Historionics

"Music is the safest form of time travel..." Fully Filmi.

 

History is what is left when everything has been lived, done and sits dusting. There are always stories to be told and written, but the number of pages will vary. And so will the time frame. When we tell stories, we relive them, but we also recreate and revive them, for a brief moment. But they are not real, they merely exist to entertain ourselves and tickle our memories. 

Know where you're coming from

When some particular stories get adopted by a community or a nation, they all converge to a cultural pantheon. People who fought for the land, who thought for progress, who planned for systems, who created for pleasure, and did so on a grand scale, they almost always become "heroes and heroines" for the locals. They are remembered, worshiped, praised and venerated for their genius and their contributions. At least, that is what books and bank holidays want us to believe.

There is something coercive about having to pay respect to a time forsaken well before our existence. When we commemorate, do we actually remember or do we blindly pretend to? Isn't it nothing else but vacuous customs designed to arrest time for a little while? We certainly would remember none of these "special" events if they didn't figure in our annual calendar. 

So, remembrance doesn't have to be an institutionalised procedure. Most of the time, it is an individual experience of time travel that happens at any moment and any time, but is always triggered by a familiarly unfamiliar object. It can be that dining set you received at Christmas, the silver handcuffs you got for your birthday, the photograph of your first car, someone's face or name, etc. When our memories have been confined for so long in our mind that they are almost gone to oblivion, there comes the time to rewind.

Erase and remind

Of all the possible anchors for the rocking boat of our memories, music is the soundest. It carries forward sensations, emotions, recollections and reflections that have been preserved in our subconscious. Music mixes the most intimate moments we have lived and burns them on the inner layers of our mind so that they can be replayed at a later time. No words are needed, no ambiguity will interfere when nostalgia strikes through a few notes, a song or a prerecorded instrumental. 

This is why we need artists, musicians, performers and other rocknrollas. The intensity of their art often tramples their own stories and individualities. Their talent is the real force that pushes the boundaries of life experiences and breaks down the confines of mortality. What we read in books are elaborate scripts written by erudites to impress our minds. What we really want is the power to explore our impressions without restriction. 
 Indeed, music gives us the freedom to relive and release our personal stories to the point where a singularity of events becomes the plurality of shared memories.

Node-fications...

"Yesterday is just a thought away." Shingai Shoniwa (The Noisettes).
 
When do we get the green light signal? What makes a thought suddenly spring into life? How come our ventures always seem to be born unexpectedly, if not prematurely? There seems to be an urge for action at the genesis of every step we take towards our goals. We have contemplated, thought, fancied, anticipated and dreamt a certain event, and also repeatedly brushed it off as silly, disruptive, fantaisist, inconvenient and disturbing. But isn't that precisely what novelty is about?

Most of our time is spent enjoying things that are already established around us: our work, our family, our circle of acquantainces or friends, our neighbourhood, our language, our laws, our nation, and even our way of thinking. But there always comes a time when we feel the itch: we want something strange to happen, we want some sense of adventure to destroy our routines... temporarily. Yet we shy away from the thought, trying hard to muffle it, for months, for years, for decades.

5D reality

Then, something gets triggered in our head. Our brain, our intuition, our subconscious one day present us with a now or never situation. A choice must be made: to go the well-trodden road (once again) or to engage in the new path (for once!). And this is not so much of a risk than an exploration, because the aim is not to experience a quick thrill: it is about checking whether what we anticipated all this time can ever match reality.

In a way, we are forever children, yearning to understand the essence of this world: its physics and its metaphysical, its biology and its mechanics, its organics and its artificiality. We don't want all the stories to be only told, we want to become a character of these reality tales. So, what better way to do this than becoming the mastermind of our own universe?

Masterminds

In spite of what is commonly believed, we can become the architects of our own environments. It does not mean setting our tent in a desert island or revoking all forms of governance. It is the much simpler process of getting hold of what make us an island, a unique landscape, an original design, a natural chef-d'oeuvre. "Gnóthi seautón": "know thyself" as the Ancient Greeks advocated is the only way to reach that ultimate level of self-actualisation theorised by our Modern Maslow.

Being receptive to our own mental and intellectual states seem to be an overstated cliché, as per coaching and psychological practices. Yet, it is so often underrated in our routines and everyday life, because at all times we want to be "aware" of everything that happens at the time it happens. Our human brain is inherently limited by its inability to reach omniscience, so we must rely on accurate memorisation, observation, analysis, reflection and conclusion. This means that we must strictly, as best as we can, retain information as raw as possible, without the confusion of emotions, the bias of opinions and the perspective of past or future ambitions. Only then can our intuition birth ideas and concepts with a consistency and an integrity that will be effortlessly carried out in our lives.

Entropy: there, then, here, now

"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind." Bob Dylan.

You would think that the more you move around, travel, discover, uncover, recover, the more experience you would have. Yet, it seems to work the other way round: the more you explore, the further you want to go, the more restless you become. It's like these travelers who have been to far reaching countries and are suddenly thrown back home. Except that the home is no longer there: the memories they had of it have been tainted and dispersed, blown in the wind. So, there is nothing left for them to yearn for in the past: they must look into the future.

Mind blowing

Movement and exploration are two simple manifestations of a single phenomenon: curiosity. Curiosity is what drives every person on this planet to step away from the comforting and familiar, to try, to fail, to walk into the heart of chaos in an attempt to find out what makes life what it is. If anything, it is like triggering a chemical reaction among the components of one's existence so as to isolate its core elements, its elementary particles. Outer travel is just another way to bring about the chemistry of the world to us.

But since nothing is gained and nothing is lost in such entreprise, what is the point of it? After all, we commonly yearn to obtain knowledge, skills, understanding, wisdom. We get an education, we get training, we get jobs, we get material possessions, we collect acquaintances, friends, partners, children, but none of this ever seems to be of any value in the end. We seem to have gained nothing but wasted our time and lost our way.

Fizzled out

This is because settling was never the real purpose in the first place. The point of a chemical reaction, just like alchemy, is to bring about a transformation: from ordinary to extraordinary, from dull to shiny, from stone to gold. Exploration is about transforming the mind, movement is about transforming the body. The places where you've been, the sights that you've seen, the people you have met serve no purpose but to reinvent yourself in this world. What we are along the timeline of our existence is nothing but a series of coincidental and self-engineered transformations.

What about those who have never travelled? Those who have lived in the same environments, in their societies, communities, families? What about those who shut themselves from the influences of the outer world and resist the perceived chaos of the universe? They would be disappointed to know that theirs is a very familiar pattern of the worldly chemistry. In fact, they are essential markers against which we measure the degree of change in us. Those friends who have remained when you left, upon seeing them, you cannot help but realise how much you have changed while you were away.

 
It makes sense to accept that the order of our lives is nothing but streamlined chaos transformed by our own storytelling. There is no direction, no destiny, no fate, no determinism nor fatality: everything is chemistry. Yet it doesn't mean that we should stop believing in a mythology, a dreaming, a free-will or a spirit. In fact, the ultimate transformation that we can bring upon ourselves is to transcend our mind and body so as to unleash our imagination. Without imagination, there is no curiosity, without curiosity, there is no life. Curiosity is the essence of Humanity.

Good times...

"If I ever feel better, remind me to spend some good time with you..." Thomas Mars

Pranging out

It is fairly obvious that the main purpose of life is to "have a good time", to distract ourselves until the moment of our death. It is as simple a concept as can get, however, ironically, it is one of the most difficult theory to put into practice. Why is it that, even in the middle of a celebration, the moment we find tremendous enjoyment is, simultaneously, the moment we experience the greatest sadness? What is it that spoils the fun? Why is the killjoy forever louder than the cheerleaders?

Our lives are full of distractions: from TV to the internet, from family to friends, from work to leisure, from excursions to travels. The more we move in space, the slower time goes and, consequently, the less conscious we become of our own existence. Such is the magic of relativity. And even though we would like to believe that we are saddened by the passage of time, in fact, we are happy to have been able to fill our lives with as many memorable moments as possible. 

In wonderland 

The first times are among the most colourful dots on the timeline of our lives. The first time you crawled, the first time you talked, the first time you walked, the first time you went to school, etc. And even when we have no memory of these events, we are happy to rely on others, close ones, to remember these for us, times and times again. That is what parents are for... until we become parents ourselves and start collecting memories for our offspring. We hang onto these to define our identity, who we are and who we want to become.

More often that not, memories are, in fact, an unsurmountable burden. We remember good times when they are gone, we hold on to memorabilia to avoid facing the daunting future, we dream of changing the past to experience something else. Some people are on a mission to keep the status quo when everything else pushes for evolution, most want to bring back the golden ages without regards for the buzzing present, others run away from what was before in an attempt to seize the future before everyone else. 

In this battle of perspectives on time, it is a real challenge to have a good time. The pressure is on everyone to have the "best" moment of all their lives. And we play the game by upping our expectations of our own lives... to our own loss. First we want good grades, then we want shiny goods, later on we crave for stylish partners, we despair to get perfect children, before reverting to striving for good deeds. Topsy turvy twisted dreams that we discard as soon as they come to life, or don't.

Disorientation

So, in the end, none of this really matters. The good times, the bad times, the old and the sad, they are often as forgotten as we go on living. In reality, we would like to stop time and exist in a sort of permanent oblivious state to what surround us. When we distract ourselves, we don't do so exclusively to forget that we have to build a living, we mostly aim to reach social unconsciousness.
Forgetting that we have an identity, forgetting that we have families, forgetting that we have duties, forgetting that we are as common as humans can be. 

Good times are all about embracing the vacuity and vanity that defines our time on Earth...for better or worse.

Gone...missing?

"Just because I'm losing... doesn't mean I'm lost... doesn't mean I'll stop [...]" Chris Martin (Coldplay).

Traveling is very much akin to losing. Losing your inhibitions, your expectations, your apprehensions. Without a doubt, those who have a taste for shifting spaces and shifting places must have lost something in themselves that they are trying to recover through traveling. 

On the road

It is very easy to lose yourself in anticipation of what elsewhere will be like. It's not about the grass being "greener", more so the grass being different, alluring and promising. There is always a sense of adventure in going for what has never been experienced before. In this globalised world, we see, hear, smell new places day-in day-out, whether or not we want to. Most of us enjoy the comfort of knowing that the new exists while appreciating that the new will never be part of our routine. That is what "different" means in reality: something foreign, useful to compare our own lives to, helping us grow and break the mould of our collective experience.

But different also means something else. It is what fascinates and scares. It is what reminds us that despite being humans, we can never be the same. It is what, any time and any place, causes us to stop and step back and become observers of our lives. What succession of events dots my lifeline? What is my trajectory on the geodesics of this world? How relative is my world in the light of multiple frames of reference? Are we coexisting or do we belong to individual spacetime continui? 

Spaced out

There is much turmoil in realising that our existences are not uniform and that there is no truth in this world. What some decide to yearn for means nothing to others. What certain people believe with all their might is derided by other people. What drives me to move forward is what pushes others to fall back. So when each of these worlds intersect, a re-evalution becomes necessary to avoid misunderstandings, collisions and hurts. It is necessary to become the observer of the other person's timeline, not just as a way to attest his/her existence, but also to learn from it.

Often, we wait onto inspiration from role-models, famous figures and other examples established in our communities. But this is not satisfying, because who is closest to us quickly becomes invisible to our eyes, heart and mind. In fact, what inspires us is what creates magic in front of us: the mystical, the puzzling. What else could it be, if not what is strange, unusual and...different? Inspiration is therefore nothing but that moment we realise that our lives can shift to another timeline, that there are multiples possibilities ahead of us and that we have the option of veering in any direction.

Losing yourself

Sure, this has the effect of making us dizzy, anxious, prostrated after a while, but inspiration often assaults us for a brief moment. The process of traveling is always the same: deciding, organising, moving, discovering, adapting. Herein lies the challenge. This is why, although most of us can be inspired to go, only a set of happy fews head away. And those who have remained start to question their traveling mates. Where are you now? What time is it there? When are you coming back? What people who remain never realise is that those who are gone are never missing. They have shifted their individual lives to the universal scale. They are busy writing their stories for others to read...

A thread to countdown

"If life had a direction, we would take the other."


This was said to me 10 years ago, during a late night jamming session with twin amateurs guitarists and their band. At the time, they were in the peak of their rebellious and anti-establishment selves, and they were so...right.

Multi-directional

Life is universally pictured as a thread: it starts with the umbilical cord, moving gradually to lengthen our spine, later on it follows our throat line to the intestines, and, for some, it continues its cycle through the reproduction of another umbilical cord. And so life goes on for most.

But it seems that more and more, lately, there is the realisation that we live on borrowed time. We collect as many experiences as possible, we experience as many stories as we can, we write multiple destinies for ourselves in a rush, we race through the world to create memories, we recycle these memories to educate, until we need to break the cycle and take a break. The thread might run a thousand miles long or stretch itself five yards, but it remains essentially the same.

There is clearly no thread that is more remarkable than the other: it might be made of gold, made of dreams, made of medals, made of fantasies, made of laurels, made of greenbacks, it is still a borrowed thread and there will certainly come a day for payback. Some times, we think that we can switch from one thread to another or disguise our existence into a line that, if we throw as far as possible, will hook the most hidden treasures. This illusion certainly pushes some of us beyond the boundaries of normalcy, out of the reach of understanding, into the realm of iconoclasm. 

Existential questioning

There is no doubt that rebellion is necessary in our day and age. When our threads are pulled together and tied up in the hands of a few on top of a system that regulates the world like a puppet show, the no pasaran! becomes the essential ingredient, if not the reason of our lives. Hence the growing numbers of doorslams, defections, disappearances and "hermits" among the current 30-somethings. 

My former twin friends would now be in their early 30s and, by now, they would have pondered the following set of Q&As. 
1. Rise to management positions: what for, since I work better when I follow my own agenda?
2. Settle down and marry: what for, since the welfare state can take better care of my wife and children?
3. Save money for a retirement fund: what for, given that I can borrow money at any given time?

Life, reinvented

That is the new order of the 21st century and its enduring social-liberalism, its absence of hard-boiled heroes, its fabrication of collective dreams. 

The more we attempt to own the thread that is lent to us for a certain time, the more we fail. Why follow blindly as if this was the promise made to us by Ariadne?  Why keep on pulling when there is no end to the task? Really, why not walk back in the other direction? After all, what has been seen and experienced before is the guarantee of what is possible, achievable, and real.

So make no mistake: we are all bound to come back to our teenage years and the spirit of rebellion in us, one day or another. The crux of our lives lies in KNOWING when to look back, so that we have enough life and enthusiasm left in us to make the most of this time-travel venture, back to our own genesis. 

The yin and the yang

"I...I...would like to put my fingers on you." Corinne BAILEY-RAE.

There is no greater mystery in this world than the circle of life and the seemingly perfection of the cycle of Nature. Time goes from Midnight to Midnight, Earth goes round and round, Space is finite by our knowledge but infinite per se. People we meet are people we leave, challenges we reach set us on the road to further challenges, what we eat and think become who we are.

Fearing the known

There is this constant opposition and immersion of Nature and Nurture in every being. What we were in our younger years surprises us with a come-back later on in our mature life. The saying that what comes naturally cannot be hindered (perfectly summarised in the French language by "Chassez le naturel et il revient au galop") should alert us to what the purpose of our existence is. 

However, "modernity" (i.e MODERN publicITY) expects us to fight our natural instincts, deconstruct our innate principles, dismiss our individual expectations. At the same time, it incites us to run after man-made "ideals" that, although they seem in tune with who we are at a given moment, do not soothe our aspirations for long-lasting (comm)union. 

I would like to think that I can nail down who everyone is by repeated observations, discussions and socialisation. I also would like to seize the full nature of myself, my identity, my personality. But these aspirations are impossible to satisfy. 

Who are you?

We, as humans, are as fluid as our environments and our circumstances. My yin is someone's yang only for some time. My vision can find resonance among certain people, but only for some time. All relationships naturally unfold into dissolution. This is by far the harshest truth: to realise that our mortality is not linked to our physical death, but to our death in the minds and thoughts of others, even after decades of shared experiences. 

The good news is that the longer we live, the more we realise that this is also a fact of Nature and that accepting it MAKES SENSE in the long run. So many rejections, heartbreaks, break-ups, separations, divorces on the one hand. Yet, many more crushes, infatuations, friendships, mating games, partnerships and marriages. 

"During any chemical reaction no particles are created or destroyed: the atoms are simply rearranged from the reactants to the products." It seems to me that the Conservation of mass is the ultimate ruling principle that overrules individual customs, traditions, religious and spiritual beliefs.

Nature is the sole and only truth in this world: learning the ways of nature is therefore the sole requirement for a meaningful human existence.

Atemporal lingering

Flutter, trigger, relish: that is what comes to play in defining lingering.
When recollections pop out of nowhere consistently and unexpectedly remind you of a person and a place and undefined moments, you know you feel the pull of time passed.
 

Where is my mind?

It is said that our unconscious is the biggest bank of data in the human brain. Working memory, short-term memory, long-term recalls could not even beat its capacity, no matter how aggregated. It's like you have been somewhere and done something that did not really "matter" at the time it was done, and suddenly your mind reminds you that this fact/experience is there, willing to come out and show you a different take on reality.

Reality kick

How many times do we travel and wander around tasting, touching, feeling things without being aware of these? For example, on the road during a road trip, do we pay attention to all that is visible or we just want a sense of the place? The food that we sample at our new destination, how come it always seem to taste "better" than what we usually have? It can be the same spices, the same recipe, the same chain of restaurant, but why the different taste?

Marcel Proust is most famously described the reality of lingering in a 3-pages long description of his "Madeleine". Throughout the journey of our lives, the places we see and we've been to, people's voices, characters, deeds... all are passively encapsulated in our beings. Every moment is carved into our bodies, every emotion glued into our minds. We then live life fighting to stay "present" and awake, striving to keep up with the happenings of the world and struggling to remain in tune with our inner rythm. But the lingering is there, and it only takes an unplanned break in the space/time of our existence to trigger the recollection of our life story.


I believe that the human brain is the most powerful creator of algorithms, computing all facts into alternate scenarii and realities. The chemical processes at stakes could not even be reproduced in lab, and, despite the legend of Dr Frankenstein's creature, it is highly likely they never will be.

 

 So, really, who needs Jules Verne's time-machine when our minds can take us places beyond the past, present and future?

Space to think...

"Is it even worth to try?
Worth to try to escape?
Well, it is our right
to reach out for space."

This was the chorus of a song that I wrote more than 10 years ago, as I was beginning my travels around the world.  To this day, I recall these lines as the key to finding meaning and individuality in life.

Roaming

Traveling releases you in the universe, like some useless particle of stardust. It can be a mind-shattering and life-threatening experience, but it is a necessary re-birth you give yourself, as opposed to the initial birth given by your genitors. Now that you are out there, only you can go the light years and constellate your existence with bright and renewed experiments.

Space, after time, is the second unit of measure of our lives. Where have you been? What have you seen? What was it like for you? Because time is immaterial and intangible, setting ourselves on the space continuum through trips, holidays, gap years and backpacking adventures ticks and crosses important moments spent across the globe throughout our time on earth. Otherwise, why would we bother gathering "souvenirs" of places where we have been?

Outer world

I've always thought that the word "space" strangely rhymes, with "escape", thanks to those twisted electrical currents in my brain. Thinking about it again, the whole thing does make sense. All these men and women who are stuck in situations and find relief in "looking at the stars". All these children and teenagers who "lose track of time" when they are too busy reading/watching/thinking about places in their imaginations. Or even people in relationships who desperately need "space" to reclaim their lives...

Space is this unique entity that gets us to experience our lives for real: we can all cross one land a thousand times, but our internal map of the place will not be identical. With a lot of space we can build or lose our sense of place. The immigrant who had roamed around different countries can easily forget about where he/she came from in the first place. However, many people also wander in search of their very own "place". This is the prime reason why the dynamics of migrations will never be controlled nor contained, despite what some politicians and elements of closed-up societies proclaim.


"When is it that I will find
a suitable place?
I got lost around from
wandering in space..."

This was the conclusion of my very teenage song. I can say that, after crossing the world South to North and West to East, I have found my own place in a land as remote and primal as the "cradle of mankind".