Too Much Time

View from Caye Caulker, Belize
c. Samantha Lederfine-Paskal, April 2007

But the question remains: how to speak, to engage a generation, a population, a power that isn't? How to speak in one voice to a million minds, a body defined only by its fractures, spaces between parts? A million proudly individual, disconnected, self-loathing minds? There is no world now, but millions that exist alone, isolated behind endless pairs of barely opened eyes.
And the eloquence is even romantic in its hope, belief in beauty; now the only belief to be held is that in the ugliness as a destructive force, as everything seems like its slowly dying.
But nothing is more repulsive than sincerity, genuine compassion, articulation of pain or love of any kind-- our privilege is that of the automaton. We learn to look upon emotion as we would a slowly dying animal, with pity and distaste, telling ourselves these things are meant to die. There is no world to be engaged in, so we communicate with the absence and each other in irony, the language of detachment and defeat, acknowledging there is nothing real to speak of or in.
Underneath the fear of sincerity, it seems, is a reminder that we are humans, able to feel, capable of being ugly, which is what you are if you have feelings for the wrong things, which of course could be, is, anything now.