Around this time last year, I spent a few hours at my desk every day, getting all the projects planned for 2020 into the home stretch. I was in the present moment of doing, which, however, was always mentally directed towards the future: getting the CD and the book ready for printing, preparing the vernissage and the concert tour … this was my “normality”, my horizon of expectations, into which I was more excited looking forward to anticipation.
At the beginning of March at the latest, this horizon – now within reach – was suddenly gone … as with all of you. I sat down briefly and thought about it. The attitude, which has become a fundamental principle of life for me, “We cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose how to deal with it” didn’t make me grumble for long: why not do things now that I have always wanted to do for but there was no time because other things always had a higher priority?
I took a large piece of paper and wrote down what I could think of on the subject and focused on some of these things. I was able to stay active throughout the year, if only because –as someone living on the countryside – I was able to move around freely – a huge privilege for which I am very grateful.
As for my concerts, I am – like everyone else – in a strange queue. Given what 90 percent of the world’s population has to go through, it seems to me to be an absolute luxury problem.
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The entire range of problems in our current way of life is reflected in the corona pandemic. “Corona” works like a magnifying glass under which we can view the existing problems. Corona seems to me a medium, partial aspect and further symptom that shows structural problems of our world order and our lifestyle: A crisis in a crisis.
Comprehensible and yet unsatisfactory: In my perception, however, “Corona” is primarily addressed in the public discussion as a kind of terrible state of emergency, which we use technology (“vaccine”), technocratic state means (“lock down”, “Billion$aid-programs”) and “ individual responsibility” as quickly as possible in order to then be able to return to the “normal state” that is longed for. Of course, present-day coping management from the realpolitical toolbox is important and correct, but can that be all?
Isn’t it the case that our lifestyle has only been sustained for at least thirty years with considerable cognitive dissonance or a radical disregard of the overall context? What is actually really “normal” about it, given the existing global conditions (ecological, economic, social and geopolitical)?
I miss the honest attempt to build a large social discussion about what another future might look like. I would like to see this task as a highly committed EXISTENTIAL challenge, as a PROJECT – not just as a marginal, decorative and aesthetic supplement on the feature sections of the leading media.
After all, the neoliberal bullshit about the “market that will fix everything” seems to be off the table for good. State interventions, on a scale that previously seemed impossible, are suddenly possible, but unfortunately its goals are only stuck to me in the “next way”.
When, if not now?
The future is not always the continuation of the recent past.
With all my heart I wish you the very best for the new year
Yours
Harald
