It Didn't Make Sense Not to Live For
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It didn’t make sense not to live for fun Joel Blanco dough and design actually Smash Mouth’s All Stars 2 index 1.1 In the corner 7 1.2 Like Bats 13 1.3 The logical imposibility 17 of being in one’s self 1.4 The donut 25 2 Ecstasy and Instasy 33 3 Experiencing the Hole 41 4About the dough 45 The Blanket Kids 50 5 If we see a hole we want to fill it 57 Turkish Drivers making donuts 62 at the frozen square 6 Making donuts 77 3 4 “There is no worthy designer that hasn't asked himself why he is doing what he is doing.” - Vengaboys 5 1.1 In the corner Last summer I arrived at a friend’s party at a late hour. When entering the room I discovered that all the guests had taken MDMA earlier and where in a rush now. All of them were talking wildly about a wide range of strange and seemingly unrelated topics: screws, music, houses, junk food and between all this a discussion was being held about why The Vengaboys are ‘way better’ than Beethoven. Even though I could understand where they were coming from and why they were so interested in this eclectic mix of topics, I couldn’t see myself engaging with them. We were sharing a room, but yet they were in a different place. 7 IN THE CORNER Because of this divide between me and the party people, I started feeling awkward and I considered leaving. Even though to me it seemed obvious that they were ecstatic, to them it must’ve felt like I was the one who was ‘out of it’. And in a way, they were, off course, right. Because when one feels awkward, one starts watching himself from the outside. Your body feels like a robot you’re trying to control from a computer at the other side of the world through a bad internet connection. Whereas when you are on XTC, despite what the name suggests, you seem to fuse with the world. Instead of being locked out of yourself, all the doors and windows are opened wide. However, if I had arrived at the party high on MDMA, only to discover that everyone there was sober, the situation would’ve been almost identical. There would’ve still been a wall between me and the other guests and I still would’ve felt ‘out of it’. 8 IN THE CORNER Picture of the party when I started to play videogames by Andrés Agulla 2015 9 IN THE CORNER An important principle in physics is that of relativity. It states that different witnesses will perceive certain events in different ways when they are watching from different perspectives. For example: when someone, let’s call her Alice, on a riding train has a bouncy ball and she bounces it off the floor of the wagon, to her it will appear as if the ball is simply going straight up and down, however, from the perspective of someone standing beside the railroad tracks (let’s call him Bob) the ball would seem to be moving in the horizontal direction as well and the path would look like a sort of V. The idea here is that none of the observations are more truthful than any other. The ‘truth’ here is not in the individual phenomena, but rather the fundamental laws of nature. Because not only do both the ball as Alice sees it and the ball as Bob sees it move following Newton’s second law, it is actually because the second law applies equally to both balls that Alice and Bob will have different experiences. When standing in a field, watching a train speeding by, it is quite easy to find your bearings. It is your two feet standing firmly on the ground below you that will tell you that it is the train moving relative to earth, rather than the earth moving relative to the train (even though this is just as valid a conclusion, and probably the conclusion Alice draws). Our perception starts with our own bodies and then 10 IN THE CORNER reflects on the environment, back to us. We are like bats using ultrasound to navigate. We triangulate our positions by grabbing on to the things and people around us. When everything starts to move however, things get confusing. Being in a room full of people on XTC is like sitting in a train standing still in the station, when the train next to you starts pulling up. For a moment it becomes impossible to tell whether it is you or them that is moving. When everyone around you is ecstatic, it becomes impossible to tell whether it isn’t actually you. 11 1.2 Like bats Bats project their sound to find themselves in space. We are not very different. Being able to perceive something is what places us in the world, the way of positioning through external references. 13 LIKE BATS All our experiences are mediated. Our brain subconsciously processes the raw images, sounds, touches, feelings and smells into something intelligible and presents it to us 13 milliseconds after the actual impressions were impressed onto us. In these 13 milliseconds these impressions are moved by our entire past and it is this past that gives us what we consider meaning. For a baby a coffee cup is just some abstract object, however, because I have seen many coffee cups in the past I can recognize it, and not only that, I can also differentiate it from a tea cup, even though the differences are minimal. In this sense every time I drink a cup of coffee I am living in the past. While drinking this first cup of coffee in the morning I will start thinking about the day ahead. We look at what there is to do and how to do this. Here we are using our past experiences to inductively imagine what might happen in the future. The present, however, stays strangely empty. It is sandwiched between the past it conjures and the future we imagine and in itself seems to contain nothing until this present itself becomes past. Once again we are like the bat that does not know where it is. Because the present is so empty, it does not offer us something to grab on too, something to ground us; it does not present us with a coordinate-system. To make up for this we send sound waves into the past and into the future and 14 IN THE CORNER when they come back to us they form a space around us in which we can locate ourselves. But this space is created from times that don’t exist anymore, or don’t exist yet, creating the present-self from something outside of it. Just like we are ecstatic in the social spaces we inhabit, we are also ecstatic in time. 15 1.2 The logical impossibility of being in one’s self Going to the middle of a donut to realize that you are not in the donut anymore. 17 THE LOGICAL IMPOSIBILITY IN BEING IN ONE’S SELF Because the present is a virtual point between past and future, we are, in a strange way, absent from ourselves. That is, if you are searching for a self that is a pointlike essence or the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. However when we refer to the self, we are not referring to something negative or empty. Rather our ideas of ourselves —or of others, for that matter— seem to be positive. When describing ourselves we talk of our jobs, our ambitions, our childhood, our house, our phone, the books we’ve read etc. etc. Similarly when judging others we will look at their hair, their eyes, the way they walk and talk, we watch how they do their jobs or don’t do their jobs, we judge them for being overweight or asking stupid questions or we love them for the strange way they tilt their head when they laugh or for the meals they have prepared for you. All of these things would instantly evaporate if even the slightest Cartesian doubt is introduced. Yet this is all we have to work with. And this makes sense, because we do not live in a solipsistic universe, but in a world shared with others and this sharing is done through meaningful gestures and language and symbols. To be meaningful, something can not be private, because that which is purely private will not be recognized by others, nor, one might argue, by ourselves. French thinker Jacques Derrida stated that for something to be meaningful, it has to be repeatable. When reading a sentence from a piece of paper, the reader repeats this sentence in her mind. 18 THE LOGICAL IMPOSIBILITY IN BEING IN ONE’S SELF If, however, the paper on which it was written was left out in the rain, the ink would fade, the original sentence would be scrambled, the reader would not be able to make a mental copy and the meaning would be lost. Many things that might appear private are in fact also covered by this definition of meaning. Take for example the smell of fresh coffee, it is impossible to describe this smell to someone who has never experienced it, but I can conjure up the scent and even the very experience of smelling it, in my own mind. So even though I can not copy it in such a way that I can communicate it to others, it is very much repeatable and therefore, in the broad sense of the word: language.