Bâtard Festival 2014
Reader
I don’t know if this is what is meant by embodiment, but the relief was really physical. It made me think of Atlas finally being able to stretch once Heracles carried the vault of heaven on his back for a change. But this is a bad analogy, since Heracles then has to trick Atlas into retaking his place, while here the whole point is to take shifts… This sounds quite naïve and obvious, and I am definitely not setting the world on fire. But seriously, yes, the whole point is that you don’t have to take shifts, but if you would want to you could! We can all carry the vault of heaven at the same time, or have a little stretch while the others carry our part of it. This was an epiphany, and it felt good. But it doesn’t mean that everything now is easy, and that sharing the burden is evident, and that I will never feel frustrated or misanthropic! Au contraire mon frère! I am now more than ever affected when I see that this potential responsibility-sharing is not obtained, and I wonder about how and why, and well, basically I am now running after the feeling I had at this precise moment when the caterpillar turned into a butterfly, if I may say so. But since I now am certain that it can happen and that I know the sweet taste of true cooperation, it is somehow truly worth the try. No doubt that it nourished my care for the ergonomics of collective work necessary to reach it a lot. With regards to my street cred’, I should as well not have shared all this hippie-ish epiphany. But it helped me think other things: First of all, it is this kind of real comprehension about anger that I wished upon my anger-fearing fellows. That they fear/dislike/disqualify anger absolutely doesn’t mean they don’t care, don’t commit, don’t engage! But I believe that, if they could experience the stability and the drive anger can give you, they might not push it away so often. Secondly, it strengthened my belief in processes like Open Space Technology. I had a discussion with one of the participants who stated that it all was nice and sweet and interesting, but that it really are only the privileged few who are able do these kind of things; and that we had to acknowledge the fact that, if we took all this time to do it and once more discuss it, it meant that we were deciding not to allocate this time to concrete actions in order to really change things we might be angry about. And even though I normally have concrete arguments26 to oppose these kind of statements, I had let my guard down and felt a bit destabilized in my faith in the ‘validity’ of all of us doing this at that specific moment. The day after, however, my butterfly realization fortified my belief in the fact that a process is an action; especially if we consider action as a positioning that shifts paradigms and brings changes, but also if we consider action as an assertiveness. Love of diversity Let’s quickly return to this exercise the others were doing, while I was totally tripping on collective responsibility. They collected all the questions, talked about them, tried to come up with a conclusive question, and finally retook the thing in hand and decided that they’d better find the question we wanted to address at this moment, the question that excited us; as opposed to the one we found to be the one we had to address, that would draw the best conclusion. This question ended up being: “How can we imagine a way of coming together based on a love of differences (and not on same-ness)?”. Our debate was once more very interesting: we mapped all possibilities of what ‘differences’ could mean; how plurality implied that not everybody had to be able to identify with everything; that we needed to rethink the role models, to reconsider the common values; we pondered that our need for identification was in tension with the idea of the love of diversity; we asked ourselves if we have to 26
Such as: is there really a more rightful way to occupy our time? And therefore a wrong one? (In regards to that, one of the participants told us he started thinking about this rightful occupation of time after several people told him to “get a job” while he was taking part in a political action in the street. How was this an ‘answer’ to what he was doing?) Or we might be the elite, the privileged, it's okay. Let’s just think from there. Just don't ignore it. And also don’t pretend to think FOR the other. But also don't shame yourself because of the position. Especially if you had nothing to do with it, and it came by birth. Etc etc etc.
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