Claire Fontaine: Mostly Sunny

“At times understanding something doesn’t mean being able to process it, or to live according to what we consciously know. 

One can intellectually understand a concept but not be able to experience it. The knowledge of facts isn’t the equivalent of the awareness of what they entail in our life. 

Because life isn’t only intellectual and it isn’t exclusively human. 

We might be living through times in which reading or hearing what is happening leaves us incredulous. We might turn to conspiracy theories, fake news, paranoia, astrology, divination, anthroposophy, or something else. 

We read, for example, that Mercury will stay retrograde from September 23rd until October 2nd 2022 , meaning that a sense of reality, of clarity or of a way forward will be incredibly hard to come by. Because planets have extra power when they change direction. Although Jupiter is well-meaning, it isn’t known for small or subtle statements. If we’re going to make mistakes this retrograde season, we’ll likely make them in true Jupiter fashion: fabulously. As with all Mercury retrogrades, humility and a sense of humor will be our safeguards. (Which is very helpful and inspiring.) 

And if you happen to have children aged between 8 and 11, Rudolf Steiner says that they are “crossing the Rubicon”, falling out of the grace of early childhood that enchanted the family, losing the luminous paradise of aerial fantasy and entering the dark tunnel of criticism and instability. This journey will entail a new need for space, which might require adult people to move house or to initiate irreversible changes in their life. You and the other parent(s) will also be crossing a Rubicon and all you used to know will never be the same. Take it or leave it. 

Or maybe, when just avidly reading the news and keeping informed through independent media, listening to militants who are in the fields where conflicts take place, you still can’t make sense of the systematic regression in all the areas that our culture and way of life were supposed to improve. Health, peace, education, prosperity, tolerance and the end of injustice have globally become a distant horizon. It’s a fact. 

If you believe in identity politics and blame the terrible present circumstances on cis-people, white males, patriarchy, all the cronies of extractivism, we must admit that the crisis that we are undergoing is extraordinarily acute given that this dreadful landscape of bastards has been there for as long as the olive groves, since ancient Greece at least, and yet the Xylella disease only hit in 2013…

When logical or mystical thinking provides a diagnosis of our crisis, it’s still hard to trace a line of flight and depression might be looming. 

As the tarots state “doing over and over again the same thing and expecting a different outcome is a form of madness,” and as Carlo Maria Cipolla explained, whether although evil persons damage others through their wicked behavior, stupid persons damage themselves and others when acting accordingly to their distorted vision of things.

If we see our mental health as a new field of extraction for governmental powers, through algorithms, surveillance, and other tools, we might want to protect it by opposing an unplanned production of joy to the systematic sadness. 

To the ones who try to make us feel guilty for our carbon footprint and predict that we will have to eat insects and quit using electricity, we can reply that if everyone of us could make a difference, the difference would have already happened. What is deemed as irresponsibility these days might just be the refusal of carrying responsibilities that aren’t ours. Taking upon ourselves the guilt that isn’t ours exhausts our capacity to exist. The energy crisis isn’t only happening on a planetary scale, it’s happening inside each and everyone of us. This is why we are all so tired.

The infrathin was discovered by Marcel Duchamp between World War One and World War Two as a space to expand and penetrate an illegible reality, and it is here again today. We can sit in silence and feel the presence of the table, speaking to us about its production process, the wood that composes it, its molecules communicating with ours. We can feel the affect of the plant, its history, its memories, what it’s telling to our eyes and our hands. 

We can perceive how different foods modify our thoughts and our way of breathing and registering the world around us. Color physically affects us and makes materially possible things that wouldn’t exist without it. Our capacity for understanding and hearing the world is immense, mobile phones and computers haven’t changed it, we shouldn’t feel disoriented, we should just listen carefully.

What is expected from us all under these circumstances is exactly what took us to the point that we are at. 

We should no longer comply with what people say about us. 

We have begun.”

The anthology of their texts «La Grève humaine et l’art de créer la liberté» (The Human Strike and the art of creating freedom), published by Diaphanes, will be presented by Donatien Grau on October 15, 6 pm at the bookshop Les Cahiers de Colette in Paris.