Colony
Do we have all the words?
How to write an essay against Culture? The piercing silence of academia nudges me to seek further from its light; their mute instrument pushes me beyond constants into the realms of disloyal, faithless, false, fickle, inconstant, traitorous, untrue (Lethe). Imitating the accent of Culture will only maintain the monopoly of access for the dominant performance and muffles diversities. Nevertheless I maintain my distance in concert with this accent so you understand my love. With the aspiration to be understood I’m trying to be a Roman in Rome. I pursue to reflect our illusion of sea by redrawing our polis in a desert, not on the back of a floating turtle in an ocean.
In an infinite regress, the sedentary life of cité promotes dominating our dance with nature, free from her anxiety. We fell into the vicious maze of civilisation. We justified living with compromises in a broken oikos (eco) and multiplied. Nature, the further we went from her coast, the chimera of our enterprise became more hideous and the blues deeper. Nevertheless the fading trail of this ship and a shoreless horizon, witnesses our adaptiveness. This monster navigates with a wrecked psyche and we are so wasted in his festival. We probably fall. Even now we can hear the clatter of the monster, this sound it emits while shedding its margins and corroding. Intoxicated with a glorifying story, his skin has a color of dried blood. Yet it seems hoisting a White flag on his nose legitimizes his addiction.
Right now the table is breaking under the hammer of the auctioneer for the lowest price of avocados. For now excluded are falling like the buttonwood leaves at the end of December; this is still sluggish compared to the foreseeable collapse of the superstructure. Yet, here in the global north, aggressive expansion of the centre’s mode of production and its immense harvest will probably cushion us. Since, the distribution of pain usually follows a reverse distribution of wealth, our fall will discriminate against disenfranchised. We are numb to the sight of a withering diversity, making it impossible for us to quit our high. Given that our pandemic blindness is instrumental to plow the Lebensraum and monoKulture it.
The only way a garden refers to environment is “to establish happy laws of gardening”. Non-society of privileged parasites have hard times forgetting about fresh tulips all the year around. The choice to leave this paradise is upon us. Maybe the melancholia of losing our homeland can help us to accept our collective depression and mourn. Depression’s function is “to minimise disruption of rumination” and “to engage in anhedonia” for a sustained analysis. Maybe through ascetic reflection we could find another story for our consumption. A story that promotes “psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to distracting stimuli”?
culture (n.) mid-15c., “the tilling of land, act of preparing the earth for crops,” from Latin cultura “a cultivating, agriculture,” figuratively “care, culture, an honouring,” from past participle stem of colere “to tend, guard; to till, cultivate” (see colony). Meaning “the cultivation or rearing of a crop, act of promoting growth in plants” (1620s) was transferred to fish, oysters, etc., by 1796, then to “production of bacteria or other microorganisms in a suitable environment” (1880), then “product of such a culture” (1884).
The figurative sense of “cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind” is attested by c. 1500; Century Dictionary writes that it was, “Not common before the nineteenth century, except with strong consciousness of the metaphor involved, though used in Latin by Cicero.” Meaning “learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilisation” is by 1805; the closely related sense of “collective customs and achievements of a people, a particular form of collective intellectual development” is by 1867.