Say.Act.Feel | 2208

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A recognition that not one of us knows what the fuck is going on. The past 2 years should have made this abundantly clear.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2022/02/26/301-2208-say-act-feel/

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo


Say.Act.Feel

This IS a personal podcast, I say it upfront every week. I write and speak to you in a personal capacity. Once a week I sit down and pour out 1000 words on whatever I feel like talking about into a document. I read it back, edit, then speak it aloud. 

Abracadabra. “As I speak, I create.”

Creating work and offering to the world online is a kind of burlesque.

You are you but different on the internet

There’s the mask you wear for the gram, the twitter persona, the face for youtube. They’re all a performance, an exaggerated imitation of ones self.

We are all Sally Rand now. On a platform – a literal stage – behind billowing fans. Hiding and revealing parts of ourselves over the course of a performance. With titular movements we suggest and intimate at parts of our authentic selves. The view, the listener, the reader, the audience, we are all implicated, complicit. A tale comes alive in its telling, an artwork is co-created between artist and audience.

In general, I try to avoid creating anything too bound up with the news cycle. That way lies brainworms – and I assure you of this – will result in being ridden by ghastly demons. 

All the worst people in society are haunted in this way. The worst opinions find those with the loudest voices. Such is the world that we inhabit and have tolerated for too long. Abracadabra. 

This is all to say of course:

  • What does one say at a time like this?.
  • What is one supposed to do at a time like this?
  • How is one supposed to act?

Beyond “War is bad”, beyond “What is happening is awful, a tragedy” what can one say? Not much. 

What is one supposed to do about things they can do absolutely nothing about? Apart from pray for others and hold them in our thoughts. Listening is ‘the doing’ at a time like this.

How is one supposed to act? Well, that is something we all have agency over. In order to act however, first one must be sure of how one feels.

To speak of the worst people once again. You would have thought that after two whole years of burning out their amygdalas 24/7, they would be weary of further glueing themselves to the inauthentic internet. If continued they will lose their souls. To be on social media right now, following, tweeting, having opinions, will see one’s soul sucked out to feed the machine. The Golden Throne perhaps The Kraken that churns the social seas.

I am not sure how I feel about real time war. 

Back in 2013 I gave a PechaKucha at Lima Zulu called ‘Viewer Discretion Cannot Be Advised’. I wondered if society was ready to be exposed to the everyday lived experience of the entire world. The answer is still, no. 

This isn’t the first real time war of course. There are many others happening as I speak. You have to seek them out to see.

I really do struggle with the mindset of the worst people. The world they think they live in has ended. This isn’t the cold war, nor is the abstract and imputent long War on Terror. Conducted overseas against people we would never know.

What’s happening, isn’t happening ‘over there’. It’s happening ‘over here’. It’s happening on streets that I have walked, in places I have been. Kiev is as far from Berlin as Madrid from Paris.

I wrote last year that if you thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel, you were mistaken. It was is in fact the headlight of an oncoming train. I didn’t predict a fucking war. But it is how I feel, how I have felt for a long time. Worst disasters are yet to unfold.

As longtime listeners will remember we are living in ‘The Run Out’. The long 20thC is ending and we are  living through that landslide. 

So then, how are we to act in a time like this?

I have over the last few years been grateful for the work, writing and influence of Bayo Akomolafe.

He speaks often of our need to ‘Make Sanctuary’. A recognition that many of us feel like we are living in the wake of a ‘multiplicity of world-endings’.

I can’t follow a real time war. I can’t do that to myself. I wasn’t ready a decade ago, and I am not – still. 

I will practise instead what Akomolafe calls ‘looking away at’ (which is different from, and lies somewhere between, ‘looking at’ something or ‘looking away from’ something). Looking-away-at is a refusal to return the gaze of the citizen with one’s gaze, a fatal disruption of the interface of sane communication.”

We are alive during The Run Out. Instead of living in a kind of ​​’end-time’ so to speak. We must learn to live in the ‘meantime’“in the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers.”

A recognition that not one of us knows what the fuck is going on. The past 2 years should have made this abundantly clear.

Back in 2018 I wrote that our only response to this condition is to ‘​​Learn How to Feel’.

Learning how to feel is as Akomolafe says. “A modest move made in face of daunting challenges” 

We do so for “The world changes in small moments. Especially when we are not looking.”

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The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

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2 responses to “Say.Act.Feel | 2208”

  1. […] wrote about how I feel about the crisis in my podcast yesterday. But I do have a small narrative to offer, in addition to other narratives trying to make sense of […]

  2. […] the trivializing structures of the internet”. I mentioned that people would be feeling this the other week, in turn reaching further back to a talk I gave in 2013 called ‘Viewer discretion cannot be […]

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