SELF  I  ???????

I was in my twenties during the Vietnam War and while Vietnam was for us in France another adventure of the Americans, I had been very influenced by it and by its consequences on society, and we believed in the necessary changes demanded by a new generation.

The sixties were the years of EVERYTHING, all was permitted, all was accepted, and all was forgiven and blessed…Yes, to be in your twenties during the sixties was at the same time a blessing and a curse, despair, and a hope for change. Total adventure was possible, and attempt to reach a new dimension an everyday task.                                                                                            

THE ME GENERATION WAS THE NEW LAW OF THE LAND.

The generation of my parents in remote Tunisia and then as refugees in France was totally protected by education, some credo in religion, the thoughts of their parents, a certain way of life and a given way of thinking…

Of course, I had heard from a cousin or a friend, or even a remote friend of my parents, that they knew somebody who was betraying his family, or had an affair, or an addiction to alcohol or some drugs, or even in the worst cases some sexual perversion…but it was the reason for whispering dirty secrets in corners, or badmouthing somebody about his terrible double life.

The sixties brought to some of the young generation, the idea that we had to contest society and the rules given by our parents, and the idea of smoking pot was cool, overdrinking alcohol was permitted, total sexual freedom accepted… We were the culmination and the explosion of a culture still wounded by the Second World War and we went for it totally with no restraints and no hesitations…

At the time, I was thinking that it would be just a period in our western society and soon all will go back to a life of order, of self-control, of respect for others and we will again TRY to obey the rules of society set by many generations.

Time flew, years went very fast, and we went from the sixties to the seventies to the eighties to the nineties and to the new millennium… and now we are in 2017.

Year after year, decade after decade, I have witnessed an incredible change in the ways of living, in the ways of thinking. Not only did we not go back to the life before the sixties, which is normal and expected, but everything went forcefully in the opposite direction to reach a degree where life and society and behavior are less and less understandable even for most of the new generation.

When one of the idols of my youth, Robin Williams passed away, even if he was a child of the seventies I always believed that he was really the product of the sixties…  

His genius was GENIUS, his talent was TALENT, his suffering was SUFFERING.

Today do we even understand what genius and talent are? It seems that the rules of life are improvisation and an attempt to prove incessantly the importance of being dishonest.

It seems that we are living in a world of total addiction more than ever…. Alcohol and drugs seem to be the normal way of living…and we have invented new addictions: addiction to phones, to social media, and even worse, compared to today, the ME generation is nothing since now we live in a total world of self-contemplation, self-admiration, self EVERYTHING.

Recently thirteen million people looked at the picture of a star who had posed half-naked with their new twins and I wondered why this is so interesting. Everyday walking in the street I bump into people who are taking pictures of themselves to publish on social media, I think they call that SELFIES but it should be called selfish OR EVEN “SELF I”.

Yes, SELF I since it is more and more obvious that everyone is totally satisfied with his own image, his own MOI…The MOI gives the right to all to denounce everything, to protest everything, to make everything valuable. And at the same time we cannot say anything because we could hurt the MOI of somebody else. We can be accused of anything since all is permitted and all is forbidden.

It seems that everybody needs to exhibit his life, his desires, his successes and failures, his latest and newest adventures on a daily basis with perpetual exposure…The general rule is to have no mystery or mysteries, everybody has to know everything about everybody, and everybody is ecstatic to expose themselves. 

The time when mystery or mysteries were present is a notion totally ridiculed by the majority, EVEN IF a life with no mystery can be very boring and even senseless.

Where is the time when private imagination and private dreams were part of the game of life and a way to be and to find a new balance…?                            

Imagination and dreams and illusions are the hidden reality, the reality of the non-said or told.

The mystery of life and the mysteries of relations are a basic of learning and a key for a life devoted to growing. Yes, dreams are only a hidden reality…the reality of the surreal… forever we should be sitting in the waiting room of final achievement, never totally satisfied.  We should wonder about tomorrow and the mystery of everything and everybody, but unfortunately, we rarely meet somebody with mysteries.                                

We too often believe that we are loved by all, hated by all, protected by all or protector of all, we believe that everybody wants us as a friend or everybody pushes us away... The reality of the non-real!!!!!

But despite that, we have to fight for discovery, yes still discovery can exist, discovery actually exists…

We have to wake up from an eternity of self-indulgence, and the belief that the world owes us something… every day, after too much time spent in non-action and in limbo of the anti-chamber of success, some of my friends of the real world, or people from the other world (I mean the artists) believe that they should now be recognized since they are exposing themselves 24 hours a day to the look of others! They enjoy the perpetual attack of self-attempt to be…

The years of neglect, of waiting for Godot, do not count anymore…they deserve to be successful since they expose themselves everywhere … and now by doing it, they should be RECOGNIZED immediately by all…

SO what to think? What to do? Where is the truth? I know every generation has problems, I know that every generation is asking for something different while the older one wants to preserve their own acquisition.

I was dreaming at the age of 8 or 9 to become a famous actor, I collected in a book the pictures of my favorites American actors, closing my eyes and transporting myself into the Wild Wild West with John Wayne or with Marlon Brandon in ‘On the Waterfront”.

Or I was a Russian character in a Russian novel, which one? Is there a difference today in being a character of Gogol or a character of Pouchkine? Sadly enough it is the same thing for the majority of people...we have lost the meaning of culture and are devoting ourselves to clichés, appearance and exposition of everything we believe we are.

Will we at one moment in this auto-destructive society wake up and find again a sense of Mystery, and some modesty? 

According to the present time we should not build a name, a career, and respect for our professionalism. I have so many friends who wanted, craved all their life to be artists, performers. But where is the cult for work, the cult for perfection? Or at least OUR attempt for perfection. A world for immediate retribution has ungloved us, we are not anymore what we can be but what we believe we deserve to be.

We cannot be only ONE, our self, and believe that it is enough to advance in life!!!! The absence of mystery and mysteries will prevent us to advance on the long path of life, we have to create a multiplicity of feelings, of thoughts, of knowledge…We SHOULD NOT let everybody know every second of our life what we do and what we do not do. We have to be a person full of surprises, of perpetual acquisition of thoughts.

TO BE ONE DIMENSION, ESPECIALLY FOR A PERFORMER IS AN ACT OF SELF DESTRUCTION.