through europe

Another day of direct action, another day of semantic stretching. Kids run inside the Tory’s HQ, break the windows, or maybe they stop a coal power station, or they enact a political performance in a socially sensitive place. All legitimate and often noble means of protesting, but, still, their classification under the label of ‘direct action’ seems to me to be a misguided attempt to stretch the meaning of this expression.

He hadn’t the time to get changed and the collar of his shirt was starting to annoy him. It was a stiff collar, almost ceremonial. Considering the total price of the shirt, that short strip of fabric must have been worth at least ten pounds. More or less the reimbursement fund for a whole day spent at ‘work’. And, to be at ‘work’, this kind of shirt was compulsory. There wasn’t a real uniform, apart from the price-tag of the clothes.

There is a place, at the periphery of the work market, where many of us are still held. It is a space that resembles that of the ‘sweat lodge’, the tent at the periphery of the village where teenage Lakota Native Americans used to spend a few weeks of sacrifice and purification before entering the adult age. This place is now called internship, and, like all peripheries, it is a grey limbo, a space of suspension, where the laws of the centre do not apply and the freedom of the terra incognita remains only as the memory of a mythical past.

He was sitting in the garden, like the previous day and the one before. The warmth of the grass, soft under the soles of his feet, suggested that the morning was starting. The old man stretched his back and curled his hands on his lap. He was keeping his eyes half-closed, as he had always done since his childhood, with the carelessness of blind people.

Politics

I can’t find a better way to talk about politics than talking about my own life and the lives of those around me.

I have just moved in with my new housemates. We are four in a house now, and it is taking us a long time to understand how to make things work. Take the fridge, for example. How are we going to share the space there?