Posts Tagged → choice

What Goes Around Comes Around

A couple of weeks ago I bought my first pair of leather pants in 17 years. Behind the curtain in the changing room, I felt strange, almost like I was tricking myself into believing I am not ridiculous.

By the time I am 50 I will probably be looking for my very last pair of leather pants.

And my daughter will buy her first.

It is unlikely I will see her wearing her second pair.

The circularity of fashion is some kind of tactical, delicate approach to two of the women’s most pressing questions: „What am I going to wear today?” and „Is my body still good enough to successfully meet my growingly complicated requirements for graceful living?„

When you wear that denim shirt you used to love in high school it is like you are trying to resume your position in the whole universe and the role you play in your own life project.

Sadly, by wearing that denim shirt that became fashionable again you cannot quite get the consistent look you want. However, the trying alone is enough to make you feel strangely connected to the present world; yet hopelessly disconnected.

There are no fashion choices that are not in accordance with an internal drive. All fashion choices actually try to fulfil a real or an imaginary agenda.

After all, you do mix fashion edicts with existential choices. You have this instinct for blurring the distinctions between the first and the second, so that you will not get too affected by these two terrible antipodal threats: the lack of meaningful progress in your existence and the excess of structure and predictability of fashion. Very few of us women know how to control such de-phasing without erasing it.

All in all, you get to wear the same trendy piece of clothing at least three times in your lifetime. Then you just stop being trendy because you either stop caring to adjust to the new spring collection, or because, well, you die.

You’re too young. Then you’re too old. And in between, you think you’re being fashionable 🙂

fashion

(Foto: ro.pinterest.com)

Broken Wisdom

Clever words, sayings, mind blowing, penetrating ideas and sophisms – they circulate everyday on social platforms. They’re un-dignifyingly called „inspirational quotes”. Bits of brilliant knowledge that, for years and centuries, were kept prisoners between the covers of books and magazines, hidden deep in strange, dark places like archives and libraries when no man ever set foot without a certain sense of purposefulness and commitment. They were made for few eyes; and for even fewer minds.

Now they’re everywhere, coming and going like clouds in a windy spring day. Sometimes they make you read them twice and mumble to yourself „good one this one!”. So you „like” it or „retweet” it. And then you move on to a YouTube jam and then you play FarmVill, and then you go shopping.

We like sophisms and „inspirational quotes”. We like them precisely because they were taken out their original context. Someone did the dirty job for is, kindly removing the trash out of our way, so that we can savor the pure beauty of some words of wisdom. Who needs context when we can have the essence? Who needs the story when we can have the plot? Get to the point, say it quick, say it smart! Don’t get entangled in a web of branchy explanations!

We have no time and no respect for broader, cumulative perspectives and, to be honest, we don’t even understand that s**t. It is hard to get, therefore irrelevant. That complicated stuff is not inspirational, it just give you a headache. Again, get to the point. Say it smart. Hit it hard. Be yourself an inspiration or find an inspirational quote to hang out there, on your wall.

You and your followers will forget it minutes after they liked it anyway.

And, in the large scheme of things, these quotes mean nothing. They change nothing and no one. They live gloriously a couple of minutes, hours, a few days at the most. Like insects. Like scattered ashes of some great man.

The internet is indeed the medium that glorifies the choice; anyone’s choice. It is the medium of all non-stake options, of false hierarchies, of derivations, and of everything that is irrelevant and reversible; a refined thinking is one click away from an obtuse debate and all platforms promote, as a rule, an abstinence from meaning. Good, bad, and neutral values, news, polemics and pieces of information are meeting and merging together forming a swarming orgy that not even a strong, ascetic mind could successfully dominate.

The use of online resources – inherently lacking in precision – easily leads to the “infantilisation” of us all: we have grown accustomed to ask more and more questions about everything, without taking the time to examine the profound nature of the answers we receive.

We have grown accustomed to wait for the inspiration to come in the form of some quotes coming from a great book written by a great man we know nothing about. We rely on nothing, but broken wisdom.

(Foto: darpanmagazine.com)