Image shared via a CC license on flickr by lukeroberts
For a small piece of Christmas/art intervention that Mr Andy Field released into the world this December passed, I wrote a snippet about moments. It was sort of about how I like the taste of cigarettes on some people, and mostly about what I wanted for Christmas, which, as it turned out, was a series of moments. This was one of them:
I would like something like a Zombie Armageddon, but not. Kind of like the kind of situation where you have to survive by your wits and strength, a well packed bag, and good fore-planning, but where no one dies, really.
So I guess, like, maybe camping?
I’m thinking about apocalypse at the moment. Well, more than usually at the moment. A couple of sniffs of apocalypse in the theatre air (including Andy’s piece ‘Zilla’), a couple of recent calls for ideas/work on the theme of it, and also, if I’m honest, much of my work – ‘Home’ most openly – and reading continues to be fascinated with it. With the end of the world, or at the very least the end of the world as we know it. Ruthlessly nagging as my mind sometimes is, it now frames the question: ‘why exactly is that?’
There’s something that strikes me about the ideas of late capitalism simmering in my thesis-related reading; that of a culture in which the wars no longer physically approach us and our ways of life (this is why terrorism, rare though it is, makes such a good bogey-man for the state), where we are alienated both from production and from the processes behind that which we consume – our food, our clothing; a world where the cold war has passed, and no one born in the West need starve (though they do, in nursing homes, on the streets, in hospitals, and on housing estates; as the food mounts up in the skips around the back of Pret-a-Manger and Sainsbury’s). Imminent death isn’t around the next corner for you or I (a reasonably safe assumption, if you can access this blog). Oh it is, in an abstract, hit-by-a-bus sort of way, but only one person ends there; not a street, a community, a country, a way of life. Apocalypse is everyone, and everyone will always include you. Continue reading Some Musings on the Apocalypse
