Pre-Covid Nostalgia and Belief Systems. Yep.
I wonder if there are too many different things on my mind. You'll tell me.
This month has been, to say the least, intense. Sometimes I realize that I underestimate the challenges that come with studying, working, and having an artistic practice on a side. How do Moms do it? I can’t compute.
Anyway, as promised to myself, and to all the unknown readers, if there are any, thereby some monthly input freshly made out of my brain.
I hope you’ll like it.
I wrote a text about pre-covid-nostalgia, and this is an extract. Yes, I miss New York. What’s new about that?
It is not a hazard that I tried to take DM* the first night I listened to Burial’s songs. Not a hazard that Burial was one of Mark Fisher Favorite’s artists and that he too felt stuck in the past. It is not a hazard that it was in 2019 and that, this same year, we all got frozen in time, stuck because never accomplished, and it is not a hazard that anything that came after felt like a strange replica. Not a hazard that covid19 happened right at a transitioning moment of my life, in between teenage years and adulthood, belief and despair, the fastest reality check-in, sort of forcing us all into a reality we hoped to escape a little longer from. I often fantasized about meeting again my pre-covid lovers. This desire makes no sense: I did not even like the way they kissed. Pre-covid nostalgia hits me as if I was reminiscing my good old 20’s, but I’m still 25. My partner says a storm is coming. In two years, I will be 27, meaning Saturn Retrograde is around the corner. If Mark Fisher had a hard time foreseeing a bright future for your economy and society, I wished that he at least got to experience 2019. A grandiose year, right? In The New York Times article 2019 -This Has Been the Best Year Ever -, journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote: “The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.” Sharp Gains in Literacy, A Greatly Reduced Toll, Escaping Extreme Poverty… I was seduced by how this title sounded, but in the end, in the race of progress and advancement, isn’t every new year a better one, statistically speaking? Rationally, yes. Concretely, no. No one will dare to say that 2020, 2021, or 2022 were great years. It’s politically incorrect.
In 2019, when I left Amsterdam for New York, I asked, I ordered for myself: something shall happen there. Sometimes, when I ask for things and get them, I imagine myself closer to God, feeling heard and loved. I start to believe that what happens is meant to be and therefore do not question the consequences of my actions. God is the excuse, the determinant, the determinism within me, although I have never called myself a believer. Two weeks after arriving there during - what the newspaper called the greatest year of all time -, I encountered Fe:
In his apartment, There was too much vintage wallpaper, almost torn off like the brand labels removed from the shampoo bottle and the stylish books ordered pretentious theory in the living room, stupid fiction next to the bed, demonstrating the tortured ambivalence of his character. Drunk, betting next to my pulpy innocent twenty-one years old self his puppy eyes transpire “Why can’t I touch you?”. Sitting nearby, at a secure distance rolling a failed joint although I don’t even smoke weed, his sight decodes that I’m too young too french, still overwhelmed by the pseudo-arrogant attitude I dressed up with, sitting on his Harlem balcony (where I’ve seen her ex-wife read the newspaper, Instagram). While moaning and writhing on the sofa, he murmured: “Irish people are fucked-up”. Irish misogynist divorced men, precisely. There’s not a thing to chewing bitter in the city that never sleeps so, I happily taste his mouth; pretentious reader, skilled kissed. When I fell in love with him, I could not compute why he rejected me. “I’m scared by your patterns of attachment”, he said.
(…)
Belief systems, as usual, were on my mind. You get the video and the podcast. I promise it’s the last time I’ll talk about it. :p
Visual and non-visual resources, as always.
If you like my work and want to contribute to this research and sharing experience, you can do so by becoming a patron. Yes, Patreon. There.
Thanks
<3