Recyclers

Though it is now more obvious than a few years ago, I (along with seemingly most of my generational peers) have spent my youth so far in a limbo, an ideological limbo in which any movement, any attempt at creation and at stuffing meaning into the more or less tactile carcasses of dress, of expression, of speech, of the use we make of our senses, seems doomed from the start to go up in smoke, as there is nothing it can adhere to, nothing it can rub against, and we twirl through the motions of spirit one failed, meaningless, utterly self-referential act after another, so postmodern it has become aware of nothing but itself, thinking that from its patch-worked bowels it can extract something, anything, of value if it only digs, squeezes, pulverises enough. But really, there is nothing, because there was nothing to begin with. We've exhausted the limited (but seemingly endless) heap of countercurrents and acts of rebellion, as well as the currents we chose to be rebellious against, so far even that we started assimilating parts of them in a desperate attempt at a new act of defiance; but the irony only got us so far, and distinguishing between what we meant and what we refused became increasingly muddy, until it became nothing at all. Now, we find ourselves stuck in a cycle of referentiality, all we are left with is the attempt to take over what has been, what used to make sense in the context of its own time, of its own place, and struggle to make it our own, to corrupt it according to our needs, and to do so while at all costs avoiding to let ourselves see that all we are doing is vulgarising it, contaminating with our own lack of meaning, of fulness, we are littering the streets and pages with empty concepts because, when ripped from their original context, their original propagators, they are nothing but shells we adorn ourselves with in an attempt to stand out in a mass that is adorned with the same shells, occasionally showing a very slight variation in shading or shape, but shells nonetheless. We all jingle the same, empty tune, and we're loving it because, hey, it's our generation's birthright to take and ruin, to colonise and misunderstand, to cut the filaments that fed the heart and dangle corpses from our ears, we are the recyclers and the conquistadores of the past, we are a band of toddlers obsessed with DIY and disgusted with history, in fact, we have no scruples about robbing signs, symbols, words of their context, we are a-contextual and the world better follow our lead, the past needs to be cut into pieces and distributed among us so that we may make use of what cannot be discarded without being recycled into an identity, so we don't let it sleep but take it with us into the future, we call it innovation, no, wait, we call it being unique.
We don't have a movement because movements are for suckers, for those whose aspirations are too linear, and, perhaps the one thing that sets us apart is this recycling of what used to be and fashion it into new identities. Our generation is circular.