It has been a while since I last updated this blog; quite a lot has happened, and quite another lot has failed to happen; I am frequently asked why I even keep a blog, and I suppose the only answer that really counts is 'catharsis.' Most of the people who I know know all about it anyway; those of you who know me but from whom I am estranged for one reason or another get to have an 'update'; those of you who don't know me may or may not enjoy it or learn from it, but will still get something or other from it. For me, however, it is merely a matter of clarifying thoughts and opinions on certain things, of 'emoting'...enfin, catharsis.
Writing also allows distance to be put on things, allows perspective to be gained. I could list the things that have happened to me since the last post, I could offer my thoughts and opinions on things that have happened around me during this year, and such a listing would serve the purpose of allowing me to rank the actual importance of these things, to see whether or not the effect that I think they have had on my life is actually close to the truth or not. It would also allow me to 'clear out my closet,' to paraphrase Eminem.
One of the most difficult choices, however, with regards to beginning this particular post, was the choice of photograph to head it. I have, due to the various changes and upheavals that have happened this year, travelled quite a bit, for work as well as for pleasure; I have been to new places, revisited some that I know very well, and reencountered some that I met a long time ago. I take, like most people who have a digital camera, far too many photos, so the choice could have been prolonged. However, this photo has been on my mind for a while. I think that at the time I took it I knew that it was going to end up being representative of a whole cornucopia of reactions, thoughts, ideas, and symbolic representations of the past year and, I think, so it has proven to be. Even the location and circumstances are in some sense an encapsulation.
Close to where I am now living, a rural location, there are a number of fields, farms, allotment smallholdings and tiny hamlets and villages. A small wedge of land inbetween a number of fields is an allotment where Kevin and his friends grow vegetables organically, raise a handful of small animals (rabbits at the present moment) and, when the sun sets (if it's not raining, which it frequently does here, despite it being June and 'summer'), enjoys the early evening and the sunset with any number of friends, just sitting peacefully staring at the mountain range in the distance, chatting, or putting the finishing touches to some aspect or other of the garden. It's not a big operation (in fact, to call it an 'operation' even is to make grandiose claims for it that it doesn't possess...): I believe the North Americans might call it a 'Mom and Pop' effort and, for the best of reasons, that is what it is. There are a number of such people around here, farmers and smallholders who, for various reasons, are fighting against the hegemony of the local giant retailers who try and buy up all the supplies of everything, and then hold the suppliers to ransom. Actions, ways of being and living more precisely, like those of Kevin, at the same time go hand in hand with a collection of other such actions - a commitment to sustainability, ecology, anti-establishmentarianism, tolerance, liberalism, and so on and so forth. The kinds of things that Slavoj Zizek would hate, but which make life in small, organic communities bearable and pleasant and which, if we could, we would all like to see 'exported.' It is the same ideology that spurred on the 'Occupy' movements and the 'Arab Spring' (what a sign of our age...as soon as something happens, it is given a label so that it can be better explained, academicised, intellectually exploited, controlled and disarmed...but, for the moment, since we are all familiar with the term, here it is, with the equally-typical scare quotes around it...).
I have seen the like of it before, of course; in Beirut there was the Souk El-Tayyeb, the Saturday morning organic farmers' market in (of all places) Saifi Village ('Village'!!), but that was somehow simply surreal, not only because of where it took place, but because of how, as soon as it could, it became yet another 'product' (and spurned its own cookery books, organisation (Slow Food Lebanon), and fixed attitudes to it and lifestyle choices surrounding it). This, however, is not that; it just is what it is.
And what it is is surreal in its own way. This, of course, is Switzerland, and on the border with France, in the shadow of Mont Blanc. "Even here," however, even in this wealthy, prosperous, uber-democratic country, there are people who are marginalised (and many of them self-marginalise - people like Kevin, the 'Okupas' in central Geneva, and so on), although being marginalised in this country (or, more to the point, self-marginalising in this country) is either sanctioned, or comes with a safety net, or is just, well, acceptable and accepted. It's not really dissident, though it is, in the original sense of the word, instructive.
However, "As we all know, times are difficult," as the 'Open Letter' says. "Even here," in this non-European European country, the 'crises' of Greece, Spain, Portugal, the fin-de-siecle political machinations in neighbouring France (Hollande? Socialist? Really?) and Germany, as well as the increasing lurch to the right (politically as well as ideologically) inside the country itself are having an effect. (Some) people are hurting, "even here." So, what sort of person, really, would steal plants (and, as it turned out, not all of them, but just the ones with identification labels on them, leaving the rest of them behind and thus rendering them useless - he can't now offer them for sale, because he doesn't know what they are; he can plant them, and wait and see, but effectively they will be only fit for personal consumption) from an amateur gardener? It's not exactly kicking over the statues of corporate exploitation, so one is left to wonder what personal circumstances the thief was in, or what set of values motivated them.
It's tempting to draw analogies with other things happening around the world, of course. The problem with analogies is that every single variable, or most of them at the very least, have to be the same, otherwise the analogy falls; to argue that something is analogous to something else based on only one point of similarity is, simply, disingenuous. So, I shall try not to be disingenuous (and probably fail...).
To be continued....
