You mentioned your disinterest

You mentioned your disinterest in current politics, and I took a detour to explain why I agree. I began with photography: the people who took pictures excessively are very much the inversed reflection of gunmen in those trigger-happy countries. Shooting, shooting, flash is gunfire, how the images of all Alpha-males, smooth-skin females, theirs poses and expressions, on posters and billboards; the scenic views of fireworks, landmarks and beautiful hills from dramatic angle and light are all distasteful at the moment – their fetish for immediacies.

I want to assault every tourist and journalist, and step on their cameras.

With relation to that owl of Minerva, of old Hegel, your smiles and nods, the wings in the evenings, I didn’t understand until I spoke about it. I said nothing about why the sound, if not the look, of an owl frightens X., because it has got nothing to do with you.

I said nothing about a book by Mary Midgley, which was another postponed desire to browse. Preservation is essentially destruction. I hated my use of such expressions.

Borges contra Neruda, a the reminder of the contradistinction between detachment and the world… you and me, we went on and on, but what are than merely non-profiting merchants trading more names and ideas, in short.

This morning, the person next to me was chatting via the mobile. It is not because the stranger is of another race, or of different God and aspiration. A stranger chattering, loud, is loud enough to make me hear the difference between two ways of breaking silence. Talking and writing. Now I am sure, every conversation is profane. This includes what’s mentioned above, perhaps.

I referred to X. as a friend who once refuted me. ‘No matter how well your diatribes against photography are equipped with ethical or aesthetical insights, you can’t deny how you enjoyed looking at old photos.” And that was precisely my point. I appreciate only photographs fermented by time, of politics mediated into history, of all the mundane or exciting conversation turning into vintage trinkets for nostalgia.

I made a decision to swing between silence and incoherent clichés, the set-meal options of either muteness or madness, for oral use only.