On Absurdity and Aesthetic Sense

I took this picture on the same day I hung out and worked with my friend the whole day. I wanted to finish my roll of film to get it developped the next day and print it all along with the hundred other pictures I took since last summer, bundle them and give them to my friends. My food was looking sexy,

marinated aubergine with garlic

spicy green beans with parmesan

roasted potatoes with rosemary

full stop. Sunset. It makes sense. The slanted black, the surprised colours. Maybe I should’ve warned them, they fled under the flash. The rusty Rococo balcony railing, the shadow it casts onto the building opposite that seems to both vanish and also be pulled closer. The garden chair. My startled wine cup that appears empty.

I find the picture charming in its disarray, the flatness of it all, how the food looks horrible when it was meant to be the star of the show.

It is absurd. The self infiltrated post modernism of it all, the juxtaposition of elements out of their natural aesthetic context, it makes me smirk, it seems performative and it makes me laugh. And the more I think about it the less I see any sort of logic to anything. The aubergines, native to fields, cut up and put into warm metal after being walked up 4 flights of stairs, then put onto a piece of cooked earth with molten glass, itself then put onto a piece of plastic held up by cold metal. This is what we do. We take things and we transform them. Create new contexts. This pretense of any real logic being behind these contexts seems a phallacy. What even is real logic?

Things are, they exist, ontologically, before we interpret them as belonging or not. Or maybe they don’t. Actually. Politics of representation. Maybe if we don’t acknowledge them through words they do not exist.

And to me all this is absurd. There are or there are not things, I can think or not on them, I can put them somewhere, with other things, paint them with light into a box fabricated by my ancestors and replicate the result endlessly with coloured juices made from rocks and shredded trees. What the hell. It is amazing. I cannot help but marvel at our world, at how human minds have been making sense of it all and tried all sors of combinations of things. I cannot help but marvel at the alchemy of metaphysics laid out in front of me.

We inherit our existence into a world that is not ours, and we try to make sense of it through developping rules and contexts based on what happened in this realm before us. And those are fun to play with, definitely, but they’re all made up. Even the medium we use to make all these we completely made up, the one i’m using to express my thoughts which exist only because of it. It is a self reflective device. And accepting it is all made up, that it could’ve been another way, or not at all, liberates something in me. It doesn’t need to make sense. And that makes it make sense. The absurdity is the finality.

And as i’m writing this i m sitting at my mirror table, listening to Erykah Badu, wearing satin dusty pink trousers I bought in a country that is mine but that I never lived in, not really, with my window open, topless as the trams bring people to and from their lives. And I talked to my sister this morning, she got seeds from her future school. Drowning in exams. I am drowning in this nihilistic soup of existence. I love it.

Absurdity helps me make sense of things.