Lucía > Recent Status Updates

Where does a story end?
It’s a lie, the last page of a book, because it masquerades as a conclusion. A real conclusion – the culmination of something – when what you’re being offered is an arbitrary line in the sand. This story ends here. Pick a random event. Ignore whatever comes after it, or write a sequel.

did every tiny connection – every word, every gesture, every kindness – simply nudge us in a brand-new direction?

And I suddenly wonder why we put so much store in words, when they can mean so incredibly little.

I suddenly realise that my life no longer feels disposable; I can’t just throw it away or undo it. I don’t want to discard it because it’s not perfect, or because there are flaws in my tapestry. It’s not quite there yet – there’s still a long way to go – but I want my life to eventually become ceramic: one I can wash and keep, even when it chips. A life I can use every day; one I smile at because it makes me happy

I am mostly on my own.I am so permanently alone that I can feel it in my bones, in my eyeballs, in the roots of my hair.I feel loneliness like a physical presence, as if someone heavy is sitting on my chest.I feel it when I wake up and I feel it when I walk down the street.I feel it when I eat and when I dance;I feel it when I’m with people, and I feel it when I’m not. I feel loneliness inside me, all of the time

Memories are time travel, and so are regrets, hopes and daydreams. When we die, the people we love carry us forward into it.

There are infinite things you can do with time.
You can save it, spend it, stitch it, kill it.
You can beat it, steal it and watch it fly.
You can do time and set it; you can waste it and keep it; it can be good or bad, on your side or against you. You can have a whale of it; be in the nick of it or behind it; you can have it on your hands.

Emotions aren’t binary or finite: they change, shift, run into each other like coloured water. They are layered, three-dimensional and twisted; they don’t arrive in order, one by one, labelled neatly. They lie on top of each other, twisting like kaleidoscopes, like prisms, like spinning bird feathers lit with their own iridescence.

That’s the thing I’ve never really understood about emotions. We’re given unhelpful words for them – sad, happy, angry, scared, disgusted – but they’re not accurate and there never seems to be anywhere near enough of them. How could there be?

«Tenemos los medios de comunicación que merecemos y, hasta cierto punto, los que ansiamos.»
Bobby Duffy

una sociedad que ha entronizado un concepto de trabajo asociado con la felicidad y lo coloca en el eje central de nuestras vidas, de manera que termina minusvalorando el resto de los aspectos personales.

La historia de la filosofía lo tenía ya claro cuando afirmaba que lo primero que había que asegurarse eran los bienes primarios y después se podría filosofar. La frase se le atribuye al filosofo inglés Hobbes, pero ya se conocía en la Grecia clásica y en tiempos de Roma: Primun vivere deinde phisophari (traducción no literal: «Primero los víveres y después la filosofía»).

It’s funny how living in a house with other people in it feels infinitely lonelier than living completely alone.

Love is a courageous thing to pursue, and to me Eos represents hope, and resilience, and light in the darkest hour. She represents the strength to keep trying, even when you know you’re doomed. She represents new beginnings and refusing to accept defeat.

There needs to be a word for both heartbroken and humiliated.
Heartiliated, maybe.

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

«The reality principle is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are ... it is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.» Zupancic

«Modernization», Badiou bitterly observes, «is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so.»

We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal.

A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

‘Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by …. downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).»

‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police.

For much hip hop, any ‘naïve’ hope that youth culture could change anything has been replaced by the hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of ‘reality’. «In hip hop», Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine, «‘real’ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompro-mised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover.

‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

«a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible.»
Badiou

In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.»
Marx and Engels