Notes from Another Underground

These are the notes from another underground...

Just to get the disturbing but unavoidable questions out of the way, I will have to do what I under no circumstances will admit to have done. Your questions are simple. You wonder who I am, how old I am and where I come from? But seriously, what you really want to know is what I look like, right? You need a picture to confirm if any further effort is worth the while. The only picture you'll get from this site though, is a mental one. And I'm not so sure the picture I'm about to give is the one you had in mind. But to begin with the easiest of pieces, I have reached my 30th year and I live in Sweden, a country in the northern part of Europe, should you not know.

 

Now, having not pleased your mind but still answered your badly put questions (I'm not to be blamed for your incompetence in asking significant questions), let us move further into the place where the contradictions dwell. And don't think you’ll be able to trick me to give you any information what so ever about, say my age, gender or the place where I live. Trust me, that simply will not happen. I'm a man of my words! ... I'm lying of course.

 

Now, let me deal with the more difficult question. Who am I? For some time now I have been asking myself and others around me that very question. What answers have I obtained? Actually, only one was given: "Who cares?" It really does seem as if nobody actually gives a damn. Yet can no one hold it for truth that the person uttering the question is of the ugly kind, nor is he a leper, at the bottom of society, a criminal or a member of any other socially marginalised group. So why the indifference? Trying to figure out the reason I find myself somewhere down below in the underground, in a non voluntary human wasteland, another underground.

 

Thus I am writing for nobody but myself. Still to ease my mind I will have to account for my own usage of this the most odious of odious phrases. And while nobody gives a damn there is nobody around to stop me, is there? Should I then by chance be given conventional questions like the ones you posed, I would simply, as I have been properly taught by you all, I reply with the conventionally given phase, "who cares?" Not for the reason that you probably believe or hold for truth because I do.

 

The convention calls for a winner and a loser in all the situations in life. It calls for the question to be posed and it calls for this nonchalance to be established, but never for two to equally intact exit a meeting. Under current circumstances a true and honest spirit of community is impossible to establish. I can hardly overcome the world created before me but I can precede the outcome. Consequently I reply with the same nonchalance in words as the speaker before me following the same convention yet cannot phrase but still is eager to. You think the outcome is settled? How wrong of you. In this foolish game I cannot win. My winning is impossible. Why? Because the difference between your utterance and mine is that I do care but you obviously don’t. So that is why I must take on all the shame of this outcome. Not only mine, that is a burden I can bear, no, I must carry yours as well. Well, so be it. Who cares?

 

Now, the entire project is highly ironic. As it is to appeal to other minds for acceptance when no other minds are present than your own, trying to avoid the shallowness where only surface are to be shown or pleading for love by the mockery making of yourself. Only in the latter of the cases there is any hope of possible success. Holding love, being so paradoxal as it is, as the last of human hopes, I can continue my irony. But indeed, love being the most inner part of any human, why not skip the conventional obstacles and go for the kill instantly. Where it normally takes several years to understand the emptiness behind the shell, all the unwanted now ought to be scattered and only the interesting and the interested remains. Perhaps the inner could be reached by the inner without the outer, still remaining at the surface but together in the depth. I know what you’re thinking when you read my words. "Nonsense, it’s all just nonsense." And indeed you are probably right, but still...

 

What is the project? I am not sure but I believe it is the operation of setting a notion free, a thought or a feeling, most probably both. I am trying to sort it out or loose it like one does with a ball of string. What notion, you wonder. I don't know, but I'm guessing the notion of life itself. There’s something about this life that just isn't right, and that very same notion proclaims what might be but till this point are not. Trying to figure this puzzle out I come to the conclusion that the form of the project only could be the written text. Not being an author, at the very most a writer, I shall make it my mission to complete what I suspect cannot be completed, converting the various fragments into a complete whole.

 

But the spaces are overwhelming and my ability of sight is deeply limited. To improve my chances I shall have to change my tongue into the one I know the best. And sadly for your sake it isn't the English one. Sadly I say, you have my sympathy (although I suspect a translation will come shortly). But again, this project isn't really meant for your eyes. Not that I forbid your reading, no, the reason is a consequence of your own choices, manifested in the loathsome and nonchalant utterance you are about to articulate. As you shrug your shoulders preparing to turn your back at me, you loudly sigh "who cares".