Global Perspective:

I took a few days immersed in the entropical city of Buenos Aires, the big capitol city of our country, where absolutely everything adds up all together in one: the rush, the constant track-track-track of the never finished hospital in front of my old flat which has been under construction for who knows how long, that old flat in which I lived with my parents and grandparents (3 generations inside 1 apartment, inside 1 building with other 120 other families, inside 1 neighborhood with the same population than Santa Rosa – perspective is good for making you thinks, transport yourself to other places, listen, observe, and conclude)

In the big city, everything adds up… the loose tiles on the street after a 5 day rain –it rains so much here, and it does more and more intense each season, and in some other places, it rains so little-; the grey, the concrete, the humidity; the subway and its combinations, resembling an urbanized anthill city; an old man, lost, a map in his hands, searching where he was standing, and where to go; the honks of the cars, used merely as a cocky whim from empty cars with buses stuffed with humanoids right beside these cars, the bus honking as well… a taxi a few meters up front is waiting for an old lady to descend with her cane, no one helps her, and you can find thousands of these contradictions here… impossible to summarize them all, but they show realities that meet with one another, which try to find each other in the big city.

It all adds up and, although the rush of the routine accelerates life, the increase in social entropy is also produced by the generational abysses which exists among all the people who form the society, we are a lot of generations, with different ideals and goals in life, trying to move forward, all mixed and mashed up in the same whirlwind that revolves it all, everybody adding a little more of rush, the insanity to Get There, and sometimes, an emotional inertia that scares.

In the subway, I also found myself with music again when I got inside a carriage full of people, with a huge guy, with long dark hair, sitting on his ankles, playing the organ with his fingers dancing over the keyboard; I instinctively took of my headphones, leaving my musical micro world aside for a while, put my pen as a bookmark and closed my travelling book, and the jazz melted with the rattling of the train over the rails, and the bad humor of the people seemed to fade away in the way back home, as a magical ending for the day. I congratulate all the musicians who give life to the routine and go out and play anywhere.

As we clapped the guy for lightening up our trip, I got to see all the way across the carriage, through the window, the other carriage with a couple discussing. She was crying, he… staring at the floor. The musician got out of the carriage, the tide of people who did not see anything at all entered and occupied the space which was being used by the musician, dissipating all the magic air, and –before seeing the transformation in the faces of the people– I opened up again “Sputnik, my love”, by Haruki Murakami, a book a satellite of mine gave me as a slap in the soul.

And I read: “Nor I wanted to put myself in a regular company and survive in the middle of a wild competition, climbing, step by step, the inclined walls of capitalism’s pyramid. (…) In all, I still have the same logical fundamental doubts. Who am I? What do I expect? Where do I have to go?”

The subway kept on going like a timeless worm, buzzing through the tunnels beneath the city’s carpet, I imagined myself going up, getting out of all of this and going up, until you reach a satellite to gain the calmness necessary to be up there and see how big we are. How the northern lights cares sour planet.

While seeing ourselves from outside, I imagine the daily drama in the entire world, and I have a moment of desperation, a knot in my throat, of wanting to know how we are going to end if we do not manage to unify realities and do things right, with the moral courage we use to talk about.

I hope, and I go back to my bunker to keep on writing to you, informing, telling, transforming, and hoping to see from above the realization of a new society.

Cheers!

Brian Longstaff.

Bibliography:

Haruki Murakami. 1999. Sputnik, mi amor (Spitunik, my love). Tusquets Editores, S.A. Buenos Aires. 2012

Images extracted from Google. I was surprised when I entered “músico subte” (musician subway) and found the same guy in a picture taken with a cell phone.

The video is a time-lapse taken from the ISS –International Space Station– and it is awsome, to see everything up there.

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