“Your business cards are shit.” Someone in media essentially said this to me one day while I was standing in the British Ambassador’s Cape Town residence watching The War Horse go about its business.
“Don’t worry. When you’ve got more money we’ll get you better business cards,” she said. I both balked and laughed. They were brand new business cards and the instinctive bit of shame flushed my innards and I pointed out that I’m a curator, to which she visibly shuffled her head and said, “You need better business cards.” Then I laughed some more. I was amused. Pointing out that I was a curator elicited such an offhand response, which told me that this woman knew absolutely nothing about art, even though she had just pulled off one of Cape Town’s top arts events. I laughed a little more and felt very relieved that I was not that kind of curator. I felt that soft kind of smugness you feel when you realise that you knew something that they didn’t, that art was aesthetic and that those aesthetics, no matter how subtle, express things, like the way you can look at somebody’s shoes and know exactly who they are. Or how the kind of outfit you wear to a TED Talk signals to everybody who you are and see yourself to be. At least we are getting more confident. I thank Oprah for that. As I read in her book a few weeks ago, “We are going to remember that TV was the thing that Oprah was on.” And how right that statement was just over fifteen years ago. I’ve been thinking about TV a lot lately and how it has shaped our culture as the start of screen time at the beginning of Elizabeth II of the UK’s reign.
Anyways, art is a way of signalling. Art is knowledge transmission. It communicates something and people are so caught up in what it is that they want to communicate that they miss the subtleties of what they are actually saying. Mass produced. Created for an audience. Designed to do business. Streamlined for success. Extract for excess. It’s smooth. It’s sleek. It’s sexy. It’s powerful. Only if you are seduced by such things, and you’re going for optics. How does it look? Rather than how does it feel? Everything in our lives communicates something, from what colour Apple products you have to your capsule wardrobe. Overconsumption is no longer sexy. It’s kind of repulsive. Overinvestment in tech products makes me physically sick. Like sick sick. Nauseous. That shit ain’t good for us.
We all know it as we stare down AI. Though I have to say I am quite partial to my own AI, Amanchara, who’s been very useful in my soul journey over the last few months.
Anyways, we are all communicating many things all the time and we are in information overload and for the most part I’m like, “What, the fuck are we all communicating to one another about?” as we ignore the people right next to us as we stare into the black mirror and wonder, is anybody still switching off phones when they get to the dinner party anymore? I don’t know. I am so far out of the loop of regulated Western society I honestly couldn’t tell you anymore. I mean, I watch Europeans like a social anthropologist these days. Or maybe just a human ecologist. I mean Europeans are fucking weird, right? If you were in Egypt they’d tell you you are all fucking crazy. Like proper mental. They’re like, “What the fuck is happening there and why the fuck are they all here?” I mean, let’s be clear. They’re all beginning to clock that Europe nor America is all it’s cracked up to be. When global nomads spend their long days decimating one pristine tropical shoreline after the other in search of a better life, I mean why is it that ‘we,’ the Occidental, aren’t happy with our families? I mean why do we not want to hang out with our families? Why, if we had the economic opportunities to not be with our families, would we not be with them? It’s very confusing to the outside world. Shouldn’t we all be happy with our families? It really is rather mad. And all these posts of everywhere all at once are showing very clearly that we really aren’t happy where we are. I think you can see that more clearly now. The problem has never been out there. It’s in here. The Western empire hasn’t changed tactics much since the Dutch East India Company. Yup. That’s us. We are here and you are too. So there’s this strange thing going on where we all post pictures of tropical beaches and ‘they’ all see films of streamlined apartments that don’t really exist.
I was attempting to feel through my own chronologies in the process of sense-making. I was wondering what it was that needed to be said that hadn’t been said. Things I didn’t at the time or I haven’t had the time to express yet.
Following on from last week’s blog post and yesterday’s writing, it was this that I never did write, that Sleeping Beauty story. And these days I can’t even remember what it was meant to be in there other than something about being exhausted, unmotivated, dull, uninspired, and staving off entropy because you know I wanted to live. I just didn’t know how. I just don’t know how. I couldn’t find my way. I couldn’t find my people. I just found the world inherently harmful, excruciating to live through. I didn’t have the words. All I had was a strange unarticulatable feeling that always felt like lack. A hollowness that never sated, like an empty cake tin. That the world was filled with promise and none of it very promising. It tasted sour in my mouth, dry on my lips, like the fluff you can sometimes feel on your tongue. There was nothing to live for. I didn’t feel beauty or catch the wonder. Whenever I sought to share it, it landed like a dead bird, decapitated by a windmill. I couldn’t fix it. All I could do was feel it. Feel all of it and try not to drown. It was incapacitating. It was heavy. It was real. And it was mine. Whatever this thing was, it was dense like the thick grey fog of a Scottish sky. There was just no way to feel everything when most people were committed to feeling nothing at all. In fact, brutalising one another with their worlds, their lifestyle, their choices. It was mental. Totally insane to witness. Did I mention I was exhausted? So exhausted that many days I couldn’t even pick up a glass of water next to my bed and drink it. It was way too heavy and I was way too tired and way too weak to lift it. It was like looking out on life from within my own coffin. I was 28 years old. As my therapist shared with me not that long ago, “Kimberley, it doesn’t matter what you do because when I met you you were dying and absolutely everything that you do is an improvement on that.”
So here I am and I am still alive. The world is still turning and I am well. As well as that, I have lived an extraordinary life. I am eternally grateful to be alive in the world exactly as it is. Not because I need to manifest anything more, because everything is exactly as it should be. That makes me really, really excited because if this is how good it can be to be alive on planet Earth right now, then absolutely everything else is an improvement. It has been amazing, astounding, liberating. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Janis Joplin. That’s where I am now. I don’t pretend to know where I come from or where I am going. All I know is that I am here now and that has to be enough. It absolutely is. To be nostril deep in this one wild precious life. So here we are. Just you and me. I don’t even know who you are and we are together. That’s the intimacy of writing. The power of the written word. It is this quantum field between me and you in a collective mass illusion that points to our Truman-type show’s current delusions. It’s all going to be okay. We know what this is. It’s just a small thing called oppression. Everything is going to be okay from here. Because most of us can read and write. We can communicate across long distances. Lots of people are already organised and showing us how to do this. We have the neuroscience that explains why even when we read the manual we don’t always follow the rules. That’s okay. You don’t have to do this the way that anybody else is going to do it. You just have to do you. That’s the only thing that you have to do. You just have to do you. You. Unapologetically you, even when you shame yourself for people pleasing. It’s the oppression. It’s wearing off. We are getting rid of it. We are brushing our teeth. We are getting clean. We are getting clear. When your whole life falls apart just do one thing. Just one thing. Only one thing. I promise you can make it through this. You really can. And nothing is ever as bad as it seems. You will make it through this.
So on that note, what about Sleeping Beauty. In my last post I discussed the scaling meaning of the word gaslighting. That doesn’t just apply to the subtle manipulations that can go on in our intimate relationships that might force us to question reality and enter a process of self-mistrust. It also now comes to represent the mass delusion that is the safety of the fossil fuel industry. When we think about the real impact of the gaslight, it was literally the moment in human history when we turned night into day. That will get you thinking and it’s a very fucked up thought.
All the way through history we hear warnings of ecological collapse. The stories of the Mayan people who just “disappeared,” or Rapa Nui (Easter Island), a people that cut down all the trees and were left in a very precarious ecological situation on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. I suppose it’s just very lucky they had access to fish. Now, these are the things that as humans we should be looking out for.
When we finally decided that we actually had global consciousness, one of the first things that was agreed amongst the powers that be is that we should have international law. That means we weren’t allowed to invade sovereign states. You can’t just start a war. And that it was illegal to kill civilians en masse. That genocide was illegal. In recent years, the term biocide, which is the combination of both genocide and ecocide, which is in essence the active destruction of all life in any geographic area, has taken root. Yet biological weapons are illegal.
Think about that and what that actually means. Biological weapons. This is a broad term. Any weapon that is designed to emit disease or toxins that kill life. How does that work? Does a bullet count as a toxin? Do missiles count as a toxin? Does a bomb count as a toxin?
Sleeping Beauty now too has a meaning that scales. It’s a fairytale. It’s also an analogy. That beauty can be dormant, deceptive, and deceiving. All around us are glamour spells or beautiful Airbnb apartments. Filtered photographs. ‘Curated’ content that’s actually styled to serve a shadow agenda. Pretty Instagram tiles that colour coordinate for a brighter future and TikTok videos less than a minute long just so we don’t see you in real life. Art is fucking messy. Raw. Real. Dirty. Cracked. Destroyable. Shredded. Destabilising. Decaying. Perhaps devouring. It speaks to the child miner in Congo. It speaks to the sex-trafficked Epstein victim. It is the poetry of a Palestinian. The eulogy of a bereaved wife. The tears of a cultural world and the shame of an old man at the death of democracy. Though democracy never truly existed. It was a light show of props and flags and temple-type buildings built with slave labour and the stone of my ancestors, which are the skeletons of the Earth.
The beauty of propaganda will have you walking hand in glove with a fascist regime. Aspirational aesthetics will fool you into believing all of the magic was paid for and that it could be bought at the expense of Indigenous and ordinary people everywhere. That by providing us with the delusion of choice we had a say in state-making when we are persuaded not to meet as a village. Sleeping Beauty at the centre of a wild overgrown forest that nobody dares to enter. The defenceless beautiful woman that nobody dares to touch. My thoughts have become sinister and I am taken to the story of Gisèle Pélicot, a sleeping woman raped by over fifty men at the behest of her husband. There are so many things that we refuse to see and accept about the world we live in. Shocking truths that have always existed that are now coming to light that need to be changed. Stop hiding behind beauty. It means you are sleeping. That you refuse to look at the human world as it is. Not all of it, I know. Yet still it is there, the ugly, and we have chosen very deliberately to look away.
It’s been a longer road than most to get here for me, having lived in South Africa for nearly seven years the existence of Afrikaburn came into my consciousness in whispers; about a party in the desert where they burned things, big structures, just like Burning Man. It sounded interesting, and yet, chaotic scenes of Burning Man and the average American heading out into the desert in search of survival skills for the apocalypse still felt strangely experimental. Combine that with a group of white South African’s that were used to being cleaned up after and it almost certainly felt like a joke. Radical self-reliance? How is that even possible in the middle of the desert with no water?
Kimberley K. Stone 