, hijacked to advocate an engineered consciousness that mass subjugates, propelling a perception, argument, understanding into a ‘convention’…a dogma that thwarts possibilities and probabilities, when ironically it is these that guarantee us a “Tomorrow”. Even quotes, while they are poetic and have become an integral part in our communications, can be a dangerous seed in and through the way they are used/misused. Many quotes are misquotes. A number are simply bogus, invented to take advantage of a reputation from a given genius and iconoclast and perpetuate the agenda of groupthinking… It’s not a case of ‘because Facebook said it...it must be so’. In fact, nowadays it’s the exact opposite. Regardless of technology and inventions that revolutionize our means of communication, I think the Holy Grail of our being - of our existence - is to always Think as an Individual, devoid algorithms, devoid movements, devoid media and trends. The greatest power an individual has is to practice a discernment…a discernment that ever-propagates an autonomous mind…a Freethinker. It is our evolutionary rite and responsibility. Interesting how that old saying holds ground…all power corrupts, so we should never simply become complacent with our given, personal sense of ‘status quo’, but rather keep questioning ourselves on a continued basis. “With great power comes great responsibility”…and no, for those younger than 30…Spidey’s Uncle Ben didn’t say it. It is as ancient and organic as being a human being itself. FYI – Voltaire is cited as saying it first…and even then…he verbalized what other brave warriors of Freethinking didn’t say, but ‘lived’ before him…and paid the price for doing so, in protecting the greatest gift of all bestowed unto humankind…that of Freethinking…as far back as Socrates. Perhaps there is truth in when wanting to find answers to the future, look to secrets (lost to time) in the past. Whether he said, she said...the primordial quote that reduces all others to their singularity - bringing us back to ground zero in the infinite auto-propagating simulations of our minds - is the following. It is Ouroboros (the mythic snake that bites its own tail and yes, ‘tale’, since we’re addressing narratives we’re born into, those we live by and those we choose to pass onto subsequent generations), marking the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning; the phenomena of historical amnesia and how it/Freedom becomes a tool for oppression:
“We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956.
algorithms of existence | frequencies … lost to time ...
(...)
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
More than ever we need to expand our minds during these challenging times of alarming contraction. Fear shrinks, suffocates, kills light and growth. It is a black hole that shreds everything it touches and that enters its orbit. The creative process is the quintessential antidote to Fear. It is for everyone, not only for people that consider themselves to be artists. It is a sacred ritual that organically digs deep into the most recessive and lost/forgotten crevices and niches in the labyrinths that weave our mind. It is a process that empowers by discovering internal answers to our external trials and tribulations; thereby allowing the silenced, latent to be articulated - and that ultimately unfolds healing. Creativity takes best care of our internal landscape, keeping it well hydrated and lit, so that it exponentially augments our perceived and experienced reality that unfolds upon our external, manifested "landscape".
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Surviving trauma and the loss of a loved one.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
We are byproducts of our earthly environment. If we lose that unique, miraculous, evolutionary crucible that birthed us into existence...then we are nothing...we cease to be human.
We are like plants. Why do we get cut back, pruned? So that we can learn how to evolve into our higher selves; to grow back even stronger, far more resilient, bountiful with abundant potential to blossom and flower furthermore. Of course, the risk you run is if you prune back too far, you could kill the organism/plant.
As it is “within” ...so it is “with-out”. Increased, growing awareness is the greatest ally we have in surviving the consequences of our actions. So that we learn from our past mistakes and stop burying ourselves alive.
The world we leave for future generations feels bleak and dismal: a dying environmental ecosystem peppered with a dying humanity. But it could be turned around “if” we start living as a collective organism and not as dangerously-fragmented, selfish and egotistical tribal factions. An organism that is responsible for its actions, the way we impact our environment - that allows us to exist - as well as each other. But very often, it sometimes takes flying into the fire of our own making to learn that life-conjuring lesson nanoseconds before it all ends. How far back can we be “pruned” in order to remove the rotted roots, so that the next, healthier, reinvigorated layer/generation can grow? This lesson is the greatest gift we could ever impart onto the next generation. The gift of Hope acquired through hard-earned Life/existential lessons.
And as Anne Frank and Stephen Hawking once said: “Where there is Hope, there is Life.”
