The Wall

Alemania unida - el resto del mundo aún no.

Al caer, nadie lo esperaba,
Al erguirse ninguno se percató,
Al mantenerse alguien preguntó,
Y de los expertos emanaba,
Y de la gente brotaba,
Explicaciones con sentido,
Razones nacidas al olvido,
Mientras el abuelo pensaba:
"Esto es diferente, pero conocido".

Al construirse, todos sentían,
Al colapsar, ninguno desveló,
Al separar, alguno se rebeló,
Y los sensatos lo explicarían,
Y los cuerdos útiles acatarían,
Alicientes redondos de lógica,
Titulares con mentira filosófica,
Mientras las abuelas pensarían:
"Me es familiar, pero tan nuevo"

Al empezar a todos sorprendió,
Al alzarse algunos fingieron,
Al caerse muchos mintieron,
Y el cuidadoso exacto lo midió,
Y el piadoso bondadoso explicó,
Conviertiendo los olvidos recordados,
Sin vergüenza, en recuerdos olvidados,
Mientras el abuelo ignorado sugirió:
"Cuídense de repetirlo sin repetir"

Is it good to be bad?

What is good, what is bad? What do we prefer, and why?

Go on, google a few antonyms.

Make it interesting, form morally opposing pairs. What do you expect to see? More of the "good" ones being searched? Certain "bad" ones getting more attention? What does it say about our own classification?  Out of sheer curiousity, I tried a couple of searches on Google  and here is what came out:

What is Art?

What the frack are Art and Artists? How to find them?

1. Art is what artists do.

• Art is the finished product of an Artist.

Art is the end product of a complex and complicated system, that has the Artist at the center as the one materializing, breathing life into, the whole process of that system. It is complex because the interdependent factors affect and change each other, while being themselves changed from outside. It does not need to even be complicated, it can be astoundingly simple, yet retain its high degree of complexity. This results in a completely new structure of the process that feeds back, both internally and externally, to reconfigure itself as a new system, with a similarly adaptive process, keeping itself recognizable even when seen by others outside the system and process.

When considering an art piece, we identify it with a person, as his work, his production. There cannot be Art without the conscious production of a person. When we see computer generated graphics from a complicated, computer generated equation, it is certainly very Art like, but cannot be entirely described as Art, as there is no personal effort behind that graphic ¹.

Poem: Crisis on TV (again)

While we were supping,

The news relayed again,

A tiresome excitement,

The well worn suspense,

But it no longer bothered,

Our semi conscious chew,

Yet gave persistent, indifferent,

A Breaking story, live and on scene.

While we were dining,

The telly chided once more,

The same different version,

Umlungu - or why we stick together

So this is it, my foray into the brave, worn, world of the blogsphere, to share forgettable thoughts. If you´ve read past that first sentence, welcome! I hope you find your time well spent and you share your thoughts as well. 

Why Umlungu? Because of the connotations, misunderstandings and general coolness of such an exotic word - universally applicable.

Umlungu: "A Zulu word used in South Africa meaning 'white person'. Originally it comes from the white foam that collects along the shore of the beach."

How cool is that notion? Not only do we all start by washing up ashore some proverbial beach, but the connection between nature and peoples begs to be considered - in its historically ongoing perspective and interpretation. A beloved friend of times gone by, recently addressed me as Umlungu. A quick google, some wikipedia reading, and I was captured by the images behind that word. And a Zulu word at that. The all conquering Zulus that even gave soldiers of the then world´s greatest empire, a run for its money. Now surely it can´t get cooler than that?

But consider this: the "otherness" in Umlungu is not just a Zulu feature. We all have our "Umlungus" in our minds. Why? My guess is that needing to survive long enough to procreate and rear the young has always been a primary task, after eating and fighting. But then again, why? Well, apart from the humdrum DNA´s overriding urge to get replicated, another guess is that as humans or hominids we were never really too many, so staying together meant a better chance at surviving and getting on with life as we knew it. And that was at least as recent as 30 000 years ago, when our nearest cousins, the Neanderthals, took that long trip with a one way ticket to extinction, leaving our species to play by ourselves. And even then, we were not exactly a homogenous group of humans, as large swathes of earth separated our lonely clans from one another, for a long time. The migration of humans from Africa seems to have occurred about 60.000 years ago. And all that time, we apparently broke off into groups, adapted to local climates, interbred, dispersed and interbred again. But the nucleus, the core, of survival was probably around clans.

These clans were probably no more than 100 - 150 people moving and living together, which is actually a huge number, considering that it was probably pretty much "every man and his close kin for themselves". Live and learn, as an adage, probability got started there, as the ones ultimately surviving longer or better were the ones that teamed up and helped each other (which I am sure somewhere a management training coach is using as evidence of "teamworking"). But the more individuals collaborated, the stronger and more successful the clans became.

This bonding and cohesion would have been far easier between people who recognized in each other the give and take of mutual, complementing needs and wants. And if your clans person was the same skin color as you, or communicated in the same way you did, then you were bound to each other tighter than warm gloves on cold fingers. This probably did bring up the uneasy question about what to do with good old cousin Neanderthal. A big, strong person with not exactly the same attitude towards abstract concepts like settlement planning or dependency creating philanthropy. And so racism, or better, specie-ism, got jump started. Hell if we could wipe out entire herds of massive Mammoths, whacking cousins Homo erectus and Neanderthal would have been just off-season practice. And all thanks to the "team player" mentality firmly in place.

So there you are.

The person that comes ashore into a foreign continent, wipes out, allies with, gets suppressed by, and finally assimilated into, sort of, that foreign continent. Just another day in the gardens of biological evolution. And far from home, and even not knowing what home is anymore, I hold gratefully to that endearing, universal, all too human term: Umlungu.