Today, I pressed five times the publish-button on the other science blog, which belongs to my current research project Neopopulismus: Revisionismus und Meta-Katastrophe. These were the first blog posts after an extremely bad experience — brutally seconding a creative, productive upcurrent. So, the bad experience was with — with what, actually? With narrowmindedness? With Wissenschafterei? Is this what they used to call a burnout, until the next big shit came — next to, say, only climate change or Covid-19?
I am not at all into conspirational theories, nor was I ever a „coronavirus skeptic“. So don’t get me wrong when I call Covid-19 „big shit“. It was big shit.
In the context of Covid-19, the word fatigue was trending — was it another word for burnout? It seemed to me that when we — henceforth they, because we are queer and don’t fit the category they — realized that everybody used the same word, burnout, which is not very individualistic — many they/thems, she/hers, and he/hims seem to have discovered the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I am not saying they all are malades imaginaires. But in a strange correlation with attention-seeking, clarifying pronouns, ADHD would spread as rapidly as the plague. As far as my very subjective impression is relevant.
Last year, when they all started to have it, I was working as an interpretor, and I had to translate it to an anne (a mother, in Turkish). It goes like: dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu. I remember the situation and the term well, because I had to look it up; and because I had still difficulties to explain it. The anne was not very convinced that anything was so massively wrong with her kid — but they were. And when they say so, isn’t it likely that they’ve got some point? And wasn’t dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu, unlike most other findings, able to explain really everything?
Anyways — not to me. Yes, there is a massive problem with addictivity and psychological damage by „social media“, eventually leading to dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Jaron Lanier has written about that convincingly in Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. But my overall feeling was more queer, punk, camp — ters! — underdog, outsiderish than for a very, very long time.
But I also know this overall feeling, or all-encompassing strangeness and non-belonging, for a very, very long time. From long before when dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was „constructed“. In fact, for such a long time that I sometimes feel I come from another millenium — which I actually do. Because subtly, it is always there. And that is the point with being queer.
And that is that.
And just as queer is not at all (at least not primarily) about being colourful, merry, gay — ‚gay‘ as in ‚happy‘, but also gay as in gay, always partying and being promiscuous, as the cliché goes (just try to look up pictures on pixabay, searching for ‚queer‘!) — the pathological finding ADHD won’t solve any of your problems. At least I won’t call it dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Cope with it.
In order to cope with „it“, you need to work like a seesaw. And what is so wrong with a seesaw, unless we eagerly strive to destroy the planet in the accelerating pace of the risk productive, harmful, pernicious ideology of … you name it. The seesaw-mode is, of course, inacceptable to the primitive (primary), increasingly useless, yet continuously leading master trope of constant growth. There are ups and downs, cycles, seasons, different weather — and so what?
Translated to writing habits, it means that it sometimes flows — and at other times, it does not. Not everybody needs learned, pathological findings such as dikkat eksikliği hiperaktivite bozukluğu and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to explain the seesaw.
But as it was now, it was really a fucked up state of mind, which is slightly, yet significantly more than a brainfuck. Really nothing, nothing, and nothing would flow out of me. There was literally no word for it. I had a very hard time, even in terms of free-floating thinking, in daring to think. I was blocked and pulled-down in my abilities to think, let alone: work. It was perhaps exactly the inversion of Hannah Arendt’s Denken ohne Geländer (thinking without railing): everybody seemed to see only the good sides in narrow thinking. On the contrary, Denken ohne Geländer seemed to be in the doghouse. People would find this normal.
Well: normal. Let us not discuss fucking ’normal‘.
A depression-like state of mind had knocked me out, profoundly. The mirror said (daily): horrible. I think it had to do with narrowmindedness, but in a way which I didn’t yet fully understand. Other human beings became villainous. Were they really niederträchtig (in German), or only narrowed down? Niedertracht — what a terrific word! And what a poorly hidden, wrong metaphore, here.
I tried not to surrender. But even my not-to-surrender-blog post on the International Day Against Homo-, Bi-, Inter- and Transphobia was sort of, well — phobic, misanthropic, „unecht“; written in dispair, under constraint, and driven by resentment. The subtone is a bit mean. „Mortification is a psychological superpower„, as an Austrian social scientist had put it.
I felt not only brainfucked; it was rather as if my mind was trampled upon by hoofed animals, who happen to have better weapons.
One’s wounds were licked, one’s brain relaxed.
This is how good, old disbelief showed up:
How was it possible that the neoliberal agenda really entered the beehive to stay there forever and to fuck it all up, so successfully and against all ‚reason‘? I mean, can’t we see the wood for the trees?
These days, of course, I am staring at Turkey a lot. And really nothing is surprising me. And this is just one example of the thriving, neo-populist regress. Or rather: progress.
How good would it be to be taken by surprise, and to think: oh, how is all this possible?, or: I can’t believe it!, or: They are just playing a bit! Surprise would insinuate that later, everything would calm down and de-escalate; of course, it would, since this is the point about the disbelief, of l’incrédulité de Thomas.
But poor, naive fellow of suprise! No: nothing of all of this is surprising. De-escalation is not at sight. My guest said, much wiser than doubting Thomas, that she stopped following the news. And Thomas finally understands her.
While our ability to view the world is widening — minds are narrowing down.
How much do I hate this expression: please narrow it down, in order to make it feasible. So what if very wide and far-reaching, epochal shit is feasible, is possible? Will Denken mit Geländer save us?
I sometimes flee to Heinrich Heine, who is, if not my literary hero, my muse. Wasn’t he (they/them) sort of queer-before-queer, in so many senses? My muse and me, we hang around in the long 19th century, just before the industrial Take-off. I imagine how we are mocking, together, die Schlegeln and their scholarly learned Elefantenmittelalter.
But now — pssst, I dare to think so! — the seesaw is back, a bit!
Certain things are flowing.
Others not.
Nothing will ever be perfect — and that’s how it is.
This whole text was so unintended.
It is so not what I wanted to write about.
I even had to delete and change the title, because this went so far away from the intital motivation. I had briefly forgotten why I had started to write in English, but it was too late to return to the comfort zone.
So, what can you do to such an unnecessary post?
Press the publish-button, for the sixth time.
And call it a day.
DUNYALOOK 
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