I am sorry for today.

I told you to complete the self-evaluation
you wrote “low,”
and I didn’t stop you.

No child should be allowed to do this to themselves.

Can I say I didn’t know?
That I come from afar?
The image of you stamped with a mark from your early years,
carrying this on your shoulders and running behind it —
this image is alien to me.

Expected grade, above target, below target.
Vol’s too high, low conviction, small size.
The sorcery of swaps and assets.
The future colonised. A liability.
Class system in a classroom.

I saw you the other day at the skate park,
and you looked different.
You waved at me and told me to watch.

You took your skate and did spins and turns.
And the question I have for you is:

How does the world look when you spin?

The next day I told you I understand why you can’t stand still.
And I promised you we ‘ll finish your wooden toy,
and you will take it home.

At least I did that,
did I?

Working class is a trembling house
We are trying to support it as we are looking for the egress
On the way, we pick up the things of value to us:
The history, the machines, the strike, the camaraderie.

But once outside,
we realise that capital has been the architect and landlord
We use the tools to give the final blow
And with the ruins we build something we cannot name yet.

A friend and future mom asked me recently what my parents did well when raising me.

The greatest lesson I got from my home was to be at home in contradiction.

Mother: In a modernist house, but with the desire to escape from it.

Father: Businessman and entrepreneur, but with the unrealised tendency to do nothing.

Housewife and feminist, boss and post-worker, my parent’s transparency and truthfulness gave me the insight and ability to see through them the categories that constitute our reality system: Labour, property, money, and, above all, the labour–capital contradiction, they were all translucent and permeable to my eyes.

The way for me to cope with the irresolvability of contradictions was to overcome them in practice: through art. It was the kind of art that derives from life, and it is at life’s service.

The capitalist way of learning, codified information, the banking model of education, the division of labour, is effective in one way but not in another. All contradiction, all the staff of the weird and the eerie, are reserved for art as a specific domain of activity and not as a generalised determinant of life.  But life is not merely composed of contradictions; it is constituted by them. For what else could it be, when it is mediated by death?

With time, I would find the words to dress up a life in-between the opposites. But theory only gives form to what is already here as a warm and kinetic undercurrent. For, after all, it is life that determines consciousness, and not consciousness that determines life.

This blog will deal with life, death, and other aesthetic matters.