The Prophets of Our Time

Nathan Fielder. Misdirection. Uncover the reality of creating artificiality by using the artifice to convey what you really want. There's a huge wave of artists in line and how would you ever succeed at making something. What is reality? What is my mind? Orson Welles after Kane. Engineering and Programming. 

Walking through the corridor as classes go on in the background and practicals, ignoring it all to enter the gymkhana and take out a few friends to talk about cinema and filmmaking. Making the making of a film.

The Prophets of Our Time. Tarantinoesque typography.

Selective sentimentality is what one woman called it, and it’s true. “They could weep in front of you, and you would not find the words to comfort them,” she says. She is wearing a bright red top. It’s easy to not pay attention to what she’s saying. Part of me has gotten up and walked out of the room with a cup of milk and a plate of cookies. Ignoring her as she rambles.

I nod, and I try not to yawn. I am sorry XYZ didn’t know your true worth or that the Instagram algorithm fucked you up. But I have no kind words to offer that will make them feel any better. Selectively though, I get sentimental and tender and soft, and then say, “we never knew you could care this much.” 

There are few people and books and songs and moments that are worth being foolishly sentimental about through writing or otherwise.

But I don’t know how to care about much else.

Time seems utterly meaningless. time ticking so slowly as I fail to rest my weary eyes. Sitting there praying it would pass by, allowing me to stop the thoughts flooding my head.

As I struggle to watch each second pass, I hear every movement as the clock continuously circles. 

When December arrives, all those exhausting, unforgettable, and painful experiences that you thought had migrated to another version of yourself resurface, not as memories or trauma, 

"You spent the entire year staring at ceilings, people, places, faces, phones, and mirrors, and you began the year with the intention of instilling more hope in your own life, but your efforts gradually devolved into a state of self-negation, a state of being in which you continuously denied the existence and scope of your own desires, ambitions, and agency because you couldn't associate with your own feelings, and as a result, each month became more forgetful. All of this pain and forgetfulness eventually accumulated at the bottom of your conscience during August, when you thought you were happy because someone else was happy with you, but that changed as well, and by September, you were depressed again, and then came October, when you went on a streak of self-destructive acts of love and lovelessness, only to arrive in November with this unidentifiable grief."

Now you're almost at the end, but here's the thing: this year doesn't feel like it's coming to an end for you because, by December, you've molded yourself in almost all kinds of pain and heartbreaks, and your heart becomes so tired that it feels like it's eternally resting.

Memory is a strange device. 

It is a wonderful thing. If you don’t have to deal with the past. I’ve stopped visiting the graves of old friends. I stay out of churches, bars, and museums. I’m patient. Time is everybody’s cross. 

Exile defeats treachery.

The great Persian poet Hafez wrote, “Start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret.” I still have no idea what I mean when I say God, but I see it everywhere. I mean it intensely. I write poems and, yes, books about it. I read about it constantly, which seems, counterintuitively, to only deepen its secret. Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the images recede from view the more language I add to them? A bladeless knife. With no handle.