Colombia’s most successful endeavour is *feeling* its way forward
Colombia is an entity making things up as it goes along. It is really a sensitive, fragile creature. It feels its way forward
In a world of premature sheen, where the modern landscape feels overly stylized, a little oversold, Colombia is a portal to little moments and simple pleasures. It is a kind of electrifyingly boring experience, where cinnamon air, saturated laughter and playful mischief, are all like one perfect golden luminous substance.
While the modern world cannot sit still, cannot take a deep breath for fear of lagging behind, is never really satisfied, Colombia is a recurring fantasy, every door leads back to the same room, every room leads back to the same door.
Modern life cannot loosen its tight grip, there is no letting go, no surrender, reality seems to be composed and closely guarded. Colombia just is. Life is lived forward. It sizzles and ferments of its own accord. It’s just energy, splashing around.
What is this thing out there bobbling about like Valderrama’s orange afro, like a rogue strutting gentleman outlaw, like a shaman in exile summoned from the past by a smartly dressed lord?
Colombians communicate with feeling, chords, detours and digressions. Ideas and ways of being are like colors, they appear, morph and dissolve into one another. They are constantly in flux and being renegotiated. If the official ways of doing things lack grace and fluency, there are other ways to move around. Life is not made of rigid stuff.
There is no search for meaning here beyond letting things unfold. It is a traveling circus. Bracing, exciting and funny. Jumping and skipping in wonky colors. A kind of gritty intimate urban trailer park in Detroit smashed together with strangely inappropriate pajamas, fried empanadas and twinkly Christmas lights.
It is also unashamed. The weakest are proudly integrated into the spectacle. Old rumpled men stride about in threadbare three piece suits. Frail boney old women in long dresses cling to clunky buses which rattle and zigzag through the smog and mist. Good-natured beggars improvise with melody and sorrowful theater — as if trying to summon a new existence into being. There is an inescapable note of sadness, but it feels right.
Maybe getting good at feeling bad is what allows us to feel good. Perhaps suffering tickles the nerves. Colombians seem to extract every last drop of joy from life — as if the alternative is being incarcerated into a tiny cell in the sweltering heat of a tropical jungle — or being condemned to be perpetually looking into the abyss.
People seem to live their lives with all the loneliness, heartache and teardrops of a convicted man — who all the while believes his day will come, any day now he shall be released.
And the more Colombians surrender to their reality, the more they become joyful participants. Families stroll gently through shopping malls in ceremonial manner, fathers take their daughters hands, the family dog struts high springy steps like a well-groomed horse, colorful ice cream is licked and slurped, and at its core, somewhere near the back, a totem pole, the supreme pontiff, low-key grandma watches over the procession reassuringly.
Has contemporary life lost its nerve for all this? As the modern landscape bathes itself in a kind of new, immaculate clean reality, it’s as though an old life force is being drained away. Rinsed until sterile. Processed and manipulated until meaningless. The more it seeks the less it finds. The more it dissects the less it feels.
It appears to be exhausted by looking at, and thinking about its own image. Forever scratching its head about where to draw the lines. Endless contemplative thought without emotional participation.
For all its colorful visibility, our contemporary world feels withdrawn and distant. Clean empty digital air, no rugged human textures. The original essence of our cultural landscape perverted into a flattened corporate idea. It is really a horribly compromised spectacle.
Colombia, on the other hand, remains a riddle. An entity making things up as it goes along. An inverted dream. Unaware. Dignified. Straightforward. A breath of life inside the machine. It spurts stuff out loud just to see how it sounds. It is really a sensitive, fragile creature, feeling its way forward.
