Personal and collective absurdities

Imagine that your eyes are closed and your mind transcends into a higher level of sensing, where you slowly start to feel the architecture and the walls around you – the spaces above and below. You lean your head back against the softness of your seat and breathe in and out slowly, feeling the still air inside your nose, thinking about what you read earlier online. The liquids you always use to scrub your bathroom mirror and kitchen stove pollute the air inside your apartment to a higher degree than any polluted city air. Maybe not the air of Beijing, but you know, Atlanta, let’s say. You breathe in and out and think of all these pollutants, and wonder if it even matters what you do. You think of tea tree oil and lemon, and how you should use these next time to clean, if you remember. 

You feel your mind extending outwards like unfolding octopus tentacles waking up from a nap, in the rhythmic tidal shifts of the shallows of the nearest ocean. You feel your mind’s tentacles of perception quietly unfolding and extending in all directions, sensing across spatial boundaries of the physical limits in all directions around you. You think of the film A Special Day (1977) by Ettore Scola. You think of two neighbours tracking each other’s movements out of the corner of their eyes across the courtyard of a building that is often called the ‘quadrangle’: a building that has an inner square and apartments stacked around it, so when you can look out your window, you do not face  the real outside, but many intimate insides; a grid of strangers’ windows, partially lit, often empty, sometimes covered by drying clothes or a plant draped over the edge of the windowsill.
As you feel the tentacles of your mind’s eye stretching into the apartments through the ceiling and underneath the floorboards, you sense the woman overhead, moving around and spooning coffee into the boiling pot of water of a džezva, the way the Turkish do it. You sense her silent resignation because she wasn’t able to save up enough money to go visit her mother back home this year. You sense her scheming thoughts on how to make a little bit more in the upcoming year. Maybe getting another part-time job in the nearby pool, which wouldn’t be too bad because the smell of chlorine calms her down. Something about the swimming pool reminded her of her childhood and her first kiss behind the bleachers, as she waited, shivering above the silver water, with her little friend as they waited for their turn to dive in. 

Your attention shifts to the apartment below you, where a young couple are teasing each other, in a language that is far from both their mother tongue. Both are blissfully unaware of the silent case of chlamydia spreading through the body of one. The brownies they put in the oven 17 minutes ago are fudging and the blueberries on top are collapsing under the heat, seeping their thick purple insides into the flesh of the chocolate dessert.

Your mind’s tentacles unfold now towards the darkened apartment across the courtyard, not the exact parallel but the one to the left. Here, a young man is developing a game engine that he hopes will commercially compete with Unity and Unreal, because he believes that his browser version will be easier to use and smoother to work with. He is using a new programming method called vibe-coding, meaning that he uses a series of AI agents who write the scaffolding of the engine in green code in a series of sequenced terminals on his large computer screen, while he monitors their work. He sips on grapefruit juice, his favorite, and surveys the glowing terminals, typing in corrections and instructions. 

At the same time, one sliver of his thoughts peels off towards the vegan burger he ordered, that will be delivered by a young Kazakh man in 33 minutes, who has two sisters he is sending money to. After paying his overpriced rent, the delivery man transfers most of his what’s left of his paycheck via a remittance platform such as Western Union or MoneyGram, which shoplifts up to 20% of the sent amount; an exchange-rate manipulation draped in a fee. Of course, the Kazakh is aware of the financial extraction mechanisms embedded in global migration flows from the South to the North; he is aware of how these “cash apps” function as secondary sites of value capture that constitute the contemporary financialized imperial structure. But, there isn’t much he can do about it. His sisters are still studying and need the money from his labor, however much ends up being received. As he is delivering the vegan burger on his rented green electric bike, he is not thinking about the sticky web of money hoarding by service providers and financial middlemen, but about a conversation he just had with a colleague while they waited in line to pick up the burger orders.

During this conversation, he was told of the elections currently unfolding in his colleague’s motherland. Located on the southern side of the second-smallest continent, with crumbling cities nestled in arid mountains, dried-up rivers, it also houses a spoken language that occupies its own solitary branch of the Indo-European family. His colleague said that they were stuck in a bit of a loop, where he wished for his chosen party to win the parliamentary majority but knowing that can only happen through voting manipulation.Thus, this would diminish the future of a democratic state and their potential accession into a larger geopolitical entity that would enable virtually free transfers of money. 

The delivery guy from Kazakhstan is biking and thinking of the conversation, weighing the pros and cons of democracy in his mind. He questions his participation in the larger conglomeration that promises security, a metropolis of conflicting regulations and balconies of exceptions. He speculates if democracy even exists, or is it indeed eroded like everybody says? He thinks of the history he learned in school and all the other histories he learned afterwards, and tries to remember a time that political systems functioned as they should. He almost misses his turn and snaps his focus back to the road, with eyes on the tiny screen fastened on the handlebars of his bike,with a plastic holder he ordered from Temu – touched by hundreds of hands in production and delivery before he received it. His phone is covered in a transparent film so as not to get wet by the drizzle that seems to perpetually fall, especially on the days where he wakes up in fatigue, with the weight of the grey sky on his shoulders. He then delivers the vegan burger to the guy building the new gaming engine.

You lean you head back against the soft nest of your seat and breathe in and out slowly, imagining your minds tentacles extending not only spatially into the adjacent apartment but also temporally backwards and deeper in time. You start feeling the reverberations of the eons that passed. You see the construction workers who built the building you are in, hands and machines working in sync. You see them burying the foundations of the architecture, the stacked apartments around a square courtyard with a solitary linden tree in the middle, paralyzing its roots in the concrete and steel foundations deep in the earth below. You see the construction workers slowly assembling the layers of steel, concrete, wood, brick, plaster, and glass. The contractors are standing in the half-constructed shells, sipping tiny cups of instant coffee with powdered milk, touching the insides of the walls and hiding small objects in the crevices between the layered material. 

One of these hidden objects had been placed in the wall to your left, melded to the scaffolding. It slowly pulses in its unique bio-acoustic grid, tracing the passing sequences of the building as it slowly turns to orange and grey dust. You keep your eyes closed and your mind relaxes into a higher level of sensing, and you start to feel the reverberations of the nuclear blast from somewhere ahead reaching back and stroking your lungs, and the breath of the city that lost its shape. Imagine the reverberations of the blast sequence stretching further back still, to when there were no buildings, no ceilings, no walls standing tall, no angular shapes, and no spaces above and below. No glass at all. Simply rustling silence, and the whispers of the dead in the towering trees, and a deer walking past thousands of years ago, leaving soft indents in the moss covering the land you still stand on. You feel the orange rich soil under your fingers, and further back yet, they slide on ice. You feel the gust of wind on your face from an ancient flying creature circling above your head, looking for a space to nest her lineage.