diary of ideas

This is my diary of ideas, a living essay if you will. Here you will find thoughts and ideas that come to me throughout the day. For quite some time, I have been waiting for a moment to sit down and write a nice and coherent essay about one of these ideas and publish it somewhere. But it seems like the nature of my mind as well as the nature of publishing does not let me. They are both too quick to change. Especially in new media, nothing that is published is really fixed. Think of editing your WhatsApp messages or your Instagram post, All is changeable, and even if it is not, you may just post something else and the previous post (publication) disappears in the big soup of information. In a way, our information exchange is starting to increasingly imitate the nature of reality: always in flux, never finished, always adding, growing, and remixing.

So, here I am, writing an essay that is always in flux and never finished. I will add ideas when they come to me. I hope you enjoy, because I am.

10.01.2025 - Contradictions are often paradoxes and paradoxes reveal truths

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes)

from Song of Myself , Walt Whitman (1892)

We tend to be suspicious of contradictions, especially in others, and we love calling them out. For example, with those who try to change the world for the better we say: ' I do not take what you say seriously because you are a climate activist but you still take a plane!' In calling this a contradiction we fail to recognize the necessity of seeming opposites to reveal something deeper to us. Let us agree om some definitions here: contradiction means that two opposites cannot coexist, but a paradox means that too opposites actually do not contradict but reveal a deeper truth to us. We too often mistake paradoxes for contradictions.

I think it is more interesting to ask: why is it that this person is engaging in seemingly contradictory behaviour? In this case, this climate activist can only do their job when they also engage in unsustainable and polluting actions. Because to participate in society and survive in this system (let alone have any power to change society) we have to pollute; the system gives us no other choice. So it is the climate activist taking a plane that shows us that our system is inherently polluting. So, they are correct: we need alternatives to be able to participate in society in a non-polluting way.

In today’s Zeitgeist, where self-help books are the most profitable books and our focus is increasingly on “being ourselves”, I see another fear of (fake) contradiction. We create our ideal selves online. Our coherent identity carefully curated on our “profiles” on our social media platform of choice. - Byung-Chul Han writes* that previously only criminals had profiles, but now we all do, and voluntarily too. It made me giggle, then cry - And here is the point that I believe I am trying to make: with this increasing pressure to 'find ourselves', we create and enact our ideal selves and we forget to allow internal paradoxes to exist. In constructing who we are, we are creating this beautiful image of ourselves that is fully coherent: tattoos, left-wing, alternative music, agnostic, second-hand clothing, keffiyeh since a year ago. But we are also from Weert, and we pray secretly, and we feel alone, and go on holiday to Vietnam to hang out with other Europeans, to drink alcohol exessively and ignore the power relations in the moment. (beware, small jum here) It was Immanuel Kant who came up with the “universal moral law” that supposedly could create perfect moral harmony in the world. And yet, he also wrote a racist essay on racial categorization. Scholars today still debate whether they can divorse these opposing viewpoints **. What truth does that reveal to us? I am not sure exactly, but I think we should approach these potential contradictions with curiosity instead of rejection. To lean into these contradictions, welcome them, accept them in ourselves and others and you will see you might find deeper, perhaps more concilliating truths. Something tells me that the focus on our self-image is suffocating us, refraining us from accepting the contradictions we are. You might just read the poem by Walt Whitman.

*Infocracy (2022), Byung-Chul Han

**Bowersox, Kant on the Different Human Races. Link

13.12.2025 - For a long time we know how technology alienates us from natural way

This is an ancient Taoist story from the Zhuangzi which perfectly describes how technologies interfere with our ability to resonate with the 'course of nature'.

. . . Kongzi’s student Zigong wandered south to Chu and was returning through Jin. As he passed the south bank of the Han River, he saw an old man gardening a small plot. He’d dug a tunnel for a well and was coming out carrying a jug to water his fields. He was huffing and puffing, working hard for little reward.

Zigong said, “There’s a machine now that can water a hundred gardens in one day. You get a big reward for easy work. Wouldn’t you like one, sir?” The gardener raised his head to look at him. “How does it work?” “You carve the contraption out of a piece of wood. The back is heavy and the front is light. You can lift the water with one hand, until it’s practically bubbling over. It’s called a well sweep.”

The gardener flushed angrily and laughed, “I heard from my teacher that where there are mechanical contraptions there will be mechanical business, and where there is mechanical business there are mechanical minds. With a mechanical mind, you cannot preserve your simplicity. When you cannot preserve your simplicity, your spiritual life is unsettled, and the Way will not support an unsettled spiritual life. I’m not ignorant of your contraption. I would be embarrassed to use it!” . . .

02.18.2025 - Reflection on the exhibition 'Reading Dust' by Meriam Cahn

In the beginning of 2025 I visited Reading Dust by Miriam Cahn at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam together with a dear friend. Here is a reflection.

The first room of the exhibition was immediately overwhelming; a child’s head coming out of a woman’s vagina, a kid being punched in the face, deformed bodies, unphantomable landscapes. Even though Cahn’s paintings do not show any faces, the acts of violence that are portrayed pierce straight into your soul. I was not sure whether I should look or not; the paintings were done beuatifully and the colours vibrand and telling but the topics disgusted me. After a ten minutes I decided to stop taking photos. I’m not entirely sure why anymore—perhaps out of respect for the victims represented by the figures in Cahn’s paintings who underwent more cruel crimes the further exhibition continued: victims and perpetrators of wartime violence, sexual (mis)conduct.

In the third room, my intuition to stop photographing the paintings seemed to be appropriate. The painging 'Fuck, abstraction!' depicts a man forcing two children to sexually gratify him. It sent chills through my body. Despite the abstraction of faces, the title of this painting is true, Cahn does not abstract the scene. She leaves no doubt about what happenes there—what is happening today, what is happening now.

(...)

Later, I read that this particular painting caused major controversy in Paris in 2023. The far-right party Rassemblement National demanded that the painting be removed from the Palais de Tokyo because it “contained pedophilia” and could “endanger minors.” The Council of State ruled that this was not the case, so the painting remained on display. A few weeks later, it was splashed with red paint. (1)

I cannot bare to look at this painting for very long, and I can no longer separate the beautiful painting technique from the subject matter. I follow my friend into the screening roommwhere an older work of Cahn is showing. It is a film showing old and abstract images of landscapes slowly alternating with one another. My friend and I sit down to recover from the violence.

For a while we don's say anything. While staring at the slow images, I notice that every visitor who enters this room just peaks around the corner to see what is on the screen and then leaves. Nothing to see so it seems, probably enough stimulation, probably shocking enough. After a few minutes is is apparent that my friend notices the same thing and she says a little upset:

“There also needs to be time for silence and reflection.”

These observations tell us something about the role of art in a time in which everyone carries war violence with them—and I mean that quite literally.

War violence takes place on the black mirror that has become our extension; between the selfies and skincare routines on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The difference between the violence on our phones and that of Cahn is that the war on our phones is too “pornographic.” (2) That is to say, it hides nothing and explicitly shows its terrors. As a result, images of war on social media leave no room for contemplation, no time to touch us and bring us to action. In contrast, Cahn does not show specific people suffering—no ruins, no outcomes. She shows the acts themselves, the individual experiences, the cruelties that are happening as I write this. Cahn conceals all unnecessary details and reduces crimes to a scene that speaks to the imagination and can therefore touch and move us.

Through this exhibition, my friends remark, and a small book (2) I once read, I was reminded again why we need spaces for contemplation and how art can play a role in that. Let us make spaces where people are given the space and attention they need in order to be touched.

(1) https://www.groene.nl/artikel/mensen-zonder-hoofdhaar

(2) Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society