اجرایی در شهر به نفع فراموشی از جنس ابزورد دست دومA Performance in the City in the Service of Forgetting: A Second-Hand Absurdity

A Performance in the City in the Service of Forgetting: A Second-Hand Absurdity

At first glance, many Iranians may be renowned for possessing a rich and long-standing culture. Yet this is largely a matter of historical legacy, and in most cases, this rich culture cannot simply be extended to the contemporary world of Iranians today. What determines the cultural structure of a nation is the necessity of rewriting that culture so that it can be reproduced in the present moment and carried into the future. But can we observe such a process under the current conditions in Iran?

As Iranians, we probably all agree that the culture of our land is the product of all kinds of internal and external interventions. What makes it necessary to seek out the meaning of culture within a land is the culture of moving beyond what we call a historical event. By a historical event, I mean an event of such magnitude that, in passing through it, Iranians remember who they have been, what they have become, and how they might set that experience in motion along the path ahead. For us, remembering this means discovering the face of a land that, for a long time—particularly over the past several centuries—has not known peace in the sense of living with awareness.

This is the gateway through which culture enters: a culture capable of questioning all established and historical criteria. From this perspective, the central challenge is determining where we currently stand within this history. Has Iranian life undergone an uneven transformation, or does it remain caught in paradoxes that prevent Iranians from finding themselves?

Performance in the City as Driving Under the Law of the Jungle

I now want to discuss why performance in the city, understood as driving under the law of the jungle, can push the cultural condition of Iranians from the position of the past to a point even more primitive than the past itself. Instead of driving being defined as a routine part of life that makes existence more comfortable, Iranians seem compelled to adapt to the street’s new rules simply in order to survive.

Anyone who has driven a motorcycle, car, or bicycle through the streets of Tehran, even once, will realize that there is no law governing them. Everyone drives however they please. This situation has become even worse, particularly following the war between Iran and the United States. In practice, there appears to be no law to enforce—or perhaps there is simply no will to enforce it.

Based on my personal experience of commuting through the city by motorcycle, I have come to understand that surviving on the streets requires directing all one’s attention toward the possibility that, at any moment, someone coming from any of the four directions might collide with you, or you with them. There is no law, and culture is of no help in this regard.

Everyone drives however they think best in order to reach their destination as quickly as possible. The question, however, is how this performance of driving through the city serves collective forgetting. Instead of the city and its inhabitants directing their ingenuity toward the broader possibilities of life, they have no choice but to expend that ingenuity on the streets in the service of survival.

This performance is by no means comparable to the action genre. Rather, it is an image of Beckettian absurdity in second-hand form, something that can be understood as a part of involuntary survival in the service of forgetting. We forget who we are and what we ought to be doing.

While someone somewhere in the world may be developing a flying car, Iranians, confined by their position in the Middle East, are expending that same ingenuity on getting from one place to another through the streets. They remain entirely unaware of this Sisyphean performance because they repeat it so often that they eventually accept it as the law itself.

For example, if I drive against the flow of traffic because I am short on time, other drivers who are traveling in the correct direction are expected to see me and allow me to pass safely. Legally, this is a violation. Yet the street has taught people to resolve the situation according to customary and moral expectations.

It is morality and a sense of guilt that keep this audacity alive on the streets. Consequently, the situation cannot simply be judged as either right or wrong. The unwritten rules of the city’s streets make this performance seem necessary. We must therefore ask how such a performance can bring forgetting to the foreground in a city of tens of millions.

A False Asceticism Within the Realm of Performance

Everything is ordinary and bitter. In this performance, conscience acts as the driving force behind an urban performance drama. The performers reproduce these behaviors and situations through the process of arriving at a role described in Stanislavski’s theory, without ever having heard his name.

They repeat a behavior so often that they can no longer imagine an identity for themselves without it. This is the beginning of a story that repeats itself every day. Its motivation is reaching a destination, but that destination may demand money, a home, or any number of other things.

When we look at the heart of the matter, we encounter a kind of false asceticism through which the city and its inhabitants manage to survive. They struggle for something whose only meaning lies in the necessity of staying alive.

When this struggle takes place, its performers do not intend to act out the situation in which they find themselves. Instead, they enact it almost instinctively. Here, instinct means the mind’s capacity to flourish in response to attacks from other drivers in a lawless city.

The mind becomes so developed through repetition that it has no energy left to pursue another performance. What do I know? Perhaps it might otherwise become an inventor, or someone capable of selling their own contribution to the world somewhere else and leaving a faint trace in its memory.

Consider Elon Musk’s performance. It seems impossible for him to go very long without doing something with Tesla, equipping it with the latest technology. It is as though the future of technology will appear on people’s faces through Musk’s mask.

Musk wears a mask that allows him to lead global technology without having to think constantly about survival. In Iranian streets, however, that same mask appears in a different, distorted form.

A Street Performance in the Service of Forgetting

At first glance, many Iranians may be renowned for possessing a rich and long-standing culture. Yet this has more to do with historical time than with the present, and in most cases, that rich culture cannot simply be extended to the contemporary lives of Iranians today. What determines a nation’s cultural structure is the necessity of rewriting its culture so that it can be reproduced in the present and the future. But can this be observed under Iran’s current conditions?

As Iranians, we probably all agree that the culture of our land is the product of internal and external interventions. What makes it necessary to seek out the meaning of culture within a land is the process of moving beyond what we call a historical event. By this, I mean that, in passing through a major event, Iranians remember who they have been, what they have become, and how they might direct that experience toward further development.

Remembering this means discovering the face of a land that, for a long time, particularly over the past several centuries, has not known peace in the sense of living consciously. This is our gateway into culture: a culture capable of questioning all established historical criteria.

From this perspective, the central challenge is determining where we currently stand within this history. Has Iranian life undergone a transformation, or does it remain caught in paradoxes that prevent people from finding themselves?

The Image of a Second-Hand Absurdity

I now want to discuss why performance in the city, understood as driving according to the law of the jungle, can push the cultural condition of Iranians from the position of the past to something even more primitive than the past itself.

Instead of driving being defined as an ordinary part of life that makes existence easier, Iranians seem compelled to adapt to the new rules of a hostile street simply to stay alive.

Anyone who has traveled through Tehran’s streets by motorcycle, car, or bicycle will realize that there is no law governing them. Everyone behaves however they please. This situation has intensified, particularly following the war between Iran and the United States. In practice, there is no effective law governing this behavior. Even before that, however, such laws scarcely existed, except when those responsible for enforcement urgently needed the revenue generated by enforcing them.

Based on my personal experience of commuting through the city by motorcycle, I have realized that surviving on the streets requires devoting all one’s attention to the possibility that, at any moment, someone—or I myself—might collide with someone else coming from any direction.

The reason is clear: either there is no law in this regard, or there is no firm will to enforce it. Culture, too, shows little inclination to intervene. Culture resembles a bear sleeping in hibernation in the middle of the street. It does not even bother to come out and watch. And if such a bear really existed, it would never survive. Or perhaps, as I see it, the bear would have no desire to exist within such a system in the first place.

Meanwhile, everyone turns the steering wheel toward the farthest reaches of the street, governed by acceleration, honking, and shouting from both mouths and exhaust pipes, all in pursuit of reaching a destination faster.

But the question is this: how does driving in the city serve forgetting? Does it stand in opposition to collective intelligence? Instead of the city and its inhabitants putting their ingenuity to work beyond the simplest routines of everyday life, are they left with no choice but to expend it on the streets in the service of survival?

This performance is by no means comparable to the action genre. Rather, it is the image of a second-hand absurdity, which can be understood as a form of involuntary survival in the service of forgetting.

We forget what we are and what we ought to be doing. I do not mean undertaking some Herculean or backbreaking task. I mean that we forget why we should consume our own stupidity in this way, on streets stripped of everything.

If someone somewhere in the world is developing a flying car, or if AI is devoting all its efforts to learning human patterns in order to surpass human discovery, Iranians—confined to a cultural hierarchy of conflict associated with the name and memory of a dead entity called the Middle East—are expending that same ingenuity on getting around the streets.

They remain unaware of this strategically organized performance because they repeat it so often that they have accepted lawlessness as the law itself, under the broad shadow of morality and custom.

A One-Way Road Is a Two-Way Road

If I travel against the flow of traffic because I am short on time, the other drivers traveling in the correct direction must, whether they want to or not, notice me and allow me to pass through a route into which I have no right to enter.

They must let me through, even though they have no right to grant such permission. The issue is not whether they choose to allow me to pass. Rather, in addition to watching out for other vehicles traveling correctly along the street, they must also watch out for vehicles traveling in the opposite direction.

This is how someone comes to think: Why should someone violate the road when I am traveling correctly along it? In other words, I am simultaneously forced to think of this one-way road as a two-way road.

Traveling along such a road therefore requires an exceptionally high level of concentration. Anyone moving along it, even while doing everything correctly, must expend twice as much concentration, or more.

This performance leaves people without the energy or capacity to think about even the simplest things. Here, the end of the performance becomes the end of everything: a conclusion in which concentration can be used in only one way—by being spent on the street again.

The pattern does not allow concentration to settle anywhere else. This is an entirely instinctive process, and there is seemingly nothing one can do about it.

From a legal perspective, this behavior is a violation. Yet the street has taught people to resolve the situation through custom and morality. Morality and guilt have legitimized this betrayal on the street.

Consequently, the situation cannot easily be classified as either right or wrong, because the city’s unwritten street rules make this performance seem compulsory.

To understand how this performance foregrounds forgetting in a city of tens of millions, we must return to the performance itself—to what happens every day but, through excessive repetition, has become so familiar that it is no longer noticed and has lost its weight.

Everything Unusual Is Ordinary

Everything is ordinary, but under the bitter shadow of the street. In this performance, conscience serves as the driving force behind a Shakespearean drama enacted in an urban performance.

The performers reproduce these behaviors and situations in accordance with Stanislavski’s theory of arriving at a role. They repeat a behavior until they inhabit their performing role. This is the beginning of a story that repeats itself every day.

The motivation is reaching a destination, but that destination may be governed by money, a home, sex, or anything else.

When we examine the heart of the matter, we encounter a form of false asceticism through which the city and its inhabitants manage to survive. They struggle for something whose repetition is motivated solely by the necessity of staying alive.

When this struggle unfolds under the shadow of such a performance, its participants do not intend to act out the situation in which they find themselves. Instead, they bring the performance to its conclusion through sheer instinct.

Here, instinct means the mind’s flourishing in response to attacks by other drivers in a lawless city. Through repetition, the mind develops to such an extent that it has no energy left to initiate something else.

What do I know? Perhaps someone might otherwise become an inventor, or become someone who can sell their own contribution to the world somewhere else. Instead, only shadows remain, spreading across the asphalt until the next day.

Consider Elon Musk’s performance. It seems impossible for him to go very long without doing something with Tesla, equipping it with the latest technology. It is as though the future of technology emerges through the mask Musk wears.

This is the mask worn by Elon Musk and many of the world’s technological pioneers: a mask they can wear without having to devote all their attention to staying alive.

They are not required to imagine that getting around on the street might consume their energy. For them, moving through the streets is little more than recreation. By modifying their cars and equipping them with the latest technology, they display a combination of self-presentation and amusement in their encounters with other vehicles.

The street becomes a grand show, a catwalk on which they parade in their cars. This catwalk offers both visual pleasure and ease. Survival is therefore never the defining concern.

In Iran, and particularly in Tehran—the apple at the heart of the country—the situation is entirely reversed. Traffic and the excessive number of vehicles leave no room for drivers to walk the catwalk. Ease gives way to frustration.

We are therefore confronted with an intensely tedious, exhausting, and frustrating performance from which everyone seeks escape, with no apparent option other than breaking the very rules that govern it.

Here or Nowhere Else

Here we encounter an obvious contradiction. On the one hand, contemporary humanity seeks to build the future. On the other, Iranian humanity is caught reproducing a situation that distances it from the future.

The issue is not simply why someone drives against the flow of traffic or why a driver continues without respecting another person’s right of way. The issue is how an exceptional condition becomes a permanent state of crisis—how what was supposed to be a violation becomes part of the rules of everyday life.

Under such conditions, no one asks why this is happening or why all their concentration must be consumed by this performance. Instead, everyone asks how they can survive it.

Concentration consequently becomes a privilege that, if not spent here, may never have the opportunity to be spent elsewhere. Either here or nowhere else.

It is as simple as that: concentration is put to work in a place where it should not have to be used. Yet this very impossibility becomes a necessity, tied to survival and staying alive.

Tragic absurdism is an interesting term for such an event. One can mourn it eternally while simultaneously overlooking it as part of everyday life. The performance overlooks us, too. We are both attached to one another by an umbilical cord of survival and continuation.

Eventually, it becomes impossible to tell how much time is being stolen so effortlessly by this performance. The thieves are not the performers themselves but an obscure mechanism called traffic.

The performers are Dostoevsky’s foolish characters. Traffic, meanwhile, becomes a lover for whom the lover is willing to die. Read that sentence several times if you want to grasp the depth of this performance.

The street, in this context, appears to have moved away from its original function. It was supposed to be a space for movement, a place where different people could travel according to a shared set of rules.

Now, however, it has become a stage on which everyone must continually reinvent the rules in real time.

What I mean is that passing through one crisis merely means preparing for the next. If I manage not to die on this street, I will probably have to try to survive on the next one as well.

Concentration is plundered along the way. Every driver must decide within a fraction of a second how another person will react in this performance: from which side of the street they will enter, whether they will stop, whether they will signal, whether they remember their previous role, whether they see the traffic light, whether they respect another person’s right of way, or whether they seize the road through sheer stupidity and proudly die on it.

Who is directing this performance? It does not matter.

In such a situation, the mind is no longer an instrument for creating something new. It becomes a tool for anticipating danger.

This is precisely where the performance can be connected to forgetting. Forgetting here does not mean losing historical memory or being unable to recall the past. It means forgetting that another way of living within this performance is possible.

We forget that we could move differently, reach our destinations without fearing a collision with someone else, and become part of a shared order without having to fight at every moment to preserve our position in the performance.

Forgetting occurs when a temporary, exceptional situation is repeated so often that imagining a different condition becomes almost impossible.

In this sense, the performance operates in the service of forgetting. Gradually, it empties our collective memory of the possibility of order.

We do not merely forget the law; we even forget why we needed the law in the first place.

Over time, this performance discovers its own law—a law that redirects concentration away from important matters and toward survival on the street.

The law no longer makes life predictable for everyone. Instead, it becomes an obstacle to be overcome on the way to one’s destination.

Reaching the destination becomes the only thing life demands of the performers on the street.

From this perspective, a violation is no longer simply a breach of the law. It becomes a form of adaptation to a situation in which obeying the law may expose a person to danger.

A driver who wants to obey the law may sometimes have to trust their own constant vigilance rather than trust in order.

They must always be ready to compensate for someone else’s mistake, a mistake that can recur at any moment. The compensation no longer resembles compensation at all; it has become an unwritten moral and customary obligation, even when the performer is not at fault.

A Thousand Reasons on the Street

In this process, morality also takes on a different form. It no longer necessarily means respecting another person. Sometimes it means tolerating that person’s mistakes.

A driver traveling against the direction of traffic expects others to make room to prevent a collision. At that very moment, the driver may even justify the behavior as a moral necessity.

They are in a hurry. They have somewhere to be. Someone is ill. Perhaps, after years, they are finally about to have sex. Perhaps they need to find the money for their loan payment at the beginning of the month. There are a thousand reasons.

But can such a necessity deprive someone else of their rights? And if everyone in the city has such a necessity, what remains of shared life within this street performance? Does home even retain any meaning under such conditions?

These questions become more complicated when we realize that many people in these situations do not necessarily consider themselves responsible for what they do.

They may know that their behavior violates the law while simultaneously feeling that, under the existing circumstances, they have no alternative.

The performance demands that they play their roles in this way; otherwise, they will be eliminated. To avoid elimination, they must spend all their concentration on the performance—even if they can no longer use that concentration elsewhere.

In this way, conscience becomes an instrument for justifying wrongdoing rather than preventing it.

The individual knows inwardly that they should not behave this way within the performance, yet the demands of the performance allow them to act against that awareness.

As a result, conscience neither disappears nor remains fully active. Instead, it enters a suspended state in which a person simultaneously knows and does not know, simultaneously feels responsible and evades responsibility.

These contradictions shape the way the performance unfolds on the city’s streets.

This moral suspension is what gives the performance its dramatic character.

In conventional drama, characters encounter a problem that requires them to resolve it, make a decision, or confront the consequences of a choice.

Here, however, the problem is never resolved through a choice or decision. The same situation repeats itself every day. Every day, someone is in a hurry. Every day, a driver blocks someone else’s way. Every day, someone must make a new decision to prevent a collision.

There is no ending. Destinations change, people change, and vehicles change, but the structure of the performance remains intact.

Sisyphus, Iran, and the Street

The street becomes an absurd stage on which performers repeat their roles every day, proudly and without knowing what they are performing.

They have no defined dialogue, there is no director, and no one accepts responsibility for bringing the performance to an end.

Nevertheless, everything follows a hidden order. According to this order, everyone must adapt to everyone else’s disorder.

This is the contradiction that keeps the performance alive. Disorder exists on the surface, but beneath it, an unwritten form of order emerges—one whose survival depends on the repetition of the very behaviors it was supposed to prevent.

Here, we can return to the concept of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned to push a stone up a mountain, only to watch it fall back down each time.

On the city’s streets, the driver also tries to reach a destination every day, but arriving does not mean the end. A group of performers must be sent back along the same route, and another group must be brought to the same point. The following day, the performance begins again.

What motivates the driver? Money and, ultimately, sex.

Once again, they must pass through danger, anticipate other people’s behavior, and employ all their mental energy to stay alive.

The difference is that Sisyphus is at least aware of his condition, whereas the performers in this urban performance may no longer recognize the endless repetition of their own roles.

Sisyphus pushes the stone, but he has forgotten why he is doing so and whether another way of moving is even possible.

Under such conditions, forgetting does not become a conscious choice. It becomes the natural consequence of repetition.

To continue living under difficult conditions, people develop habits. At first, these habits may be temporary solutions for navigating dangerous situations. Gradually, however, they become part of the individual’s personality.

A person no longer simply drives in the absence of clear laws on the street. They gradually begin to understand the world according to the same logic: move faster, get ahead of others, and occupy someone else’s place before they take yours.

The street thus extends beyond physical space and becomes a model for understanding social relationships.

Perhaps this is the central issue: the performance does not occur only on the street.

The street is the most visible expression of a condition that may be reproduced in other areas of life as well.

When a person learns that reaching a destination requires circumventing the rules, we must ask whether the same logic is reproduced in the workplace, in social relationships, in the economy, and even in the way people confront the future.

Might we become performers in different areas of life, compelled to repeat the very behaviors that ultimately destroy the possibility of building a better life, simply to preserve our positions?

Of course, the existence of this performance does not justify concluding that Iranians lack culture or that all their behavior can be attributed to a national characteristic.

The question is precisely the opposite: under what conditions can culture emerge in performance? At what point does the structure of everyday life push it to the margins?

If a person needs mutual trust to obey the rules of the street but encounters situations every day that deprive them of that trust, how can we expect them to continue behaving in the same way without any support?

The issue is not necessarily individual morality. It is the set of conditions that makes morality difficult and sometimes costly to practice.

For this reason, returning to culture cannot mean glorifying the past.

A long history, valuable works of art, or memories of great civilizations do not, in themselves, guarantee that a society can perform its role in everyday life according to those same values.

Culture is alive when it can be reproduced through everyday behavior: at an intersection, in the moment of deciding whether to proceed or stop, in respecting another person’s rights, and in accepting shared limitations.

When this possibility disappears, culture becomes an empty, boastful memory—something about which endless speeches can be made but whose presence in everyday life cannot necessarily be observed.

Perhaps, therefore, instead of asking why Iranian culture has such a glorious history, we should ask why that culture sometimes fails to become shared behavior in everyday situations.

What has happened that individual intelligence, instead of being used to create new possibilities, is consumed by navigating recurring dangers?

What is it about the structure of our lives that prevents people from thinking about the future and forces them to spend all their energy managing the immediate demands of the performance?

Here, we can return once again to Elon Musk—not to turn him into a flawless model of future-making, but to recognize the difference between two ways of using intelligence.

One kind of intelligence imagines a new possibility and begins building toward its realization. The other, confronted with constantly recurring conditions, searches for a way through them.

The first seeks to change the conditions. The second must adapt itself to conditions that seem unchangeable.

Of course, these two forms of intelligence do not necessarily belong to two different people. Both may exist within the same individual.

The question is which social structure gives one of them greater room to operate: the kind that connects one boast to the beginning of the next, or the kind that uses boasting to bring the very rules of boasting to an end.

Imagination Dies

When a large part of a person’s mental capacity is spent anticipating the dangerous behavior of others, less opportunity remains for imagination, creation, and experience within the performance assigned to them.

This does not mean that the individual can no longer be creative. It means that their creativity is being expended along a path that has little of genuine value to offer.

They may become extraordinarily skilled at driving, calculating several possibilities in a fraction of a second, and escaping situations that might seem impossible to others.

But what does this skill ultimately produce? Does it merely enable the continuation of the same condition, or can it lead to a transformation of the performance itself?

This is the point at which urban performance becomes an issue extending far beyond driving.

We are confronted with a performance in which human abilities develop in a deeply contradictory way. The mind becomes creative in order to survive, yet this very creativity may limit the possibility of escaping the conditions of survival.

Every day, the individual becomes better at moving through disorder, but this learning does not necessarily help them create a new order.

They become more proficient at performing a role defined merely by movement from one place to another, without necessarily being able to leave that role behind.

From this perspective, the title A Performance in the City in the Service of Forgetting points to a dual condition.

On the one hand, the city is a site of collective memory, where rules, habits, and ways of living together take shape.

On the other hand, the same city can become a space in which everyday repetition destroys the possibility of remembering.

Every day, we enter the streets, repeat similar behaviors, and return home without asking what this repetition has taken from us.

It is as though, instead of keeping our memory alive, the city has become a machine for forgetting.

But can we escape this performance? Can a performer suddenly distance themselves from their role and recognize that what they have considered natural is merely the result of repeating a particular historical and social condition?

Perhaps the first possibility for change lies not in discovering a definitive solution, but in seeing the performance itself.

It seems that even Brecht, when he developed the concept of distancing, could not have imagined that one day, somewhere, people might be unwilling to distance themselves from their roles because doing so would result in nothing less than death.

As long as our behaviors appear natural and self-evident, the possibility of questioning them remains limited.

But when we recognize that we are reproducing the same situation every day, we may be able to step away from our roles for a moment and ask whether we should continue performing them.

This distancing does not mean denying the necessities of life.

We cannot expect someone who must travel through the city to reach work, pay living expenses, or care for their family to transform the entire existing structure on their own.

The question is whether we can discover another way of understanding shared life through these very everyday experiences.

Can we remember that another person, before becoming an obstacle to our destination, is a human being who also wants to reach theirs?

Can we transform the street once again into a space where one person’s arrival does not require putting another person’s life at risk?

Let Us Save Intelligence, Morality, and Creativity

These questions may seem simple, but they concern one of the most fundamental issues of culture: how can we move from individual life toward shared life without erasing human individuality?

In this sense, culture is not a collection of historical symbols or glorious memories. It is the capacity to establish rules that make living alongside one another possible.

These rules become meaningful when people can trust in their existence and know that following them does not place them in a weaker position.

Ultimately, what we witness on the streets of Iran’s capital may not be merely a crisis of driving, but a crisis in our conception of shared life.

The performance that repeats itself every day shows us how a human being can mobilize every mental capacity for survival while simultaneously forgetting the possibility of living differently—of being something other than the self demanded by that performance.

The person survives, reaches the destination, and returns to the street the next day.

Yet something is lost along the way, something that cannot easily be measured: the possibility of using intelligence, morality, and creativity for purposes that extend beyond survival.

Perhaps the bitterest part of this performance is that no one intends to become a performer in it.

No one wakes up in the morning intending to play the role of a person struggling to survive in a lawless city.

Everyone simply wants to reach their destination.

Yet this is precisely where the performance begins: in the distance between what we intend to do and what our circumstances compel us to do.

We do not intend to perform a show, but we perform it every day.

We do not intend to forget, but every day we consign something else to oblivion.

Ultimately, when a society becomes so consumed by staying alive that it loses the opportunity to reflect on how it lives, what remains of its culture?

Can we continue speaking of civilization, history, and ingenuity when so much of that ingenuity must be spent anticipating the next collision?

Is it possible that we have fallen behind the future not because we lack talent, but because our talents are consumed by an endless cycle of survival?

Perhaps the street is precisely where this question must be raised anew.

Not because every problem in society can be reduced to the street, but because the street displays the outcome of shared life every day, before everyone’s eyes.

Here, forgetting is no longer something that happened in the past. It is a performance that continues in the present moment.

A performance without a final curtain, without an audience’s applause, and without any guarantee that it will ever come to an end.

We keep moving, we keep reaching our destinations, and tomorrow we return to the streets, more magnificently than the day before.

Perhaps the only difference is that if one day we manage to see this repetition, if we can distance ourselves from our roles for a moment, we may no longer have to spend all our intelligence and ingenuity on keeping it going.

Perhaps that day we will remember that life is not meant to be consumed by the mere act of staying alive.

Sooner or later, save yourself from this unfinished grandeur of forgetting on the city’s streets, before death comes to claim you.