Thoughts on unruliness
Unruly zones are good places to play and linger. That’s the starting point: going to a space where no protocol nor judging eyes are watching, and staying there long enough until your stomach feels itchy, curiosity dives in, together with the urge to create something.
Unruly zones are completely dysfunctional in our way of operating.
Modernism educated us to avoid the discomforts of disorder, institutions came to keep us all disciplined to follow the conventions, anarchists were ridiculed, and women (and kids) were boxed as inferior for their emotional “unruliness”. Protocols, a bit of surveillance, and, human behavior is under check.
The Renaissance man created the frame so that a painting would be emancipated from the wall (and then Degas came and cut human bodies in half at the edge). Boundaries help us navigate life without having this overwhelming feeling that freedom can generate (I learned that from my therapist when talking about setting boundaries for my 3-year-old daughter).
The thing is that we are so used to them that we forget to question, what was their initial purpose, if they are still useful, or if we can skip them altogether.
We navigate spaces in the real world and our minds, with our limitations, and with the ones set by society, and by our environment. So the truth is, there is no such thing as “unruliness”, there will be always inherent properties that we can’t control nor change. And that’s basically because we can’t play Gods. But then the connections, the reinterpretations, and the web that we can create it’s a vast free canvas.
That’s regarding space, how about time?
As a Spanish-speaking person, I couldn’t find any good translation for the word “linger”, which is curious because Latin culture is all about that. Slow departures, delaying, prolonging, lengthening. Saying goodbye in my hometown might take between 5 to 15 minutes. The Belgium style will take 1 to 3 words.
The fact is, the act of lingering is an act of resistance. It’s a counterbalance to the “intense” life we all have to deal with, and it’s a F-you to the neoliberal modus operandi of productivity. In a context of constant movement and distraction, “perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger” said Byung-Chul Han. We are all the time perfecting our master plan of becoming a “self-realized” human being, that we forget to purposely free linger.
So the suggestion is, to go to a safe place with the eyes of a kid, pile up some wooden blocks to create something, and dwell in the present moment.
