Listening to Shubert

I don’t write here any­more. An obser­va­tion I make from time to time is as if, in its ear­ly autum­nal days, inspi­ra­tion is slug­gish­ly aban­don­ing its fad­ed leaves in antic­i­pa­tion of a more soli­tary and win­try breath.

I bought a tele­vi­sion. I had­n’t had one for 13 years. It’s incred­i­ble how far tech­nol­o­gy has come…

I fill my silences with high-def­i­n­i­tion doc­u­men­taries : the noc­tur­nal life of ani­mals, the anguished life of Andy Warhol. With my tablet, I can spend an hour on a game of patience, a long time watch­ing use­less videos, observ­ing the col­lec­tive uncon­scious­ness. With my Kin­dle, I read a lot.

At the moment, I am fas­ci­nat­ed by the grand plan­e­tary cycles, those that ini­tial­ly have noth­ing to do with human­i­ty. The Neptune/​Pluto syn­ods, Uranus/​Neptune, and many oth­ers can be asso­ci­at­ed with the dra­mat­ic phas­es of the human species. A beau­ti­ful soup.

There is a plan­e­tary index that mea­sures the total angu­lar­i­ty of the stars. André Bar­bault became famous for, among oth­er things, pre­dict­ing the 2020 pan­dem­ic in this way. 2022 is not to be out­done ; the solar sys­tem cur­rent­ly has the low­est index since 1988. We are promised a renais­sance in 2026. And World War III in 2080. Like that.

In short, it’s all the same ?

While Putin is mas­tur­bat­ing in front of Ukraine with the bit of vigour he has left, researchers are fly­ing planes with the sole force of ions, man­ag­ing to tame nuclear fusion as best they can. Our con­scious­ness could be, accord­ing to some, the result of quan­tum probability.

And let’s not for­get the RNA that will save us while Africa kills each oth­er with­out us being offended.

We choose our show. We still have that lux­u­ry. Yet our des­tiny is played out with­in voodoo rings. We still believe that our care­less­ness will get us out of the hole again.

Mean­while, my teacher asked me to select a Schu­bert lied. There are so many. Schu­bert com­posed dur­ing the Uranus/​Neptune con­junc­tion (syn­od) of the 19^th cen­tu­ry, which marked the Roman­tic peri­od when indi­vid­u­al­ism was dis­cov­ered in its strug­gle with the ocean. One hun­dred and sev­en­ty-two years lat­er, from the 1990s onwards, indi­vid­u­al­ism is being redis­cov­ered and lost in the tumul­tuous and shift­ing waters of the emerg­ing vir­tu­al world. We ask our­selves the same ques­tions, and we grope around.

Sym­bols can be made to say any­thing, espe­cial­ly as they inter­twine and mix their colours.

In the mean­time, I con­tin­ue to sing because I know that I won’t be around for the next Oura­nos and Posei­don encounter. I have noth­ing else to say in con­clu­sion. I am only an eter­nal elec­tron, moved by inef­fa­ble forces, and I might as well go back to Schubert.