Imaginary fields

 04/07/2021

Perhaps hedonism post-modern slogan “to live fast and die young” makes sense for the majority of boomers, ozorians, psytrancers in general. Or these temporary autonomous zones are but imaginary fields build upon the ancient doctrines of hedonism allowing its participants to engage in post-modern religious movements, produced by the global technomad tribes.

For the first time in more than twenty years have been released on internet an historic and ethnographic approach about music genre psychedelic trance and its culture. Boom festival 20 years promotes the event going back to the first edition in 97 and how it have grown from there. It recognizes the history behind the psytrance movement in Portugal, its variations and the endogenous features of an alternative culture. Moreover it recognizes how an underground movement with origins in Goa, India, became mainstream and originated million euro industries to overcome the expectations of its participants. 

Turning Point Ozora documentary released at early August 2021 sets festival origins to Goa and how it started in Hungary. It is important to mention that national cultural properties are implicit at these two documentaries. Language is necessarily one of those differences, among others. 

In Turning Point two of the leading djs on the scene are interviewed and they explain pandemic impact on their job and on their life. Their super busy agendas have suddenly been suspended after festivals, parties and other event alike were cancelled. While they both agree how they got the time to spend with their kids, it is understandable through their testimonies how difficult and uncomfortable has been to be confined at home. Pandemic first and foremost showed humanity how important and necessary is to stop. To have a break from the wheel of life, to give away the rush in which we get involved at industrialized and capitalist nations.

As I watch turning point and listen to this guys I understand the follow paradox: they all proclaim festivals, the psytrance movement, as a big family, one love, a huge community, but that have failed at home as their super busy agendas put them away from their kids and their beloved ones. Given the opportunity how would they change the world if they don’t lead by example at home? If they get to spend most of their time away from their families in order to make money to buy them things they don't actually need and in doing so, they give up something money can’t buy: time. 

Certainly children need their parents love and if you think you can have them loved by buying them entertainment technologies, while you spend most of your time away, you live in a great illusion. Our timeline is uncertain and one never know when it comes to an end so it is important to make strong decisions. At a given moment one shall leave this planet and his story won’t ever be recorded. 

While I listen to the guest speakers at both documentaries I understand they all converge that these particular festivals operate as an escape, a break from every day life where people tend to be what they can’t be in ordinary world. After a week they return from the imaginary fields to the everyday world where they become what they are not but must follow. They put on their jobs and all its cargo (responsibilities; hierarchical systems; duties), their social status, their persona, their masks, only to live according their communities. We are not the clothes we wear; we are not the cars we drive; we are all the singing and dancing terrestrial creatures; we are reality makers. 

Although one may be recharged after an escape from ordinary world, one understands that this promised land is a spacetime dimension about to vanish and sooner than he would like, he needs to address himself into the everyday world. A world he claims: he doesn’t belong; he doesn’t identify with, a world he wants to escape.

Quite frankly, we are only having this conversation because psychedelics are the protagonist of the story, otherwise we would find it hard to decide whether we should spend a week at rural, in nature place or in a five star hotel exchanging promiscuous eye contact with our temporary hotel neighbors while we drink martinis by the pool as a sort of posh hedonism.