XXI.

How much time spent looking for the person(s) we were because we cannot remember how we became what we are. Sitting suddenly upright in the bed, frantically staring at the mirror; unable to recognize the stranger wrapped in the sheets. The past entices us because it is untouchable and thus eternal. We use the past to give us the answers that we think we need. But where in this arabesque of passing faces are we supposed to recognize ourselves? These masks are already used, worn out, thrown away...they have nothing to do with us anymore.

XX.

Julen er allerede på retræte. De sidste hårdnakkede julefrokoster og familiemiddage er krampetrækninger fra en døende krop. Resten af året gør vi vores bedste for at forføre og fortære vores venner og fjender; men når vi nærmer os december spreder der sig en kollektiv skyldfølelse, som giver sig til kende i en neurotisk fascination af den barnlige uskyld...hvad ellers er konceptet "julekalender for voksne" et symptom på? Jo større glæde ved julen, jo mere skyldigt samfund? Måske. Måske dybden af et samfunds ondskab skal måles ved dets glæde? Jo mere energisk der pyntes op, jo mere får man mistanken af at der er noget der ønskes glemt.
Lyset fra juleudsmykningerne forskubber for en måneds tid lysene fra den daglige blitzkrieg, og vi vandrer gaderne tynde i en tilstand af komplet skizofreni. Ikke mere menneske end hvad dankortets susen kan afsløre; måske vi akkurat når at fange et glimt af os selv mellem koden og registreringen.
Julen får det bedste frem i folk. Muligvis. Men det er i højeste grad et spørgsmål om alibi. Vi tilgiver hinanden fordi "det er jo jul", en arbitrært valgt dato (eller rettere: en yderst politisk valgt dato), der på magisk vis annullerer vores synder. Vi glemmer de foregående måneders apati, had, løgne; gemmer dem under falsk sne, oppustelige nisser, og letgennemskuelige slogans. Som om fred på jord var blot et spørgsmål om gode ord og god vilje. Hykleriske måned: Vi taler løs om fred og tilgivelse, hvilket er yderst nemt for os eftersom vi befinder os i den "korrekte" ende af kapitalismens infernalske maskineri. Hvor vover vi at tale om tilgivelse når vi næsten hver eneste dag i december understøtter og forstærker fundamentet der holder ubalancen velafbalanceret?
Og givet de sidste par tusind års historie, kan vi så virkelig med god samvittighed fejre en højtid, der symboliserer kristendommens overherredømme? Juletræet er farvet af religionens millioner af ofre, så vi skynder os at dække det til med guirlander og farvede glaskugler. Er det et tilfælde at rød er den dominerende farve i december? Vi stikker fingrene dybt ned i dejen for at glemme hvorledes vi selv er "roulé dans la farine".
Der er noget ufatteligt tragisk ved julen; noget der lurer lige under den glaserede overflade, altid på nippet til at bryde igennem. De hyperaktive smil er evigt klar til at vende sig til en snerren, hvis nogen tager den sidste designerskål for næsen af os. Og denne maniske insisteren på familie minder os kun alt for godt om, hvor alene vi egentlig er. Vi kan ikke undslippe diskursen om højtiden tilbragt i familiens skød, så vi arbejder så hårdt vi kan på at opretholde illusionen...angstens sved lurende under silkeskjorterne. Presset fra alle sider smiler vi, skåler vi, udveksler vi gaver i fint papir, og sarkastiske bemærkninger pakket ind i omsorg farer gennem rummet i en lugt af snaps og svin.
Der er næppe andet at gøre for det fornuftige menneske end at holde hovedet nede i denne hvirvelstorm af fortrængning og falske løfter. Glædelig Jul.

XIX.

Questions swarm up when a life returns to the suitcase; when the pictures leave the wall and leave white spots behind. Going through the rubble, trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Which of the lived moments will get to stay with you?
There is never any going back. If you're lucky, you'll still fit in somehow. But just a little bit off. Every little bit of memorabilia asking to be judged, turning every object, desire, and experience over and over before it finds its way into memory.
All the time looking around, seeing the inhabited room slowly return to its original emptiness...its geometrical reality. The whiteness of the walls staring at you; challenging you to make sense of the past days and months. And bit by bit your life seems diminished...wondering what imprint - if any - will linger behind. Whether these parts you swore you'd never need again will take on a life of their own in your absence.
And still folding up, packing down, tucking away every single thing that made this a home. Hoping you'll find another one waiting.

XVIII.

Living by metonymy. Is this not what we do? Every time we come close to touching upon the essence of something, we do not dwell on it but hasten on in a continuum of "That reminds me of...". It is an infinite regression: We can only comprehend something in terms of something else and so on. We try to encircle our prey but only succeed in wandering further and further away from this essence that we thought we were looking for; getting enmeshed in a freak show of arbitrary similarities. How do we make new friends? By grasping some outer of inner feature that reminds of someone else. It is strange - by hastening after the past we propel ourselves into the future.
So we try to make sense of things by understanding their neighbors...and in like sense, we fear that which stands close to our enemies. The xenophobic posters of the right wing has realized this in some sense or another long ago.
We search for meaning constantly and compulsively. Of course always missing the point because we want to be spatio-temporally bound. "Standing close to" is an arbitrary statement at best; so we speed on, in jobs, families, educations and "projects"...still hoping to find some fixated point in time on which to hang the coat of our existence and relax.
But there can be no quarter; every moment is another moment of re-actualising and (worse yet!) re-constructing our moral structure. Every moment is a choice - and we shrink from this choice as night-creatures afraid of the light; putting on the masks of our personae so the mirror will at least show something.

XVII.

We treat each other as ourselves, but never in the Christian sense. We try to dominate even our fellow humans' inner wasteland by inserted ourselves into their motivations, drives and desires. "What would I do if..."; but you're not. In fact, we try to convince ourselves that we are actually enforcing humanism and mutual understanding by "putting ourselves in the others' place"; but the motivations has at some point been reversed. We don't want to see the world through the eyes of the other...we want to poke his eyes out and tell him what to see. When we try to explain behaviour, we do so only to dominate - never to understand. Is not even the phrase "In his place..." an attempt to make my ego the single determining factor in the intersubjective world? There is no place in his place for him and me to peacefully co-exist simultaneously. Life is a warzone and as in any warzone, espionage is crucial.

XVI.

That being said (XV), the real has always exercised its dominance over the imaginative. The discourse of rationality has always sought to enslave the freedom of the imaginative - the causality of Jung's interpretation of dreams did absolutely nothing to liberate humanity. All it did was to tie the noose around the one essential power of our misbegotten race: To construct images that were nothing more than the act of thinking them.
The two main properties of humanity are thus always at odds with each other; we wish to be meaningless yet cannot live without meaning. Both Baudrillard and Orwell were right - simply deceiving ourselves is not enough, we have to be aware that we are deceiving ourselves, yet still proceeding. We construct a world of beasts, forget our part, and then we tell each other that we must be beasts to survive.

XV.

It fascinates me that we as a culture cannot grasp reality better than when it is given to us as entertainment. Hence the tendency for Hollywood to take subjects so current as possible - yet these are in no way documentaries. The purely imaginative is gaining on reality. The quantum leap came, I suppose, with the trend of "re-inventing" ancient material in contemporary settings. Suddenly fiction was knocking on reality's bedroom door. The issue at hand is not merely that we begin more and more to perceive reality - our friends, family, and the man at the depanneur - as fiction, but that reality begin to behave more and more like fiction: The fictitious has embedded itself into the collective unconscious, making us act on reality in the ways we used to interpret the brilliance of Mr. Holmes or the cruelty of Dr. Caligari. We are all, now in a sense more urgent than mere poetry, actors in the teatrum mundi. The events of the real hardly have time to unfold before the captains of industry breathes down its neck...luring it with the promise of being more, of being infinite. Was the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan anything else to us than fables when they came to us through a never-ceasing continuum of images?
A sad consequence of the freedom of the press...unlimited access on all areas were supposed to bring us closer to Truth. We were never further from it than now. Facts turn into fiction and vice versa; it doesn't matter anymore. The plurality of images only means that we can never tie them together to a coherent whole. Perhaps we should just resign ourselves to living the attitudes of the silver screen?
Some might say "Let us turn then to the documentaries in our search for Truth"; look at the structure, the narrative, listen to the score, notice the aestheticism of the camera angles...and tell me frankly if this is anymore than a "realized" fable. When did the population discover that it was in fact at war? When it reared its ugly head, disguised as topos, in the visual recreations of art.
The imaginative has seduced the real, as was always its goal. The new world order consists simply of this, a reality that has finally and irreducibly moved beyond our grasp - only the residual remains.

XIV.

Oftere og oftere ligner folk på gaden mine venner; ved første øjekast fremviser de træk jeg mener at kende, men ved nærmere undersøgelse forbliver de ukendte biologiske systemer på vej mod deres respektive skæbner. Hvis jeg blev længe nok i dette land, ville jeg så langsomt fylde det op med fantomer af venner og familie? Ville jeg lidt efter lidt udviske menneskers ansigtstræk på gaden for at tilpasse dem skabeloner jeg mener at kunne genkalde mig?
Eller er dette hvad vi kalder at få nye venner? En hengivenhed genereret af fysisk lighed, frem for noget forestillet indhold. Savnet giver retning til vores perception - fanget i en cirkulær bevægelse, der hver gang bringer os tilbage til det samme tab, som vi igen og igen forsøger at påtvinge verden. Hvad end dette tab må være, lader det til at være gennem dette afsavn at vi tvinger verden til mening. Vi kræver kompensation.

XIII.

Kvindelige rockgrupper: De mandlige anmeldere fokuserer på deres kvindelighed for at fange dem i betydningens sommerfuglenet – kvinderne selv fokuserer på deres kvindelighed for at etablere sig selv som sejr på det mandliges præmisser; er det nødvendigt at påpege den nødvendige fiasko af en mission med denne strategi? Hvad der kunne have været et forsøg på en ophævelse af kønnet (og dermed implicit seksualiteten) som diskurs er nu blot videreførelse af det samme ævl: ”Jeg er kvinde, dvs. jeg er præcis som dig, blot spejlvendt.” Vil nogen helt ærligt hævde at dette skulle være en form for frigørelse? Queer-kulturens fabelagtige opråb burde være retningslinie for os alle: "Not gay as in happy but queer as in Fuck You!" Borgerlighedens eneste svar på en omvending af de vedtagne seksuelle paradigmer formår kun et ”Jamen, er du så biseksuel?”, hvilket skal mødes med værdig tavshed og et blottet skræv.