ventsislav zankov
24.01.2001
Sense and meaning
of the IDEAL CEMETERY FOR IDEAS;
principles, selection and work of
the MORNIN' FUNERAL AGENCY
The first observation and explanation that imposes itself after the first reactions when sharing the "Mornin'" project - most superficially; the first interpretation of this idea is that it's about collecting garbage, waste from our intellectual activities. To some extent that may be what it is, or what it looks like, but the aim has never been to give a definition of garbage nor to get into the role of a hygienist, even less into that of an intellectual hygienist. I leave this to the intellectuals, at home and abroad. I want to make clear that intellectual junk in our sense here has nothing to do with the idea of cemeteries and the burial of ideas, ideals and substances; the MORNIN' FUNERAL AGENCY builds on the intention, the desire to give those thoughts that are suppressed as futile, unsuitable, unfit TO EXIST IN OUR DAILY LIVES with its pragmatic goals and passions, a chance to escape extinction .
The aim of the MORNIN' funeral agency is to hinder the annihilation of thoughts, ideas and wishes by the self-censorship we all exert, maintain and develop in the process of adaptation, living and SURVIVING.
In other words, the aim of the IDEAL cemetery is not gather junk, litter, but to give visibility to thoughts and ideas that are contrary to or simply OTHER with respect to the logic of values, ideals and criteria (a direct product of liberal democracy) that is the social ideological platform of globalized financial capital.
I.e., the agency and the cemetery have set themselves the impossible (?) goal to provoke, discover and preserve thoughts which are untimely and improper in the current model of organization and existence.
While avoiding simple oppositions - avoiding such notions as radical as opposed to conservative; avantguarde/traditional; official/alternative/underground as well as useful/useless-junk.
Avoiding such notions as success and successful, which in today's conditions necessarily refer to prosperity, money, fame and affluence, which are all interrelated and interdependent and construct, determine and rationalize the foundations of contemporary morals, ethics and aesthetics.
This is where the question of art and beauty inevitably surfaces - if contemporary art is the fruit, the result of democracy and the democratic system, it necessarily includes and relates to capital in its contemporary form. Everything that does not deep in itself refer to those essences and values is immediately and definitely doomed to failure. Here the role of the "Mornin'" agency is to save the timid sprouts of otherness and difference while it is perfectly clear that - since the basis of all art are interpersonal relations - no change, development or modification in art can occur without changing its basis, the practice of interpersonal relationships and communication. The very attempt to provoke the sharing of thoughts and ideas other than those that are necessary by entrusting them to the cemetery of ideas is an effort to change the model of criteria for evaluating adequacy.
By entrusting them to the agency and cemetery, attempts, projects and ideas that have turned out to remain unrealized, to be unfeasible or untimely, are given a chance to sprout, to escape getting lost, to provoke the emergence of kin thoughts. At the very least, in the IDEAL cemetery the chance that they acquire sense, meaning and influence is not forever lost.
But most importantly - the most important is the practice of sharing, of donating, of trusting, of overcoming fear or overcoming the sense of futility and self-censorship - daring to imagine that we can think differently; pushing our thinking to its limits - how to think the UNTHINKABLE; reaching out to it without fear of losing ourselves, those selves that are products of the individualizing functions of capital and modern civilization, the selves necessary for creating ideal consumers, who believe that "everything is intended specially for you!". Being different - the wish to differ is so uniform and standardized that is becomes suspiciously.
The same can be said of the individual right to an opinion, to taste. Everyone is competent to speak on art; speaks nonsense, or simply says "I like this - which means it is beautiful". End of the small lyrical digression in the direction of individuality/difference/OTHERNESS.
To avoid confusion it should be made clear that the Agency and the Cemetery are concerned less with intellectual junk (although they do not exclude this possibility) than with the preservation of memory and memories. Unlike memory, memories are emotion-oriented, they evoke and RESTORE emotions, sensations, feelings; they induce tears, a smile, or nostalgia. The Agency gives precedence to WHAT WE DO NOT WANT TO REMEMBER, allowing us to objectify and dissociate negativity rather than suppressing it and diverting it into the subconscious, and thus free our psyche of its untimely burden and the danger that the suppressed negativity flood consciousness in revenge, with the accumulated power of the fermenting subconscious.
What is not and should not be the basic aim of the agency and the cemetery is to define themselves as unrealized radicality, as a container for emotional junk, as marginality in the process of defining itself, or as opposition to whatever officiality - this should be outside scope of activity of the Cemetery ad the Agency.
The Agency is fully aware that different/other practices, if they are to sprout, must not be exposed prematurely to the light, to public space, but must be kept in the shade/in the dark under optimal conditions. The cemetery of ideas is this appropriate metaphor and electronic practice that could foster the vegetation of 'untimely' thoughts, 'inappropriate' ideas and 'silly' emotions through sharing the principles of trust, cooperation, sympathy, selflessness and mutual support.
The Agency goes beyond 'author's rights' to think the shared, surrendered ideas so that they keep on living, with the possibility that they develop, become completed and find their realization outside their creators who in their turn keep on living through them, since one of the mandatory conditions for using ideas from the cemetery is to cite the name of the donor/"grave-digger".
The agency expects the creation and maintenance of the IDEAL Cemetery to stimulate ideas, thoughts and impressions that tend to deny themselves and be overlooked; and that they will remain on the surface of consciousness, helped by the idea that at least there is a place where they, the vagrant ideas, thoughts and impressions can have or acquire sense and meaning, in the hands or the mind of someone else.
The IDEAL cemetery and the funeral agency work in the context of the Internet. The Net as a different social environment presupposes possibilities for sharing, involvement and collaborative activities beyond borders, regions and countries. The Net as a fundamentally new social environment fosters the clarification of personal identifications, which makes sharing easier and provokes the manifestation of meanings pushed towards the boundaries of consciousness, of suppressed meanings, and may thus have a certain psychotherapeutic effect. The anonymity of the Internet, the possibility to hide behind nicknames, to give false information about age, gender, profession, family status, to be freed from responsibilities, from personal, physical and psychological responsibilities, from ties and dependencies from the other, tangible life of flesh and blood, the distance from the body offered by the Net in its communication context - all this promises to relieve from the tensions and contradictions between the ideal, non-material side of human existence called the spirit, and matter - the objective corporeal matter that weighs and needs food, the body that gets tired and ages. The Net's promise of liberation from corporeality, the new social environment offered by the Net also make it easier to switch between personal identifications. Social life in the Net offers new and more choices of how to appear. The avatars of Krishna are an appropriate metaphor for what is going on.
There are those products of human intellectual, emotional and psychological activity that do not find their place - because they clash with contemporary life, with the ideals of survival, prosperity and progress. Instead of being pushed to the peripheries of consciousness, or even worse, into the subconscious, from where they could backfire and flood consciousness as activated archetypes, they can be entrusted to the Agency and the IDEAL Cemetery, where they can acquire this perspective that is needed for surviving by preserving, putting aside and sharing essences whose values we often casually dismiss as untimely, inappropriate, trivial, failed, perverse or objectionable. But it is they that are often the most human, that go beyond the status quo of Everyday Life. The IDEAL Cemetery and the MORNIN' Funeral Agency aim to provoke (in one way or another), to foster and help, making use of the virtual space of the Internet and the Web, the process of sharing, putting aside and preserving those heavy, 'inappropriate', untimely thoughts and emotions and forever latent wishes and ideas, those thick black waves that silt us up. Which certainly does not mean that they are useless and harmful, the litter of our emotional and intellectual life. On the contrary, the Agency considers them as important as all the rest of the so-called 'positive' ideas and practices. This is why it is essential for the psychological, emotional and spiritual balance of a human being to save and preserve rather than ignore or 'annihilate' them.
What's more, beyond emotional coloration the grain, the core of every buried idea, thought or memories can germinate, become reborn when it falls on the right soil, in the right structure or person. The intention behind the Agency and the IDEAL Cemetery is reminiscent in form and sense of the idea that made LINUX possible and functional, and of the idea of keeping the originator, the wellspring, the 'source' open to everyone who wants to use, change or develop it further - only that it applies to the world of ideas, thoughts, emotional and psychological contents thanks to which we can still call ourselves human.
The Agency maintains that the unipolar and positive world we are drawn in, by depriving us from the possibility of interpreting negativity as the other of contemporary civilization with its dominant American model, represses this same negativity and otherness and thus provokes them to rise from the dark waters of the human psyche, to wake up atavistic unconscious contents. This provoked collective pathology is the next, last step to the empire of evil, doubtlessly refined, improved, perfected in comparison with the wild National-Socialism of 1939.
Translated from Bulgarian by Zornitsa Dimova