Words by Reece David Merrifield & Joshua Cialis; Pictures by Joshua Cialis and Clàudia Pinazo
Today, Joshua and I (Reece) have been discussing the ‘moment’, so we’d thought we’d share an extract from our conversation as a final piece before the moment our magazine comes out on Thursday…
R.D.M: Our social lives are a series of instantaneous time capsules designed to capture a moment where we know the moment is a good moment so we must detach ourselves from this moment and have our moment’s moment saved for tomorrow because the future is no longer measured in generations but in 24 hour timeframes and in between such moments our moments are enjoyed by other moments and we enjoy people enjoying these moments and when the flow of enjoyment spills its last drop we must turn on the tap once more and find ourselves being social once again by being socially unsociable to interconnect tomorrow’s summer with yesterday’s winter and find a constant medium between all extremes for if here we find ourselves with a moment to spare are we really in that moment at all?
J.C: To live in the moment, sometimes one must extract himself from the scene. This should not be an everyday exercise but maybe once a week we should cast off one of our senses and live purely with the other four. Obviously, the easiest sense to ‘switch off’ is our hearing, or rather we can make our ears concentrate on something else (music). This lack of hearing allows our sight, smell, taste, and touch to be heightened; allowing us to be more in the moment. Obviously, you lose those snippets of social conversation you’d normally hear from passers-by but everything else is elevated, the smell of the canal meandering past, the light of the sun passing idly through the branches of a tree, the way people walk rather than the way they sound. To truly be in the moment we must use all our senses together but sometimes to notice everything deeper we must remove ourselves from the picture and see the world as someone who does not understand it. Take away human contact and communications and see, smell and feel the world. Then once we have done that and noticed the less noticed senses, we must again fully immerse ourselves in the cacophony of sound and vision that the world offers us.
R.D.M: But if such and such is true, why must we not walk with a peg on our nose? Or continually chew the same flavour of gum? Maybe even keep our hands in touch with the one we’ve always loved? Or wear our darkest pair of sunglasses in the depth of a winter’s rage? Put this all together and listen to music, are we taken out of the picture completely or have we indeed made a new picture from all this nonsense? One does not need to dampen a sense to be removed from the picture and therefore see something new, for the listener will see more if he is aware of that around him and add to the overall picture in a three hundred and sixty degree sorta’ way.
J.C: Yet, for us to fully appreciate all our senses we should get rid of one some of the time – almost as if an experiment. Obviously, it would be interesting to see how our senses are heightened when getting rid of other senses, however, this is not particularly practical – or in some cases safe. One cannot walk around blindfolded without assistance of some kind which then adds another variable to the experiment of the senses. Again, chewing gum would affect the other senses, hearing yourself chew, smell as well as taste. It is therefore, far more practical – for now at least – to only experiment with a lack of sound; and not regularly. This may allow us sensical advances and allow us to better understand the world we live in when our hearing is given back to us by the pausing of music or the taking off our headphones.