Mayer Hawthorne & The Country - Maybe So, Maybe No
pressed in 2009
maybe so
maybe no
could it be that your love was meant for me
maybe so, maybe no
could it be that your love is meant for me
maybe so, maybe no
i don't know what led me to your love
was it fate? or destiny?
or was it angels from above
smiling down
on you and me
lalalalalalalalalalala
like birds of a feather
here we are together
could it be that your love is meant for me
maybe so, maybe no
could it be that your love was meant for me
maybe so, maybe no
why does time go by so fast now?
when i'm here with you
don't know why minutes seem like hours
when i'm away from you
lalalalalalalalalalala
i'm not sure if it's really real now
is it a dream or maybe a game
all i know is since i lost you girl
my life, hasn't been the same
now everyday we grow
closer together
South of the Rio Grande, once you have crossed the US frontier, the curse begins. The entire South American continent is still living out the moment of the immolation of the empires which collapsed with the arrival of the Spaniards and the Portuguese and which forever will be collapsing.
On the predators' side, the depredation continues - if it isn't the colonials, it's the international mafias. But a corruption and an attendant depravation have set in, as they did among the Indians as early as the sixteeth century, in the joyous and renewed acceptance of the spectacle of a colossal failure.
Just as in North America the primal scene of the 'frontier', of freedom, energy and go-getting endures, so here the opposite primal scene of immolation goes on forever, the scene of the absolute despair of conquest, which has passed into the veins of an entire people, from the veins of the Indians to those of the half-castes and, in the end, of the whole population, including the white race, which seems to accept that there is no hope for this continent and it is doomed to the scandal of extermination. Home of the planet's reserves of chlorophyll and cocaine, of oxygen and of the total corruption of resources and minds.
No one has any real hope of getting out of this. Perhaps there never has been any desire to extricate themselves away from the primal scene, except among a tiny, epiphenomenal intellectual and political stratum. And even their behavior is problematic. Everything is planned in terms of modern norms (plans, programmes, organization), but then, at the psychological moment, there's a loss of interest in the outcome. As thought they proved what had to be done, but then had no will to carry it through. Things then go pretty badly, of course, but don't think this makes them unhappy, since it merely confirms the impossibility of getting out of the mire.
It is the same with personal relations: a generosity, a moving affection and, at the same time, casualness, carelessness - perhaps as affected as the demonstrations of warmth? But no: the point is that nothing must be made certain, in order that play remains possible. The relation to time is the very same as the relation to money and the relation to others: dates, appointments, rates of exchange are all deliberately left in the air. It is a game, it is a destiny. All economic plans are doomed to failure here with such certainty that what happens isn't even a failure; it is a spectacle, and, as such, competes with football, the samba, the cults, the jogo de bicho. This is real Brazil, as Muniz Sodre says, not the simulated Brasil, the one they want to make run on the same lines as the Western techno-democracies. As it really is, the country is no doubt doomed joyously to perpetuate the sacrifice, the immolation, the ritual cannibalizing of all its wealth. And why not?
This profound indifference to one's undertakings, this syncope in one's performance (echoing the syncopation in the rhythm of the samba) comes perhaps from the short-circuit between a primitive, ritualistic world of slowness, in which the cycle completes itself spontaneously, and a modern world of speed and acceleration. The result is incoherent: they go forward, forge ahead determinedly, then fall back suddenly, fatally, into the cycle of slowness and are once again overcome by the lethargic virus of indolence. This is not because of a lack of determination or energy, but because a part of that energy remains caught in the earlier cycle, to which they are still faithful. Hence the serenity with which Brazilians take the failure of their projects or programmes. Nothing is destined to go straight to its target, no one can expect to take an operation through to its conclusion. The end, the remainder, the denouement have to be left to chance, to the devil, to fatality. To claim to control that part du feu, that accursed share, to take responsibility for it is strictly absurd and sacrilegious. It is the cycle which commands and the cycle is like the curvature of the earth. And the indolence, the casualness is merely the silent acceptance in people's heart of that enigmatic element which thwarts every project and ordains that everything be accorded its chance of not succeeding.
What is being destroyed more quickly than the ozone layer is the subtle layer of irony that protects us from the radiation of stupidity. But, conversely, we may also say that the subtle film of stupidity, which protects us from the lethal radiation of intelligence, is also disappearing. We are secreting information at such rate that it is polluting the higher layers of the mental atmosphere with its non-degradable waste, gradually destroying the kind of atmosphere girdle which protects us from our secrets being totally dispersed into artificial intelligence (the way molecules are prevented from totally disappearing into space).
- Jean Baudrillard (cut)
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