The circularity of events, the repetition of life; this is when history becomes the future.
We always make the same mistakes, don’t we? No matter how much we think we have learned from our past, the future always brings new opportunities to prove us wrong. We remember the lessons we have learned from our mistakes, but never the events that lead to those lessons and to the subsequent mistakes.
It’s circularity, repetition, history.
It must be a plague to our species, this lack of memory for the things that matter. Wars seem to multiply—they’re repeated, cloned, doubled, tripled. Different men in different times find the same excuses to violently destroy other men in the same positions. The gruesome details and outcomes are blurring and mixing and combining all of their pain and truth into a big bowl of shame. Salads are made, mixed and prepped by many countries and many men. In them, shreds of human dignity, chunks of forgotten flesh and a diverse seasoning of emotions flavour the taste and thicken the texture of our collective forgetfulness. It’s a shameless process, clean and shiny, as it’s planned and executed. The whole world watches, oblivious, as these chefs of destruction create a disgusting, colourful bowl of sickly and sickening diversions. We oooh and aaah and let them do to us what they have been doing to us for centuries. Then, when we’ve eaten it all up and are too ashamed to face the indigestion we have caused ourselves, they take off their masks, aprons and gloves and show us their true claws, fangs and rotting insides.
That’s when we get scared, and that’s when we regret the power we gave away; but we must all lie in the mess we have made, embarrassed by our gases and bloating, all of us lying back, staying down, apologising with no meaning.
Repetition, history, circularity.
They’re stories of success and failure, these lives we create for ourselves. We crawl, walk, talk. We love, lose, crash, win, land. And then we do it all again, in reverse order. What we once cherished as children renews its treasured value when we’re old. And everything in between is just a crazy ride, always unstable, always unpredictable, always a repetition of everything we did before and will do again.
History, circularity, repetition.
Now these men in their pure, white chef hats and their clean, blood red aprons are running our world, as they always have, as they always will. This disease—this insanity—that we have allowed to take rule of our world must be, then, a conscious product of our laziness, must it not? These men, with their beady eyes and whiting hair tell us what to do and then do the opposite. Follow as I say, not as I do. We follow as they say; but why? What they say is wrong. What they say is a lie. And what of what they do? What they do is worse: what they do is dirty, scary and bloody. What they do is also wrong and it is what they have done forever and will continue to do forever more. So why do we allow it, do it, let it? Because we think more about our stomachs than our tongues and are willing to swallow these dirty salads just so we don’t have to cook or wash up. As long as it fills us up…
It never changes, this world of ours. Not really. The outside changes, even her insides are angry, as well they should be—we have given her an irritable bowel. But us, us who inhabit, use and destroy her, have never changed and never will. Not really. Everything is always the same; filling and unhealthy; brightly lit by rechargeable batteries.
Now is the time. The time when history becomes the future; we are witnessing the circularity of events and the repetition of life.
And we do nothing to change it.
Laura Restrepo Ortega 