NOEMAYA

All this, a vacant and abandoned amusement park, cars here and there covered with dust, the ferris wheel that hasn’t revolved in ages, swings hanging down with broken chains! The only signs of life are the homeless that occasionally stop by to take a break from the summer heat under the passing shades of the old, dead machines. All this, a place that used to amuse but is now unused and at best misused.

All this, that was it was because it was loved and stopped being what it was become the lovers stopped loving. All this, this is the heart of man, it’s the child, the innocence. The soul, abandoned, in favor of the glamour of the city and its wages, of its penthouses and amenities, of new obsessions and addictions, of reconstructed amusements and entertainments that are moved from the heart to the head. This man is still that same child longing for thrill and love, but somehow chose to abandon the real thing and move the amusement park into his own head, to live secret fancies and to ride the ferris wheel of his own neurosis, to get on the pride ride of prestige and status.

This man, this modern creature that has a semblance of a man, has more idols than ever before. He prefers the fake to the real in all affairs; he prefers a text to a call, the call to an encounter, obsession to love. He murdered God because it was too real, too real to be grasped by his tiny hands; instead, he replaced it with perishing idols that live in his head, mad idols.

What never changes and never goes away is the child and its longing for the infinite love. This man couldn’t bear infinity and replaced it with the indefinite, hence the birth of quantity and mathematics. And the child knows very well that no amount of indefinite intervals can add up to infinity. A man with a secret longing for infinity but with access only to what’s finite and perishing, this kind of man is bound to become an insatiable consumer, a consumer not only of material products but of more and more theories and philosophies and ideas.

There used be a child content in love and abundance, for whom one idea was enough, and that was his concrete Reality. But this modern semblance of a man, he needs one too many ideas, identifications, positions with regard to everything, swarming in podcasts and debates, only to satisfy an insatiable sense of belonging that is only truly satisfied by what is buried alive within himself.

The walking dead! That’s not a show; it’s the reality that’s around us; it is us. And the child, the abandoned amusement park that is still bright and alive under the thick fog of time. All is gone but nothing has perished, for what’s real can never not be. Love cannot not be.