Chaotic Love

Don’t be afraid. The love you have will be expressed even if not verbally. It will plunge you into the utmost chaos and when you feel that torture you will know that you truly love. It is the fear of that chaos which will ultimately be your downfall. Love and chaos are brothers in this fight. When you love and believe you are not loved back you find yourself a tortured soul, with colours losing their vibrancy and sounds becoming lack-lustre. Your environment becomes an empty void in which you live a (believed) meaningless existence. When you love and are loved back you find your soul uplifted into a chaotic state in which colours become more vibrant and sounds become vivid and pronounced. Your environment becomes a magnificent painting in which you live a life with more meaning than you could ever imagine. The point of this game is to always feel the latter and the trick is to love and not worry about being loved back. Take the time to get to know those around you and spend your life showing those you hold close just how much you love them. Forget the torment of a lack-lustre life and approach love as a child; without expectation or ulterior motive. Love selflessly, and don’t stop. Ever.

Peace, love and revolutions

Signs

Signs affect us all and convey the emotions of their creators. They feed our need for order and sometimes even the seemingly unprovocative can bring about powerful emotions in us. Makeshift signs convey greater emotion and are easier to fall into rebellion against for they express an individual’s spur-of-the-moment feelings about a particular subject or situation. Strangely, working in an office, the signs here seem to express feelings of passive aggression between colleagues. It is a strange concept that the office environment could be seen as a total institution in the sense Erving Goffman described, but it can be – at the very least in the sense that all individuals within it are bound by the rules of the organization. And they rebel against this control in their own ways; by entering into conversations about their colleagues, constantly clamouring for attention and putting up signs against practices they believe to be wrong or for practices they believe to be right. They assert their authority, autonomy and their perceived rights to individuality because an office, like any other total institution, is made up of individuals with individual agendas – it is a buzzing microcosm housing love and latent aggression bubbling under the surface, waiting to spring forth. Gingerly peel back the top layer and witness the eruption.

Peace, love and revolutions…

Food is the Music of Love

Food is one of the purest expressions of love there is. It unites the masses and creates bonds through a common feeling of pleasure and ultimate satisfaction. Food knows no borders, it has no conception of age, ethnicity, ideology or sexuality; it is incapable of conveying hate or malice. Our humanity is brought out when we cook for others for not only do we feed them, but we invite them to take part in a shared experience with us. And they, the people we cook for tacitly express their ultimate trust in us.

We sit then, around our tables and create bonds with individuals we never thought possible. We eat and for those moments we talk about interesting things, our souls shine through and we are truly free to love one another. A fried banana machine, then, would be an essential component driving this revolution - a revolution of love and trust. Feed your friends, feed your enemies, feed everyone.

Peace, love and revolutions

Spatial Oppression

The space in which we live has become politicized; controlled for the furtherance of powerful interests. When we stand at a cash machine in a mall we are unknowingly conforming to the politics of that space; we subconsciously stand behind the line where the tiles on the floor change colours while waiting for our turn. We obey seemingly irrelevant and arbitrary symbols and words restricting access to various spaces in the places we live. Spatial oppression has become a norm in our times – we are told where to live, where to eat and where to walk. We are being oppressed by the words, lines and symbols which have become, in their own right, agents of control.

During the apartheid regime in South Africa, the National Party adopted a divide and rule strategy – a well known tenant in the Oppressor’s Handbook. They dictated where the indigenous African’s lived – pushing them into tight corners within the country. They controlled the majority by transforming them into several minorities – they told them where to eat and where to walk. How then, is our time any different? We are only happy because we are not subjected to torture and violence, and are kept in relative safety but in perpetual fear. We don’t see direct aggression perpetrated on fellow human beings so we don’t think about it until our memories are jogged by the odd news report which we talk about at the water cooler for a week (‘shame,’ we say, ‘did you hear about that?’) and then forget about for another fifteen years. And we are happy, conforming to symbols of our oppression, standing behind our lines where we are safe, and not daring to step over them.

Peace, love and revolutions

The Comfortable Revolution

Comfort is the ultimate goal of our leaders. When we are comfortable, we are apathetic – we don’t want change because this would destroy the sense of security we’ve gradually and lovingly bricked together over the weeks, or months, or years. The comfort leads to routine which, ironically, eventually acts to feed our comfort – we walk to work in the morning, and walk back in the evening. All day we sit in our offices, earning not just money but the feeling that we are secure; that our future is set to stay this way – and we are happy with that because that reinforces our comfort. We look to the street from our tall, double-glazed buildings at the unemployed masses living in their council flats and the vagabonds living in their cardboard boxes, and we judge them lovingly; pouring pity on them and secretly saying to ourselves, ‘at least it’s not me’. And we love this because it makes us feel good about ourselves; in our offices, earning our endless comfort. We like our routine and our comfort, and our leaders like keeping us in that perpetual cycle because no comfortable person will revolt for change. And those who do are crushed underfoot and removed from society proper to prevent further ‘contamination’ and influence. But we all harbour revolutionary thoughts; it stems from our need to believe that life could be better. And that is the irony of it, for the very same people who are and were the biggest tyrants of our time, and who would continually force revolutions and revolutionaries underground with gas masks and rubber bullets - the very people who would benefit from our contentment - once fought for a better life and were themselves discontent, and pushed underground by people with gas masks and rubber bullets. Is this, then, the nature of humanity? I hope not.

Peace, love and revolutions.