Mirror World
There are two chaise-longues in my possession now that work miracles on my back and therefore on my mood. One sits in the garden, the other one in the backyard, by the clothesline. They used to belong to my mother in law, but I don’t think that she ever used any of them. She is one of those people who entertain the idea of comfort for some day to come, like my grandma used to with her living room for guests only, with the tremendous exception of birthday parties or Christmases, of course, there was rarely an occasion for her to make any use of it, if one of us closest family didn’t force her to: These quarters were there exactly for the extraordinary. They were never meant to be even stepped on normally, apart from the ritualistic, daily opening and closing the windows, or the equally sacred weekly cleaning of the grey carpet floors, the silver and the woods. Well, my partner got the chairs for his mother's recovery, I think, in a recent time of delusional hope for a better general management of stress and physical efforts, but that was unfortunately not the case.
The chairs were left abandoned at her open air verandas for no one, not even guests, so, eventually, he ended up collecting them home to my own and our occasional guests' enormous satisfaction. I was most gratefully surprised with the unexpected ergonomic perfection for my needs while reading, just enjoying the sun or actually any shadow that I might want to refresh on, as the chairs are so absolutely thoughtful, that they are even light enough to be carried around according to spontaneous, ever changing wimps.
I couldn't think of a better use of them than the proficuous engagement in both that last Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD , is inspiring me to perform lately. It was not an essay of my choosing. As much as The Shock Doctrine had contributed to my strenuous political activism more than a decade ago, in Berlin - to the human limits my mental health was then forced to realize -, almost like an educative manual to keep resisting, believing that global social movements were very much on time to achieve more transparent and direct democracies and ecological justice, this one's feeling more like a simultaneous sinister and lighter, even fun to read, chronicle on post-pandemic virtual thinking worlds' war.
My good friend, the one who says a lot of different things about several topics, left the book for us here two weeks ago, just before returning to Germany after a short break on Portuguese familiar land. The act was in itself some kind of solace, considering the social isolation we're so much keen on now - but not always. It's the superficial city social life that I still don't miss much, not the actual human exchange. To be reading about first reactions to Covid's quarantines and all other measures, vaccination specially, at this time, and how they kept changing the mental political map everywhere, it's quite comforting and liberating to some degree - regarding a slightly bad conscience for having [not that] simply opted out: Stuck in the binary of lock versus open up, we failed to consider so many options during the first years that we lived with the virus, and there were so many debates we didn't have. Faced with the torrent of lies coming from the conspiratorial right, many liberals and progressives opted to simply defend status quo measures, despite the fact that we could, and should, have demanded far more. It is as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else.*
I'm halfway through the book, enjoying it to say the least. It's not the most surprising or refreshing matter, but I'm already under the impression that it supports most of my own contemporary concerns with particular depth, for example, addressing cancel culture and the dangerous appeal of new far right leaders sucking neoliberalism criticism without really opposing consumerism or transnational capital, but actually fuelling the latent racism, homophobia and xenophobia that we all knew to be out there camouflaged in plain view since ever. Can't wait to find out if Klein proposes some unknown strategy to break the illusion - particularly in what refers to greenwashing and left-wing movements’ ability to renascence.
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