Alexander Theil and Diana Chovanová

 

„The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.” – Charles Bukowski

Bukowski knew. 25 may be the point of return. the pollution of people’s minds tends to start a lot earlier though. these kids. empty stares.blankfaces.no trace of emotion. they are on a bus that’ll take them to a place usually called a “school”, where their indoctrination will be continued. all of them damaged. irreparably. the rotting film spreading from the margins of the frame like a cancer. a disease infused into the mind.

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives [...]. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.” -  Bukowski

flash-forward. the children from the bus. adults now. grimaces. grotesques. insanity lingering beneath a surface that may crumble any second.are they to blame?didthey ever have a chance?should they just be abandoned? aren’t we similar to them – to some degree?who are we to judge them?there must be something left inside of them. whatever innocence they could preserve from their childhood. locked away in a remote, treasured place in the back of their minds.

have you ever sat in a train, bus or metro, at a time between evening and night,  packed with people on their way home from work? scratch that. any time of day – any public place:silent, anonymous suffering, quiet resignation, monologues on the verge of madness. it’s a depressing sight at times.yet, every single face has a story to tell.just like those in the film.aren’t you interested in hearing them? should we just sit across from somebody and ask? the question is, would we be able to understand the answers?

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.”          Franz Kafka

Kafka knew. thereare limits to empathy, limits to compassion. is there a way to overcome our isolation? maybe not. yet we must not stop trying. for this life that we share probably is everything there is, and therefore we are everything we’ll ever have:

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” - Bukowski