2024 is celebrated around the World as two major wars ravage its surface. Children are dying, civilians are murdered and hate is spreading among those who are not yet fighting. We drink champagne—le vin du diable—awaiting our turn, though refusing to accept that it will come.
Ça va
Il y a toujours un peu partout
Des feux illuminant la Terre
Ça va
les Hommes s'amusent comme des fous
Au dangereux jeu de la guerre
Ça va
I am repeating the same tirade, year, after year, after year, after year... so I have little to say that is new under the sun, or, rather, under the New Year, which, like every new year, starts in darkness.
Nothing new but everything more clear and pressing. I might have had never more reasons to feel personally more fulfilled than I am now, at this very minute: the fear, the thirst, the ambition, all these futile pursuits of mixed materialistic and egotic needs finally quenched by the time passing and the uncertainties settling. The people I love, love me. I have time to think about the meaning of certain types of correlations and the phase of propagating wavepackets, to worry about whether the holographic principle and the hole argument could possibly be true, things which I don't even have to worry about. I am blossoming with the feeling that it is both time and also possible to find and toy with inner peace, yet dizzy with this Universe of possibilities that seem palpable...
Pourtant il nous reste à rêver
Pourtant il nous reste à savoir
Et tous ces loups qu'il faut tuer
Tous ces printemps qu'il reste à boire
And still. I keep feeling on the spine of my soul this cold shiver of a chilling wind that is blown from the darkness of nothingness, this wind that smothers the candle when death strikes. It is not strong enough to switch me off but it is making the light flicker. I am more and more, inescapably, feeling the impending doom that will wipe us out. I'm not sure who "us" is, whether this is the occidental civilization, the human species, the people of my liking that were born before the Internet but after the television, or only me and myself. But it's coming for "us". And it's inescapable, because it's coming from us.
And I feel always more frustrated, more upset, more vindicative against ourselves, against the "rest of us", more precisely. If only for not feeling the same.
I feel estranged from what the technology is coming to. This artificial intelligence, it is horrifying me. No, worse still, it is revulsing me. This tomorrow where everything is deep-fake, where the machines dream and draw their inspiration from the guts of hell. This world where nothing is revealed anymore, but is vomited instead, from a black box that is blacker than it is voluminous.
This society of doublespeak which did not even need its new dictionary to make the transition, and stepped from the age of its prophets—Orwell, Vonnegut, Burgess...—straight into their prophecy, without realizing, worse still, with their books in hand and living by excerpts and cultural references.
This progressist world of high moral values which have been erected so high that they cannot be discussed, challenged, or criticized. This world where democracy and freedom of speech are so exacerbated that nothing can be said, not even against, but about them, and about all that they decreet is sacred, up to what is a man and what is a woman, up to 2+2=4.
And of course, the end of it all, the sheer, simple, brute, naked violence. The destruction, of things, of ideals, of lives. The war that is at our door. And the senseless defense of this cycle of promoting conflict and virility, followed by their abhorrence and exhaling concord between nations. How not to get seasickness from this sloshing of History between war and peace? I hate them both. I hate the war that so many people seem to want, or tolerate, or understand, in one way or another, and I will hate even more the unanimous concert of "Never Again" that will follow, the condemnations of the past which is still our future, but which have been already written hundreds of time.
I feel this new year will be a combo of all these nightmarish visions that paint the circles of hell, so predictable in its terms, only unclear as to its delivery date. Of course, this will come with even more duress that one can imagine. It will be, I wouldn't be surprised, a year (and age) of medical distress for many, possibly, for all of us, starting with excess death becoming so obvious, that even the most orthodox believers that nothing remotely bad can be done in the name of science, may find it difficult to pretend that one can ignore it. Or won't they? Doublespeak is a powerful idea, once you accept and understand that, far from being a fictitious instrument for a novel, it is actually true. It will also bring us closer to the big economic collapse, although this keeps being postponed. But inflation will carry on, we will pay our coffee the price of a glass of champagne—the coffee of the devil—will not heat our homes and avoid using hot water, comfort ourselves that it's for the greater good of the planet anyway... We will see people around us become increasingly poorer, many will turn to stealing, some to direct aggression. It will also be even more excruciating for the soul, as we will have to witness and cohabit with more pure, naked horror, of the type of children torn to mess of blood and broken bones, of entire cities turned to rumbles, of lives sacrificed and wasted by the thousands, by the day. We have already been confronted to all that in the recent past, but if one thing is good in this world where nothing is true, where everything can be turned into a lie or at least a point of debate, it's that one has a tiny window of escape by pretending this is not happening. When it will be happening at a distance so close for the blood to splash on our faces, this last recourse to illusion will be gone.
As in previous years, I don't know if it's for 2024, or 2025, or 2030. But you will agree with me that it's coming.
And like in previous years, what else can I do but be in denial, and wish ourselves all the good things that could be instead. To advance Science, to defeat cancer rather than our neighbor, to heal the sick and cure the blind, to read literature and write poetry, to conquer the immensities of space, rather than the frontiers of our small planet. To understand the inconceivably small and its link to the unbelievably big. To be free to read aloud what is written in books. To debate and argue and speak our minds, that all say something different, instead of all pretending that there is one truth, one standard, one ideal and be offended at those who think slightly differently. To tolerate differences and excentricities, instead of normalizing them. To understand that blasphemy is not something that silenced Galileo alone, but that it is a constant and a universal affliction of troubled times, which is increasingly silencing an increasing number of people.
So it will be a bitter year, if not for everybody, for more and more people, in particular for people we know, if not ourselves directly, as opposed to those who make the news instead. Let us do our best, all of us, if only for the symbol, for the «panache», let us try to be happy and more importantly to make happy those around us, especially the children, to cherish locality and in our free-fall through time and History, to live each day as if it was, indeed, the last. One of them will be it. In the meantime, despite not unaware of the situation, we'll have surmounted it, insofar as it is possible. This is what I wish ourselves.
⇠ See also the 2022 greetings.