Cosmo-Utopian-Transformation
People told me, my posts here tend to be quite personal and revealing: not always in a good way. Yet I feel I should write this: 2013 wasn’t a good year. Losing a friend (plus, finding out about it via Facebook) was one of most sad and formative events (actually an ongoing event). I met Tim about a year earlier, on a bus ride to Bil’in, a Palestinian village close to the Israeli border, which, since the infamous separation wall was built, became one of the central locations for physical dispute between the IDF and its critics (the place gained some popularity with Emad Burnats documentary 5 Broken Cameras depicting those demos from the start). It was the 7th annual demo, and we were stuck in a sleazy, thin-aired bus full of Israeli activists, in the middle of April. As soon as we arrived at the border, the only two idiots who didn’t carry their traveling passports were Tim and I. Frankly, Tim at least had a regular passport. The only thing I could show the border police to identify myself was a membership card for the Tel Aviv University gym. So instead of demonstrating, we were freighted into an Army Jeep and located in a “police station” (an improvised 5 sqare-meters plastic box) in the closest settlement around, where they interrogated and kept us. Sure, that was kind of intimidating, people threatened and screamed at us, but honestly: I’ve had worse experiences. Since none of us matched the racial profiling, and none of us was a terrorist, they later even offered crackers & tea, of course: turned over by a guy with a huge machine gun. Tim and I shared about seven hours imprisonment, so we sat and talked. We soon found out about mutual friends, readings, coffee-shops, jobs. Tim had currently been on vacation in Israel, I had lived there, however either of our hearts was sitting in Kreuzberg. He explained me about Beatriz Preciados elbow-theories, the contra-sexual manifest and Sun Ra’s cosmo-philosophy (and practice); how in the seventies he and his followers created those science-fiction-like spaces and thereby helped some of the ghetto-kids to rise to a completely new level of consciousness. Movements like Sun Ras, Tim told me, evolved from an experience of crisis. One should read them metaphorically for how utopian dreams can facilitate zones of liberation, even if the dreams themselves are not realized. Just like the Zionist youth movements, which fought in Nazi Germany. They didn’t have to go to Israel. Simply by fighting, they were free people. Looking back at all this, it seems kind of ironic to me that I read about Tim’s death (his death) while having a coffee in the Knesset-cafeteria in April 2013. Anyway, I’m happy now that Tim remains somewhere in that space of cosmo-utopian-transformation, at least for us.
Oh, and hey, it’s Sylvester, right? I’ll post another post, a happy one, right away.