The Final Text

A quote by the legendary footballer Johan Cruijff, who was incidentally also the greatest Dutch philosopher who ever lived. It reads: “Alone, you can’t do anything. You have to do it together.”

On Finding A Voice

This is my final text for Thought Magicians. Lex and I have decided that after three years of writing, thinking and creating together, the project has run its course – at least for now. It still feels a bit strange that everything we have written, everything we have done, will be gone in a few weeks. But it does not make me sad, because we are not ending things with a heavy heart. When Lex and I were discussing the project’s future (and its inevitable demise), he said something that I instantly felt was true: we can end the project because it has done what we hoped it would do. We have created a long-lasting, independent writing practice for ourselves without gatekeepers, without external forces or constraints that would tell us what, and how, to write. We have built something from nothing, publishing our own texts alongside a wide variety of strange and interesting pieces by authors from all over the world. We’ve experimented, failed, and started over. And even though the project may be done, I hope (and sincerely believe) that our friendship, our joint efforts to philosophize together, will go on. We stop, but only to continue.

In this final text, I want to share some thoughts on what this project has meant to me over the past three years, both as a writer and as a person. Don’t be afraid: I won’t talk about ‘what a journey it’s been’ or how this project has ‘exceeded my wildest dreams’. I won’t bore you with that. Rather, I will talk about the way in which writing and publishing my ideas has helped me to find some sort of voice, a voice that is both personal and impersonal, and why I think that is a meaningful and powerful thing.

When I look at all the texts I’ve written for this website, there are many different topics, ideas and points of reference that I have touched on. My texts are a bit all over the place, ranging from madness and alcoholism to hiphop and metaphysics. But that messiness is also the point, I think. I have not written them with some external goal in mind, an overarching narrative, something they should ‘do’ in the world (like change people’s minds or activate them). I haven’t even written them to be especially good. Some have been good, but others have been a bit sloppy, unfocused or strange. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s not their content that is dearest to me. Rather, it’s what they collectively articulate. They are my personal attempts to aestheticize life, to give it meaning through creativity. Together, they speak as a voice. A voice that feels like it has, over the course of three years, become more and more my own.

The reason why I think this is valuable, is because when we speak, write or think, we inevitably use other people’s words and ideas. We think in a language that is not our own, a foreign and collective symbolic order. When we passively use that language, we tend to speak the same as everyone else and thereby think the same as everyone else. But we’re not doomed to do so. Through writing and creating in a free and experimental way, it becomes possible to peel back some of these layers of collectivity, to find a language which becomes homely, a place to be. This creates a niche, a place that I can loosely call ‘mine’, which I can access when I write and think. The crucial thing to note, however, is that this place, this voice, is not ‘mine’ in the literal sense of that word: it does not come from ‘within’ me, it does not reflect ‘me’. None of this has anything to do with identity. Rather, it has to do with the way in which I can create a place in and through that which is foreign to me, a collective wall of language and thought that I can slowly and partially make my own. Since I am thrown into a world that I have not chosen and that I cannot control, I am also thrown into language. But through writing, I can turn this thrown-ness, the anonymity of history through which I tend to think and speak, into something that is an intimate alien, a form of personal impersonality. That is why I speak of finding a voice, rather than finding my voice. I write in a voice that resonates with me, but that does not belong to me, does not originate in me. This is the beauty of writing.

But the impact of finding this voice transcends the merely linguistic realm. What startles me most about these past three years is the way in which cultivating the habit of writing has changed the way in which I relate to my own thoughts and to the world itself. When we started Thought Magicians, I felt a slumbering fear that one day, I would run out of ideas. I was afraid that there would come a point in time in which I simply had nothing more to say, feverishly combing through my notebooks to try and find something new to write about. The strange thing is that the exact opposite has happened: the more I write, the more I find possible things to write about. This might be the hidden value of developing a long-lasting writing practice like Lex and I intended, something that I was not aware of before the project started, but that is now very clear to me. By developing writing not as a duty (for university or for work) but as a habit, the world becomes a place in-habited by my ability to think. This is to say that all these fleeting thoughts, these short moment of inspiration and wonder that I feel throughout the day, now became possibilities for a new text. I can hold onto to them, stay with them, give them consistency. Cultivating a habit of writing can create a sort of positive feedback-loop in which writing begets more writing, demanding more parts of the world to be explored through thought.

This mode of receiving the given through writing is what I call ‘creative receptivity’, which is not about what one sees, but how one sees. I think all writers are also seers, but in a very particular way: they invite their perceptions into the realm of the imagination, rather than the realm of information. Through this mode of receiving, anything can become a text, a connection, or an idea. The banal can become the remarkable, depending on how one sees. This is also something Lex has taught me: that one can write by simply looking at the world, carefully and attentively, and turning that which is given into that which is not-yet-given. That is why the ideas haven’t dried up yet: they do not arise out of ‘my’ mind, but out of the way in which I encounter the world, a world that always has more to give, more spaces to explore, more things to look at. Writing is infinite because the world is, in a way, infinite.

There is an existential, perhaps even ethical, dimension to this as well. As dedicated readers of Thought Magicians may know, many of my texts discuss the bleakness of reality, the problems of late modernity in which we find ourselves. But by virtue of their existence, these texts already point towards a  hopeful and affirmative way of dealing with our problematic state of affairs. They are the ways in which I grapple with life in today’s world. All these writings show me that aesthetics, style and creativity can make life meaningful because they create meaning, at least for me. It is like Prince once said about his music, that it was “a success upon creation.” We must be careful here, for we can read this quote in a relativistic way which is overly celebratory of anything that can be labelled creative. As we all know, creative things can be of immensely poor quality. But we can read the quote in a different way, in which it does not mean that anything that is created (a song, a book, a text) is automatically ‘good’ by virtue of its existence, but rather that the way of life which helped bring it into existence is good. It is the mode of creative receptivity underlying the created that matters the most. This is also how I relate to my own writing, where the purpose of a text is not some exterior goal, but rather the fact that it expresses a way of being-in-the-world, a way of dealing with that which transcends me. Therefore, writing is also a way to remain hopeful. Not hopeful that ‘better times will come’ or that the world will somehow be a better place because of my texts, but rather hopeful in the sense that regardless of the way in which the world is shaped, regardless of how dire things look, I can always create. I can always write. I can always think. As long as I can still do these things, I will not lose hope.

But enough about me. All of this self-reflection is a bit misleading and grotesque, because it obfuscates the central point, the most important lesson that I’ve learned in these three years. And that lesson comes down to Johan Cruijff’s dictum seen in the picture above this text: alone, you can’t do anything: you have to do it together. This is to say that when an idea comes to you, a desire to create or build something, it is not only important to listen to that idea, but also to realize that you’ll probably need help along the way. Our society tends to idolize individuals for the things that they have created on their own, letting their remarkable, unique genius blossom in isolation. But that admiration for the individual is thoroughly mistaken. As far as this project is concerned, I am convinced that not a single text would have been written without other people’s help. Some helpers have been philosophers, writers and artists who have passed a long time ago, others have been friends that I am very close with. I have only been able to find ‘a’ voice because others have allowed, helped, and stimulated me to do so. I speak with, through, and alongside them. And above all people, that has been Lex, one of my best friends whose creative, caring, driven and funny way of looking at the world made all of this possible. His way of seeing and creating is something I continue to marvel at, even after years of friendship. Thought Magicians was never about me, or even about him (sorry Lex): it was about us, working and writing together as a collective, speaking in a third voice that we have found over the course of the past three years. Above all things, this project is therefore a project about friendship, about the joys of creating together with others and finding new ways of connecting, learning, seeing and writing. Saying goodbye to Thought Magicians means saying goodbye to the platform, but not to friendship and its endless possibilities. And it also means saying thanks. So thank you, Lex, and thank you to all those lovely people who have written texts for the website, sent in their ideas, or read, commented and shared our texts. It has been a great pleasure. On many more things to come.