MAR-CH

Having struggled enough about the topic for this editorial and having countless stimuli for thought and yet, not knowing how to connect them, the solution came when I was flying to Greece. (At least it was a start). Between boredom and drowsiness, I had a look in those flight company magazines, you know, those that change edition once in a year, and I saw that a girl had written a few lines under the date 14.2.09. It is amazing how people depend on dates to act. The girl, who wrote these lines was waiting for Valentine’s day to write what she had to write and moreover, the person she had in mind will never know, and not only because I kept the magazine!

The carnival and Valentine’s day are behind us and people who cannot put up with themselves will be always in search of a mask. As Hawkwind say:

“You must take a firm decision

And once it’s made you will find

That the role that you have chosen

Can entirely fill your mind.

Choose your masks the ranks are forming

Choose your masks the day is dawning.”

Maybe is the era that demands it to be that way, maybe not. Living, moving in a world surrounded by the latest word of technology, we learnt to live mechanically. Machine dominion is not a myth after all. We are the machines. We act mechanically, mechanically we live, mechanically we work, mechanically we do whatever our body temple demands, though the mystery has ceased to exist. George Wells in his book “The War Of The Worlds”, where machines take over Earth, was quite prophetic. In the end of the story, our planet is saved when these machines are destroyed from microbes, to which they were not immune. Hence the world was saved from its own microcosmos. Nowadays, human machines probably will have the same fate, and it is again the microcosmos that can save us. Here, by saying ‘microcosmos’, I do not refer to bacteria and viruses, but ourselves, the defences that we have built inside, the immune system against ‘must’, ‘go with flow in order to survive’. There is a difference between the verbs live and survive.

Man’s mental outlook is recommended in creating ‘black holes’ in his world, on purpose। The creation of antibodies fades from our organism with geometrical progression. Filled with stress and worries, we protect us with every possible way, by: consuming drug cocktails, becoming distant and learning stories from others. We try to experience from distance, we do not dare. Without action, no reaction can occur. There are enough stimuli and reasons in order to make us react, however… The unconscious, is a ‘black hole’ for the person and it seems that we need more than one unconscious part. With man’s development and his moral perception through the history axis, defences are slowly decreasing. And now is like coming back to the garden of Eden without a knowledge tree.

Meaningless to say, that we are walking in a path that leads us in having, three senses, top. Sight and the sense of hearing, are the only two senses that operate from distance, (you can forget about olfaction, at least from far), and from those two, sound is the social sense. Mostly through sounds we can form opinions about several situations (voice tones), remember events (sentences, melody), think (about something we heard), communicate (share that thought and hear what other people think about). Music does that as well, no matter what kind of music one hears, as long as it makes that person feel and express the feelings which will appear, think for oneself, it is great. I do not refer to the bench-music trends. Music is one of the rare things that keep us standing. Now that Valentine’s roses have withered, we still hear the music that taught us to fall in love. Now that communication fades, we still hang out with friends, listening to music and having fun, instead of watching others having a good time.

The things that keep us standing are treated as our weaknesses by the others.

In an era that offers models of thought, images, knowledge, we turned in lacking defences so in physical as in mental level. It has been decided that since we chose to pretend not to be ourselves, it is easier to adopt someone else’s judgement, opinion, images, friends, behaviour. Anyway it is the era of generalisation. Society observes that situation, so does television, education, music companies and promoters. They know our weaknesses and give us a compass with fixed indicators. If you do not watch where you want to go, you will end up where you were looking.

In such an era, it’s still everyone’s right to judge situations, and be for or against them। It seems that is unhealthy to have individuals that are in no need of a mask, have an opinion of their own and discriminate their position from the one that has been defined for them. Winter is behind us and spring enters dynamically. March, the first month of the season. So, march for what you want to be, for you. It is time to build our defences, not by defending ourselves, but by marching, first of all against the self that was created by us for the others.