To disappear a little (but never completely)

A day arrives when everything seems excessively repetitive and desperately boring to you. If you step back a little, you perceive the incessant repetition of the tactics and strategies with which the capitalist world reinvents, repositions, and resets itself, leaving ever more ‘collateral effects’ on the societies that, discursively, it seems to be saving from the abyss that those same dynamics have opened beneath our feet. You get tired of seeing the usual political dynamics in this almost childish dispute of ‘I am better, he is the bad guy’ and the unscrupulous exploitation of certain unforeseen circumstances, in the form of social outbursts of anger, frustration, and healthy, necessary, and urgent exercises of dignity. We already have the typical and cliché positions of right-wing, left-wing, far-right, far-left parties, and those who call themselves “transversal,” because they can no longer call themselves “centrist” (because the center does not exist). Doesn’t it tire you?

And while these people, who are the ones that dominate the media and fill people's time and minds intensively, incisively and without rest (lest we be left with any time to think for ourselves), continue in their spiral of crude and perverse refinement, the lives of the majority are acceleratingly drifting towards desperate, bewildered situations, limit situations that are already difficult to digest, sustain, endure. Now, in addition, a sign is added. A sign of the end of time. A disturbing sign: a critical climate that leaves us with fires impossible to extinguish, nights impossible to sleep, and in the worst cases, homes impossible to inhabit.

This year, the torrid summer, no longer tropical, with entire months of extreme temperatures without respite, a sea that is too hot and too many people acting as if nothing were happening, left us with a sense of unease, an anxiety, a deep sadness, also, at times, when the thought came to mind: “what have we done…”. Now, the violently unleashed rains, like those that weeks ago destroyed the port of Es Canonge and the estate of Toni Feliu’s family, Sa Casa Pagesa, where only 15 minutes were enough to leave dead animals, razed sheds, uprooted trees, and a family without their means of subsistence, make it very clear to us that the rules of the game of what we considered predictable until now have been broken; the effects and consequences of this whole outburst are not accompanied by justice, they strike wherever they hit and without consideration, and not everyone has the same conditions to face them.

In parallel, people are also exploding. The suffocation of not being able to find a place to live, of being thrown out of your home at 87 years old, of having no life horizon, of seeing young people who have had to cross the sea in small boats living and witnessing situations that no person should ever have to experience, and who, once they arrive here, find themselves spat out to sleep in the open upon turning 18, and are left at the mercy of the violence of streets that hide from the postcards of the false paradise we sell in exchange for misery, precariousness, violence, racism, ruin... in a world that is also falling apart. Where the most sinister reality we never expected to live seems to be widely surpassing the fiction of the darkest scenarios, whether they affect us directly or not, because everything affects us, even if we pretend it doesn't.

It is not easy to digest, all of it. But there are many, so many people who continue, day after day, trying, trying to set things right, to find alternatives, to weave bonds, community, possibilities... Because life is nothing more than this, keeping going and not giving up, despite the helplessness we sometimes feel when everything starts to seem threatening to us. But we sustain ourselves: in mutual support networks (even if they don't give it that name), in small communities and neighborhoods where the daily life that is life is cared for, and where beauty and smiles are generated in a horrible world, where hope is generated in a world that, at times, and as Mark Fisher said, casts us into a future cancelled by force. People who rack their brains, dedicate hours, organize themselves, focus, and persist. They put their minds, their time, and their hours into common spaces that sustain, that accompany, that generate a possibility for the lives of those who seem not to matter, not to have value; who are violated, sacrificed, and dehumanized, if necessary.

There are days when, all things considered, we would like to find a hole to disappear into for a while. As Francisco Martínez points out in his latest essay, Escondites. Cómo desaparecer sin desaparecer del todo, from the publisher Menguantes. Martínez explores, from an anthropologist's perspective, caves, basements, garages, shelters, tunnels, trains, airports, gardens, photo booths, bunkers, and submarine cables to see what we do when we want to step out of others' line of sight, with the idea that these spaces are not simply places to hide things: they are spaces of possibility. The author speaks of the hideout as a place where other forms of life, relationships, and thoughts can be born. Disappearing can provide time, rest, and protection, but only for a little while, eh? Because it can also turn into abandonment or non-existence. Therefore, the hideout needs an exit. As Martínez says, “Desaparecer es bueno, pero reaparecer es mejor”. So let's not stop trying. We can hide, but only to emerge more lucid, calmer, slightly regenerated, and continue.