I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).
EMILE DEWEAVER, "Profile"
You see me swagger to a stop
at the crosswalk, chin bobbing on
the currents of my playlist, and the Nike
Swoosh on my sleeveless says
I hold my shape after washing.
I look upstreet, presenting you
the question curving along my cheek.
What a nice man you’re thinking,
his Afro is nonthreatening
like a light bulb invented by Thomas Edison.
You’re having ideas, right? Weighing
myths and elongating for answers.
I’m walking your way, broad as day,
and you have to choose. Do
you relax your shoulders and step
into the street or clench your toes
and face your faith in the human
race: all men are created
sequals, every black
man is not a syllable.
---
...nor every man/ woman his/ her profile,
unless we all so genuinely pretend
So in the music video, we see two behaviourally different profiles of a young woman, one commuting/ blending into an "urban normie" profile version, the other at the beach, establishing a fitness/ beauty profile version. Gone is authenticity. Gone is sincerity. All we see is the genuine pretending of her adapting her profile to suit second order observational positions of "profilicity" through the self-isolation technology of music and headphones, she dances, alone. All opportunities for presenting a dance card to a like-minded individualist on a comparable derive, technologically foreclosed.
Object-relations mediating the social. Cultural-relations mediating the social. Will human-relations ever restore or establish a new social without such intervening and foreclosing intermediaries?
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