The world is a very confusing place.
I'm not just talking about disorder, that's not really the problem: you can tidy up a cluttered room.
If you walk into a room and see a t-shirt thrown over a chair, you can predict with almost absolute certainty that the right thing to do is to pick up the t-shirt, fold it or hang it on a hanger and let it join its companions in the wardrobe.
But pretend that you have just lifted the shirt from the back of your chair and you find yourself thinking that this piece of fabric looks more like a curtain than a t-shirt. And if you look at the chair, it looks more like a coat rack than a chair; and so you might think that the t-shirt would have a right to be there — if only it were a t-shirt — also because, in all this, there is no trace of either the wardrobe or the curtain board in the room, which makes it in any case superfluous to decide whether that cloth is a curtain or a shirt.
At which point, ladies and gentlemen, you would question the very aspect of being in a room, because that space could very well be an office or a studio and, after all, what are you doing there?
This is what I mean: It's not disorder, it’s confusion.
To make it scientifically meaningful they sometimes call it ‘entropy’. But for me it remains confusion. And it does its job perfectly: it confuses me very well. I don't know why things are not as they seem. Above all, it is not clear to me whether it is me not understanding them, or they who are changing the whole time. Either way, I will never understand why when we find a curtain in our hands we often continue to behave as if it were a t-shirt.
The fact that we were wrong just doesn't sit well with us. We have a need for coherence that sometimes trespasses on the ridiculous and makes us behave in an absurd way. The fact that one can walk around with a curtain instead of a t-shirt may seem at least as improbable as the idea of hanging t-shirts in windows, but I find the world full of equally incomprehensible situations.
Some say that all it takes is to make decisions, that our way of thinking changes the reality around us: “Think of the t-shirt and the fabric will be a t-shirt” put in simple and perhaps simplistic terms. All I'm saying is, even if this were true, 9 billion people are far too many to agree on something that will make everyone happy.
So maybe this is what happens: we are tossed around between transformations of reality created by other people's desires. Maybe that's why we wake up one day and start to like courgettes, which we have always hated. Or to dislike our partner, whom we have always loved.
Things change, they say. But this does not answer everything. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is what we tell ourselves to avoid answering for something. I'm sick of knowing who likes or dislikes courgettes, I’d just like to know whether courgettes are good or bad.
But, I’m afraid, this is just the wrong question.