I am sitting here at my computer, playing freecell. Somehow I find myself pondering the flowershop scene of the movie… and am taken visually and viscerally to the movie, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin. To the scene where he passes the flower shop where the girl whose eye operation he paid for works.
I saw that movie back in Hungary. I was young. And I didn’t understand the movie.
Today I realized: I didn’t understand the movie because I didn’t understand that the Chaplin character was poor.
I lived in a country, in a household where poor wasn’t a meme. We had what we had. And we were alive.
You could argue that poor isn’t a meme, that it’s a fact, but it isn’t.
You have what you have, and that is not a meme. But what you don’t have is not real, other than in your thoughts, in the memes. Lack is only real in the memes.