Yet Untitled 182 - Zeitgeist
"What does it even MEAN?"
Dearest Yet Untitler,
There’s a medical drama series I’m pitching that I think ‘captures the Zeitgeist’ of our times. It’s about the ongoing penetration of AI into healthcare. Everything I’ve written about is actually happening around me. I’m not making this shit up.
I’m making my rounds before commissioning executives with this Zeitgeist thingie as the arrowhead of my pitch - all with great conviction and belief.
But…
This word: Zeitgeist.
What does this even mean??
(For those of you who are flummoxed about the context of the above clip, read here. Psst: it has something to do with the utterance “What does it MEAN?”)
Thinking about it, it’s like trying to say that I - some kind of explorer-pioneer - have gone to the South Pole and captured a rare penguin which I will now display to you in the attempt to convey the current state of affairs in the Antarctic.
The truth is, the moment I’ve caged the penguin, I’ve changed it. It exists in a different reality from that moment on and will evolve differently in its cage, with us ogling at it from the outside.
Perhaps that very theatre is the zeitgeist I mean: us humans, making theatre - spectacle - of everything in order to understand what may be happening right in front of us in the first place.
I found myself turning this thought over and over in my head last week. Like a fluffy omelette.
Penguins are fluffy, endangered things. But sometimes even endangered things need to be captured, tagged and let off again after being studied in order to understand how to help them survive.
Penguins are fluffy plodding things. What of leopards? Leopards are fast, ferocious things. In order to study a leopard up close, I would need to corner it, or make it stationary first.
In the light of this reflection, I found myself thinking about Our Times, looking at them undulate from up high like an eagle watching a rabbit move on a grassy knoll below. Like the rabbit (and the leopard), Our Times are quick-footed. The eagle will make a rabbit stationary by putting its talons around it. The only way I’m going to make Out Times stationary is by putting a frame around them.
I feel it’s my job as a storyteller to make some kind of sense of our fast-moving times. It makes me reach for my framing bow and keep my quiver at hand.
Camera, notebook and Yet Untitled are frame-creating arrows in my quiver.
They isolate what’s happening in front of me, freeze the scene in sharp relief. These now well-worn arrows help me put a frame around the flashing fractals swirling inside my head, so I can see them - hurricane-like - frozen in a sea of clouds when viewed from an orbiting astronaut’s port-hole.
I have a Frame for you
What undulates before my eyes is a source of continuing fascination. What undulates behind them is just as fascinating to me, if not more.
It reminds me of looking at audio visualisations from the late 90s and early 2000s when apps like Windows Media Player had just started to blow our THC soaked minds.
Surely this theatre before me and within me should not be mine alone!
But when I turn to look for it, in a flash it is gone; unless…
…I stalk it down and trap it in a frame.
For whatever it’s worth.
Inspired by the words of the Indomitable Beyoncé -
“If you like it you’d better put a frame on it” 😆💃
Inspired by the words of Henri Cartier Bresson:
“The photographer is a kind of hunter, but instead of killing, he collects.”
Sometimes I wonder, though - am I just collecting trophies? Stalking Meaning, and then parading it? Peddling it like I do before those commissioning executives in the hope they give me a pot of money to make my medical drama?
Is this even dignified?
Every once in a while, YU finds itself at such crossroads, where I ask -
“Why are we here, you and I?”
What’s my incessant framing got that’s of any value to you, dearest Yet Untitler?
Is it trapping and bottling anything at all, or it’s just an installation piece entitled “snapshots of whirling sinkholes in newsletter writer’s mind”?
You tell me…
An absurd theatre is unfolding on our phone and TV screens, one that froze me before I could freeze it with one of my frames. I had to fight before I could find and feel my quiver.
It takes some courage, this hunt. Courage is the fruit I pluck from the trees as I gather my resolve and pursue my prey.
I’m going to keep hunting.
You’ll keep seeing me, carrying the bounty of my hunt on my shoulders as I bring it to your doorstep each week.
You’re still here, and so am I. For this, I’m grateful.
I’m not going to stop. Neither here, nor at the doorstep of those executives.
I’ll keep making sense of the theatre in front of and behind by eyes.
What does it even mean??
I’ll leave you with a short video in which I find the universe in my teacup. (Whisper - What does it MEAN??)
Emoji curated by Ananya:
^_^ —> o_o ?_?
Thanks for listening,
Lots of love, and a prayer for peace.
V
and