Journals record the content that consciousness produces. These records are not plain and attempts at representation but rather they attempt to mount a web of discourse into view. A view available for examination and a view that is ready raw-material for history to weave its stories out of. These webs of discourse are like theatre, with figureheads who each seem to stand for a position and nuance of their own. From the world of simulation and modelling, journals are actually model simulations of a world with contrary opinions, hard-line politics and reputations built on them. Each journal tries to inherently be the friction and the noise that emanates when ideas with degrees of variation in their world-view have to acknowledge that they cannot be completed without the other. After movements orchestrated to differentiate and distinguish themselves they have to now make peace with other perspectives and agree to forge a landscape together.
Rather than become mastheads themselves journalists are lighthouse keepers who agree to abide by the inflammable friction that the journals contain. They agree to standby even with the risk of being engulfed by the fire that the friction could cause. And this is a real danger. As is the danger that the friction will subside and become just a rumble echoing from history. After a point, journals still have to remain what they claim to be. They cannot start short-tempered chases after social media brownie-points or financial market ambitions. They cannot suddenly desire to be stars in their own right, they have to commit themselves to being channels, like window-panes let the glass pass through. They cannot hope to become redundant specks of dust on the glass. Various rules apply to journalists. Besides the rules that relate to transparency and fidelity there are a bunch of rules that deal with fraudulent use of language. Journalists should be like lab-rats in the observatory of life. They should only relate authentic observations through media. Fabricated material ensures the death of the channel. On repeated violations of fraud they become nothing but stenographers. They become dependent on a voice that dictates something to them. They lose the capacity to write a single world on their own. They become like zombie-journalists, losing any individuality which they might have had.
Journals are maps of arguments, each journal is piece of fabric that holds the strands of a discussion together. But they are also stagings of fake dramaturgy. Stagings of the empty shells of superfluous construction of drama around empty ideas, not worthy even of consideration by the bored and idle otherwise. These are necessary too, of course, to populate the space of dullness, the off-white space that refuses attention and whispers, "go on searching, this is not where you stop." The moment when they whisper this, energies in the synthetic universe get balanced again and sighs of relief are heard all over, at least there is honesty in this space infested with namesake heroism.
Our journals are without much fanfare not interested in multiple voices, in the outside chance of discovering under published voices and becoming a platform for more bullshit than we know what to do with. We are not just self-obsessed, we genuinely find a satisfying kind of content in the mist of togetherness. Between Alishan and me, issues of journals only need to be transcribed from the radio of our misty heads. We do it one at a time and spread across months rather than days because we empathise with you and we want you to have adequate time for reflecting on each issue. We find calls for entries, invitations for content sent out into the vacuum of hope and unknown genius tiring and wasteful. If we already have an idea of what we want, why don't we do ourselves a favour and just deliver it to ourselves. Our journals are webs of postures that Alishan and me strike when we play amateur theatrics. And being such ardent fans of excellence in theatre we pour ourselves fully into our postures. We literally bend our psyches out of all their elasticity.
Rid of the imposed responsibility of having to discover other voices and promote the voices once discovered, we feel free and light. So light that we can dance around the few pages of our journal with a free-footed ease that betrays the betrays flavour in our heads. We know how to shape the many-sided polygons of the complex nature of concepts that humans consume and into spherical pellets that can be swallowed whole. These pellets are nutritious, low-fat and high in fibrous-content. They are fully digested and there is nothing left for you to shit out.
We present the biennial journal missed opportunities.
Opportunities are missed all the time. Every second in fact. The stockpile of everyone-in-the-world's missed opportunities is so deep that people dare to set foot in it only with a life buoy around their necks. So it can be easily understood why we are dedicating one issue of our journal to this stockpile. Also the stockpile does not have any contributions from us. Because this museum has not only not missed any opportunities, we have not even needed any opportunities. We don't mean to say that we are autonomous and entrepreneurial and that we create our own opportunities. We mean that the moment we were born, the tangent and pathway of our lifespan was charted for us and we knew clearly what was to happen for a very very long time. That allowed us to feel a calm, a soothing feeling of stability and security and this calm has never left us.
When we talk of missed opportunities we talk of the missed opportunities of other people. We look at the world and we compute the reasons for all the negligence, all the wastage, all the lack of vision. When we do that, we arrive at the missed opportunities.
The opportunities were missed for many reasons. Some of those reasons were really sad. The opportunities waited at the pre-decided time and place and waited to be grabbed by someone but nobody grabbed them. As they waited their body frame dried up, million of years passed and the opportunities became road blocks. Then at other times the opportunities were victims of hit-and-run accidents at the hands of rash drivers and they never rose after that fall, but most often the missed opportunities went home to spend the night with the wrong guy. They are deluded and loose that way, if someone shows them a little bit of tenderness and curiosity they surrender themselves in their arms. They do not for a moment think of the assignment at hand, the job they have to do.
So the issue of missed opportunities has its twists and turns, some are missed by the fuck-ups of the subject and some subjects are given a miss by the opportunities. Both are to be dealt with in this journal. When we were doing the research for this journal, we got numerous calls from the entities whose stories are chronicled here. They wanted us to paint a generous picture of them, they requested us to gloss over the details of how exactly they missed the said opportunities. We listened patiently and had a lot of private back and forth between us and we decided that we will stick to our stand. Of the people who called their were numerous presidents and prime ministers of countries from across the world, there were CEOs of big multi-national corporations; but we just played dumb. We refused to acknowledge the power that they represented and talked down to them.
So, ladies and gentlemen we are happy to present to you the first ever issue of the museum's quarterly journal. Please enjoy if you are so inclined else just spin yourself in circles and enjoy the view.
