Spaces of Alienation
I felt alienated. I felt alienated not because I was in a unconfortable position to interact with the other or I could not establish a relationship with the other due to a lack of common ground. I felt alienated just because at that time my interests were others that did not lay in the surrounding reality. I shut down the paths of normal communication - I stopped reading the papers, watching TV and even listening to the radio. I cancelled the contract with my internet provider. I stopped (for that period of time) being interested in Politics, History and even in Sports, so what before had seemed a easy way to keep a link with the outside world (and by this I mean, outside of my own room), suddenly felt like it was no longer necessary.
Alienation is not a matter of conscious choice. It is not like I chose to not be interested or to have a interaction with what surrounds me. Alienation could easily happen over a period of heavy creative creation where the inner world feels wide enough to keep ourselves busy. Alienation could also be an insconcious reaction to external contexts.
I travelled for few months with a small backpack - and over that period of time I felt free. Often, on those days, I felt that freedom had to be linked with the lack of physical possesions that hold us to a place. Happiness had to lay somewhere around the experience of not having ties to places, to things, to people. I talk in the past tense bacause I feel that those moments were moments of transition between a place and another.
I wonder for how long are we able to carry on, moving around without that need of ties. Do we choose consciously to be tied to a place? To have certain responsabilities that will not allow us, without a huge feeling of guilt of parting - of catching the next train or plane, or even ferry to the next town or country.
This I consider as an allienation of my previous physical world.
However while I was traveling I also felt other sort of alienation. The one probably felt more often across society. I will try to call it a ’sight alienation’ - what you do not see does not affect you.
I was on the other side of the sea from where the place I usually call home is. Week after week I felt as I was loosing touch with what was the place I would eventually go back to. This lost of contact was not by any means linked with a lack of means of communication. If I had spent three other months travelling I would not have probably came back.
How could I be interested in what was happening so far away from me? It simply did not affect me or my daily routine. Why should I care with what mum was doing when I was in bed due to time differences?
Of course one can say that this lack of interest is linked with the distance, with the inability to establish direct contact or to create a common ground of understanding.
I found very hard to agree with such arguments. The context I was feeling alienated from had been my home for all of my life. I read the news every day, but I started to read them as an outsider - as an spectator.
I wonder if these is the same sort of experience we establish with what we watch in a television. We are mere spectators. My space is different of the other’s space. I am in the mountains the other is in the desert.
Is the physical location the key factor for alienation at different levels? Is the four side polign the key element, either in the format of a television, computer screen or even the frame of a window?
