The new life

In  his The New Life, novelist Orhan Pamuk captures the unsettling moment when ordinary reality slips away and we suddenly find ourselves inhabiting an entirely different world. That sense of reality dissolving and being replaced by another is something I often experience. Sometimes it brings with it a sense of loss and thoughts of what might have been; at other times, it evokes surprise and awe. More often than not, it is a mixture of both, unfolding within the space of a few minutes. 

“It has happened to all of us. One day, one ordinary day when we imagine we're making our routine rounds in the world with ticket stubs and tobacco shreds in our pockets, our heads full of news items, traffic noise, troublesome monologues, we suddenly realize we are already someplace else, that we are not actually where our feet have taken us.

I had long slipped away, I had melted into a color paler than pale when I stood behind the windowpane made of ice. If you are to come down to earth, or any kind of reality, you must then hold a girl, that girl, hold on to her and win her love.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

l-aqwa li m'iniex numb

Gwerra, elezzjoni, World Cup, heat wave.

Terapija ta' ħafna baħar u duħħan, 

Il-ħedla u l-għafa tas-sajf wara ħarifa ta' tqanqil.

Imbagħad jiġu dawk il-mumenti fejn qisu kollox sejjer tajjeb.

Tħossok "qed tikber u tisbieħ, tikber u tiblieħ, donnok qatt ma tixjieħ"...

Fejn ir-realtà titgħawweġ f'ħolm improbabbli. mhux wahda imma tnejn, forsi tlieta 

Sakemm ħesrem tiġi doża qawwija ta' realtà,

Imma terġa' tqum bit-tama u tieħu gost tittama u tgħid: l-aqwa li m'iniex numb.

U vera... imma xiż-żobb.  

The 'Queer' Ethics of Care

Reinventing an ethic of care and love should be one of the central revolutionary tasks of our time. Our understanding of friendship, romance and companionship remains anchored in a social world that no longer exists: the isolated nuclear family, the monogamous couple, the ideal of exclusive romantic fulfilment, the marginalisation of friendship as a secondary and largely recreational bond, the rigid zoning of human relationships, and the privileging of biological parenthood. These forms were shaped by a historical order centred on industrial production, the privatised household and the reproduction of labour. They are increasingly out of step with a society characterised by fluid identities, mobile lives and ever-shifting social and economic relations.

Yet while the material conditions of life have changed, the insecurity produced by late capitalism has not liberated us from these inherited forms. On the contrary, precarity often drives people to cling more tightly to outdated and exclusionary institutions, not because they are inherently fulfilling but because they promise stability in an increasingly unstable world. Economic insecurity therefore creates fertile ground for the reaffirmation, rather than the transcendence, of oppressive hierarchies.

The alternative is not simply to celebrate fluidity. It is to embrace the complexity and multiplicity of human relationships while eliminating the material insecurity that makes people dependent on restrictive forms of intimacy. Liberation requires both economic and cultural transformation.

This transformation is necessarily dual. It demands a socialist economy that guarantees the material conditions for freedom, alongside a new ethic of care grounded in the plurality of human relationships. Rather than expecting one person or one family to satisfy every emotional, practical and existential need, people should be free to build diverse forms of connection that fulfil them in different ways. Love, friendship, care and solidarity should cease to be organised around compulsory exclusivity and instead become networks of freely chosen commitments.

Equally important is moving beyond the biological family as the primary refuge in a heartless world. In its place, we should cultivate voluntary kinship: communities of care formed not through blood or obligation but through mutual choice. Freed from material dependence, people would come together not out of necessity but out of a shared desire for personal development, enjoyment, affection and collective flourishing. Such a society would not abolish families or romantic partnerships, but it would dethrone them as the only legitimate foundations of intimacy, replacing them with a richer ecology of human relationships.

In such a society, friendship could become what Michel Foucault described as "a way of life", one capable of yielding "intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized", and of giving rise to "a culture and an ethics". This vision resonates with my own understanding of queerness. That is why I embrace a queer identity despite being predominantly heterosexual and cisgender.  As Foucault also suggested, to be "gay" is not merely to identify with "the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual", but to "try and define and develop a way of life". In that broader sense, queerness represents not simply a sexual identity but an ethical and political project: the creation of new forms of intimacy, solidarity and freedom that transcend inherited social norms.

The Sea, Always Enough

 

The sea is beautiful, whether calm or lightly stirred by waves, because whenever you’re in it, it feels like enough. Whether for a quick dip or for hours in the middle of a day of coming and going, you emerge sun-drained yet certain of it—certain it will always be there to cool and refresh you.

And in the evening, the sea turns into a witchy realm, where colours and reflections merge and dissolve, deepening the silence under the gaze of the moon. 

The sea, along the beaches, is both communist and anarchist. It gives to everyone and takes nothing from anyone. It invites you in, but you enter only when you choose. 

It belongs to everyone, at least until they sell that too. 

It is also a place where you can be alone, or among anonymous multitudes whose voices merge into a collective hum that recedes as you drift further away. Yet it can also be a place of encounter and breezy conversation, where lightness and depth meet. 

The sea has a smell, a sound, and a touch that reach you everywhere—body and soul, material and spiritual at once.  

And though it moves to its own rhythm, in an eternal dance with the wind, within it you find silence. Because there, it is easy to stop wanting more. 

Whether you are in it for a moment or for a long while, it is always enough—so much so that even when stormy, you can feel the urge to dissolve into it completely, to lose yourself in its raw force. 

But on calm days it is gentle with the soul. At least while you are beside it or within it. Even when you're far from it, you know it's still there—ready to welcome you inside it, always.

Two-liners

1. The good moments in life are light, pleasant, a bit random,  and come without any need to process them.  They become memories which evoke gentle melancholy. 

4. History is both random and subject to over-determinations dictated by objective material realities.  So a random subjective  act  can only alter history at a particular and unique juncture, or, to put it more mystically, when the stars (conflicting over-determinations) align or collide.  

7. “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” (even if I am a terrible dancer). The self-appointed prophets of wrath, fire, and brimstone—the Savonarolas of the world—are always counter-revolutionary, no matter how fiercely they denounce corruption.

10: In-yun: Encounters can feel already known from countless past lives, that fleeting déjà vu at first meeting,  but it is the later choices that give those crossings their meaning.  Kismet: Encounters are serendipity with intention, unlikely paths briefly intersecting as if inevitable, asking us to surrender to life’s absurd choreography.

11. The pessimism of the intellect against the optimism of the will: an eternal struggle between the realm of the possible, burdened by its contradictions, and utopia, haunted by its fanatics.

15.  People exist independently in the minds of others. The way we are lived and  experienced in other people’s minds defines who we are—Unsettling but awesome.

18.  Sometimes all you have to do is to change perspective. Things then start floating in the gentle lightness of being.

Magical Realism at the Polls

The Maltese elections provided a surreal backdrop to more important things happening in my personal space. The intersection between timelines was interesting, with the circus I had to follow as a journalist and commentator bordering on magical realism. Some of the proposals were worthy of a José Saramago or Gabriel García Márquez novel. Unfortunately, it was not like in Seeing, where a sham democracy collapses under the weight of an abstention epidemic, but more like the gypsies selling extraordinary wares in Macondo. In such circumstances, although I am probably voting for the Greens, I am appalled by platitudes about the virtues of voting, and it is worth recalling Saramago’s line in Seeing that “by casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.”  

The reality is that real social battles are rarely won in elections but through communities, unions, activists, and everyday struggles. The rest of politics is an amusement park. Still, unlike the gypsies in Macondo, our politicians are here to stay and, to win favour, they insist on restricting the goodies to the natives. But wait for the shit to hit the fan. Eventually, at this rate, like the dictator in The Autumn of the Patriarch, they will have to sell the sea to a consortium of foreign businessmen.

Moving Trains / Crossing Timelines

You can never cross the same river twice because it's not the same river and you are not the same person. So it follows that you can never meet the same person twice. Of course there is familiarity, character traits, ideology, heritage, roots, accumulated knowledge, ephemeral impressions, and looks, but whenever people meet they are like moving trains. Even faces change. So does the gaze. Sometimes the trains move so fast that meeting someone the next time could  feel like meeting another person. Intersections and collisions can happen in different timelines.