THE ARMCHAIR ACTIVIST
editor of online project, proposed mechanism for activism

companion text >>

It's like waking up from a dream.

Suddenly I awake, suddenly I remember.

I remember that I've been here before, I've been awake before, but this time it's different. This time I'm shaking, this time I'm nearly in tears. I'm scared and elated simultaneously. It's raining outside - pissing down, sheets - and it feels like the world outside is going to hell.

I'm still shaking.

I remember now a time, not so long ago, but it feels like an age - a time when everything did seem black and white. There was a polarity and I was aware of it, I lived partially inside it. Only partially, maybe I wasn't strong enough, clever enough, convinced enough. I didn't take myself all the way there - I retreated. Again, scared. I didn't know what it would be like to live the polarity. Live it as a reality.

The polarity was us, or me, against them. Them being so many things, standing for so much, standing for everything. Everything and everywhere and everywhen. Them, they - the strength it possesses is incredible. It's everything - the words on the newspaper, the voices on the television, the packaging on the shelves, the mouths of other people (other people who don't know or who have forgotten or who are part of the other end of the polarity). They make everything seem so simple, they do everything for us. They are our benefactors, our benign dictators. The control mechanism that keeps everything as it should be.

And I'm scared because it so easily sounds like bollocks, so easily sounds like rubbish, ranting rubbish. But it's like any other voice of opposition - it's ridiculed, it's unbelievable. I'm a wanker, an idiot, a fool. Worse than that, I'm a rambling dupe, sucked in by the voices of dissent. Say it, say what you like, go on, I don't care.

Tonight I came up for air, lying in bed, barely being able to breathe, knowing that I'd hidden myself away from it, knowing that I had been living a sweet, sweet lie for all those years. And what it makes it harder was that I once got so close, so very close, and then I shrank away from it. It seemed too far fetched. To deny all of this, to deny all of this 'comfort' - why would I do such a thing? That way madness lies, surely?

Actually, it's all to the contrary - this is the way where sanity lies.

I'm taking a deep breath, trying to comprehend what's going on. Trying to get some grip on what's going on right this very moment in my head. And I'm stunned by the irrelevance of so many things, so many things that I had, that I do, hold to be important, or somehow worthwhile. I'm stunned by the strength of my agruements in favour of so many inconsequential things. It's all irrelevant. The energy I consume in making inconsquential decisions or doing / reading / watching so many mundane, irrelevant things.

Of course, there are good books, good films, good writers - they are out there and I know / have known where they could be found. They are the very people who manage to break through the mesh, the net curtain and manage to slip some semblance of 'truth' into the world. But there aren't many entrances, there aren't many doors that will lead us to corridors where we can be helped through it, guided. Maybe we can't be guided, maybe we just have to find it all ourselves.

This is the moment where many things end and many things begin.

I had thought that many of the answers could be found in art, that I was somehow searching for a 'truth' in art. I'm starting to think that, in many ways, that too holds me back. There's a polarity in art - it's split into the haves and have-nots, those that have the will and the understanding and those who do not. The attempt to 'share' is largely misguided. There are too many mediators in art between what is true and what is 'represented' by artists. The channels of communication need to be far more obvious if we are too keep our heads above the water.

I've no idea what happens now. I've registered the domain www.thearmchairactivist.org. I think this is where it all starts again.

It feels like coming home, it feels like I'm waking up and I feel like I want to cry.

stuart b, 30.09.01


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