^{[ 6 min ]}

‍

‍

‍

I don't know anymore.
‍

‍

I think I used to know, thought I knew, or have things to say. But I don’t, anymore.


The last months I keep saying, “we’re all gonna die” in conversations, as a way to answer a question, or to reflect my recent pondering.


I don’t do this to be negative, or doomy, but rather to have a center to reflect from in terms of what things are worth to us, to your lives, to our art, to our ‘why”.


Look, we’ve always lived in a place where the one thing that we are certain of is that we’re all gonna die. This isn’t new.


But our systems had us believe that somehow, we could keep things up longer and longer, and in the future even longer.


But we don’t live anymore in a system that rewards effort as it used to. I don’t know if we ever realty did in truth, but certainties that were formerly more-or-less known to us will for sure start to crash down around us over the next decades.


New certainties might arise, or re-center: eternal ones, like breathwork, like stretching and embodying.


I used to make art about embodiment, healing, places to come together, to share feelings, get closer. I used to make art about ecology, earth, soil, alternative ways to live together.


But interests in music and ambitions to grow my career sucked in my focus on my art and on open calls and grants. It has been rewarding in ways, but it still evaporates so quickly. The power and the access are but a thin temporal film. A little micro aura of power and certainty that asks for so much effort to keep up.


But I can’t keep up the marketing, the posting, the attention hunting.


I can’t keep showing up at openings where everyone is dressed up and projects success and ease when most of them are stressed for money, need next steps, breakthroughs.

‍

Why are we all pretending?


In Come of Age⁽¹⁾, Stephen Jenkinson signals that it isn't purely the change that is alarming, but the rate of the changes. The speed of one stage of collapse delving into the next and the next, faster than any of us can truly comprehend. That is the sign of illness.


Jenkinson speaks to our denial of the end, of aging, and about the obsession of the West to stay young, "productive", where "growing" is understood as a continued and boundless pushing through of limits of time, accountability, mortality, instead of something attuned to its own limits, and thereby deeper, and more full.
‍
‍

"A tumour is a relentless incarnation of growth for the sake of growth. A tumour is growth untethered to, ungoverned by, the consequence of growth. The end result? A tumour loses by winning. It kills what it draws its nourishment from. It grows itself to death."

‍

What to do in a world that rather sees itself crash and founder, instead of change trajectory?
‍
‍
What to do in a world that is going faster and faster and quicker, and quicker?


How to hold yourself, hold things that unfold, hold your kin, your beloved?
‍
‍
How to be, now?


Since a couple weeks our government is telling us to prepare for possible war or crisis. To save up water, food, batteries.
‍

Is it finally coming to terms with endings, with change?


(I think it's not)


But how the fuck is this just an anecdote on the news?


Can we please talk about this together?


Or is it just gonna be more memes?


Are we ready to help one another? Are we resourced to face what is to come?


(This is not said with a panic-voice, but with a concerned, contemplative one. I am not panicked; I am puzzled.)


During COVID, the Dutch government handed a lot of freelancers and entrepreneurs a sort of income-support burseraries, in order to finacially stay afloat. Do things like that happen in war time as well? Are we going down into a possible war relatively safe, or is it that imagination of state-care that keeps us from re-organizing?


Growing up in the Netherlands has given most of us this fantasy that the world is taken care for in the basis. And comparingly to many places around the world it also is, with healthcare, transport systems, safety. But right under our noses, this providence has been eroding.


I knew since a decade this would happen. I came back to Europe from the jungle of Brazil in 2014 and I felt clearly the incomprehensible vulnerability of the modern western European lifestyle, where nothing really grows nearby, and everything is arranged and dependent of transport systems. Top down. Nothing horizontal, like how many places and communities function that are less fortunate than us.


This is partially why I set out to learn about permaculture, and alternative community, etc. Self-sustainability, or at least, interdependent sustainability. Nothing insular, just not tied to a dying engine.


Still sharp-minded after days of Ayahuasca -yes, that whole era- I told myself upon coming back that I had 6 months max before I would start to forget, start to slumber again.


But I didn’t jet out of the grid. I am still in the grid. I stayed in Europe.


Maybe we are all in the grid. If you’re reading this, you probably are. Vulnerably dependent on systems, on others. And this shouldn’t be a bad thing. But somehow, it is.


The grid is changing, it has done so, for so many diasporas and places on the world for already a couple 100 years - if not more.


The "apocalypse" that is coming to us already came to people 400 years ago during colonial conquests. The climate change that is hitting us in Europe more and more already hit many. It’s nothing new, but it is here now.


Astrologers say that things are evolving. That we are evolving. Dominant power structures are crashing. I want to believe in this aquarian evolution where we overthrow outdated forms of government and power. To imagine our future spiritual selves.


But why does this evolution come after 100’s of years of violence on so many?  Why would the evolution happen now that the shit is at the doorsteps of White Europeans? What does this crashing of the systems mean besides the metaphorical? Are we aware of what Land Back means? The transformative chaos of justice that for sure is not going to come about calmly.


Someone posted that climate change is something we keep seeing footage from, coming closer to us, until it is us filming it ourselves. I think I’ve always rented places one floor up from the ground because of possible floods, or riots.

‍

How to answer the rapid incoming changes in the world? How to make art in this, about this, to fight this? What still means something? A show? A new commission, or something about making kombucha leather?


Bayo Akomolafe says we are not to know right now. To not rush to answer the painful question of the now and the next. Because we can’t know. Because we’ll answer from the old. We’ll answer from fear, from panic perhaps, or from the believe that we somehow know what will happen or what must be done, but do we? Really?


Can we?


Astrology speaks of evolutionary leaps, unstoppable leaps. Acorns turning into oak trees. To trust that unfolding, as it is happening, now. Bayo asks us to slow down.


So, we are tasked to somehow prepare, let things unfold more. Simultaneously trust the evolutionary "leap" while at the same time start prepping extra food, water and batteries. Oh, and keep your portfolio and CV updated and smile at the gatekeeper curator at the opening.


Awesome.


We head straight into the unknown while so much is already uncertain. Are we going to keep smiling cordially, or can we get together and throw a tantrum, cry, hug, breathe, release, let go of knowing, strategize?


I really don’t know anymore. I feel greatly unready and I might need us to talk about it.

‍

‍

‍

VENUS

^{_____
(1) Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, Stephen Jenkinson, 2018. North Atlantic Books (NAB).
‍
image: Mire of Melusine, 2024.}