#yellow letters

[777polaris]

♬ number beads 🆕 ☆ round beads ☆ square beads ☆ more letters ☆ masterpost ♬

[yellowhollyhock]

Isaiah 54:10, KJV

I used to do these all the time, haven't in a while. This is on a whiteboard, just calming myself down after school. made me wanna start doing more of it again

[ill-will-editions]

Yellow Letter #15: 2019, A YELLOW YEAR!

First published in lundimatin#173, Jan. 7, 2019

Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, these mysterious Yellow Letters have been circulated at roundabouts and through social media. Accurate and poetic as ever, this 15th missive, which deals with the imminence of the end of this world and the responsibility that sits with us. -Lundi.am

***

Dear Yellow Jackets, dear men and women from below,

We are approaching a critical moment. We are approaching a historical moment, a tipping point in history. We are approaching the end. For several months now, we have been battling together to block the suicidal behavior of those above. Our lives, our children’s lives, our grandchildren’s lives, hang by a thread. We refuse to do the tightrope dance of weighing the pro’s and con’s of this or that constitutional measure that they promise will win us some tiny margin of room to maneuver. We must admit, we simply can’t stomach it. 

It is no longer possible for us to define our forms of life in our own way. How do we work, how do we educate our children, how do we eat, how do we produce things, how do we dress, how do we celebrate, how do we look at one another, how do we struggle, how do we share things, how do we kiss, meet, and  love one another? All of life is sucked up and devoured by the machinery from above which has never cared a lick about our grievances, our legal status, or our fine feelings. Those from above are already machines, and a machine, dear friends, does not think or feel, it calculates.

Dearest Yellow Jackets, dear men and women from below.

In 2019 our living ground, our real soil, all that surrounds us, the beauty and bounty of our countryside, the freshness of a fine morning, the scent of jasmine or lilacs filling the air in the streets, the anguish of dark nights, the shafts of sunlight caressing our morning faces and the laughter of our children in the gardens of their innocence – all of this is being destroyed and disappearing under a monstrous tide of useless pavement. We have to admit, my friends, that there are no peaceful pastures, no Greenpeace on the horizon. No carbon tax either! No responsible ecology! Still less, any high-level debates around the environment, nor Cop 21, 22 or 23! All of it would amount nothing but a brushstroke of green paint over the trash that awaits us!

So Macron and his friends from above can well afford to wish us a Happy New Year. They’re not the ones who suffer at the end of every month, nor is it them who despair over the end of the world. No, they despair at the lack of growth, their only worry is about what happens if France-from-below fails to adapt to commercial dictates from above. Today, our struggle from below is a total confrontation, and no doubt the last one. It is a struggle against the planned extinction of the human species. It is time that we create a real social organisation with a local base and global reach. The problems of those from below in Congo, in Thailand or in Brazil are also our problems.

While we are encouraged to soothe our frustrations by emptying the shelves of shopping centers during the winter sales, let’s try and imagine a 20-year-old in Vietnam, uprooted from the native soil where his family has lived for generations, heading out at 6am, alone, to a cotton field or to huge cold metallic blocks to produce a miserable item of clothing! Let’s imagine the same company congratulating itself on its great quarterly results! Now imagine us Europeans demanding consumer credit to buy this very same object! Can we imagine how wretched that is? Can we actually imagine the world that we live in? Our faces, a reflection of our daily miseries. This world, our world. The one that we are have rendered so intolerable, detestable, suffocating, and unlivable that we must seek refuge in the citadels of our screens, our illusions, our denials…

On the other hand, imagine if we could establish other ways of producing and consuming things in our apartment blocks, in our neighborhoods and villages. Can we imagine one washing machine per building? Can we imagine spending the morning fishing, the afternoon doing childcare, and the evening preparing the local festival, or tomorrow’s football match? Can we imagine conserving our food in old-fashioned jars and shared spaces? Can we imagine shattering the private property that pens us in, forces us out, isolates and evicts us? Can we imagine the 25-year-old pregnant woman whose needs are distinct from those of a sturdy 35-year-old man? Can we imagine a night watchman working 40 hours a week in the freezing cold, while a banker works the same hours in an air-conditioned office with a cup of coffee and fine cookies? Can we imagine these really-existing sadnesses? Can we imagine a real inequality, and not this abstract equality, that of an abstract labor in which work is no longer judged according to real, vital needs but according to fictive and imaginary ones? Can we imagine real work, meaningful work? Might we, finally, imagine a human face?

Dear Gilets jaunes, dear men and women from below.

This year, our fate is again in our own hands. Let’s seize the opportunity, raise the issues which trouble us and come up with radical and real solutions outside every institutional artifice. Our world is dying, our world is collapsing, human life is being extinguished. We have reignited a spark of hope! So let’s set our villages ablaze, set our towns ablaze, set France ablaze, set Europe ablaze, set the world ablaze!

May our yellow sparks of revolt be transformed into a creative furnace! May the destruction of the framework of everyday life be transformed into the vitality of tomorrow!

A Happy New Yellow Year to all of us!

P.S. A recipe for your end-of-year meal:

1 - For 40 years, wipe out 60% of the world's wildlife.

2 - Stir in 10 tons of plastic produced every second in the world.

3 - Mix this with $237,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, the global debt of our world.

4 - Drizzle it with yogurt that has traveled 5000 miles to end up on our plates.

5 - And voilà, there you have it, the destruction of humanity! This recipe is unlimited, and will ensure one in six deaths worldwide occur due to industrial pollution, a death rate 15 times higher than all wars.

Translated by Ill Will Editions. Hat tip to Winter Oak, for their draft translation.

[suite116]

“La terza ipotesi è che nessuno sia mai vissuto abbastanza a lungo da avere il tempo per potersi mettere a sistematizzare, sotto forma di enunciati, schemi, grafici o tabelle, quello che ha imparato del diventare grandi. Dovremmo prendere appunti ogni sera, su quello che abbiamo imparato nella giornata, lasciare a qualcuno il compito ingrato di trascriverli e dare loro una forma comprensibile e forse, nel giro di qualche generazione, a scuola inizierebbero a insegnare anche questo. O forse basterebbe che le persone grandi si guardassero tra loro e guardassero le persone piccole e dicessero, non so proprio quello che sto facendo, ma andrà tutto bene. Andrà tutto bene.”

Diventare grandi for dummies (via Yellow Letters)

[ill-will-editions]

YELLOW LETTER #17: TOTALITARIANS

Since the beginning of the Yellow Jackets movement, these mysterious ‘Yellow Letters’ have been circulated at roundabouts and over social media. Accurate and poetic as ever, this 17th missive attacks both the standardization produced by globalization and the fictional identity promoted by those above. -Lundi matin

“Over the past few days the verbal escalation has reached its terminus. The contradiction between the reality from above and the reality from below has been set out clearly: there is Evil and there is Good! We are Evil, they are Good! Those above preach to us about the "free world”, inventing imaginary enemies to ensure the triumph of their logic. "We want freedom of expression"; "We want to defend the right to protest"; "We want to respect all opinions”, they say! They use these ideological tirades to adorn themselves with virtues, while concealing the real nature of their actions! They are talented magicians, but their tricks aren’t working anymore. We Yellow Jackets can see the iron fist beneath the velvet glove.

In spite of their enamored songs about Liberty, those from above are presently prepared to use any means necessary to eliminate those from below: banning demonstrations, preventive detentions, mass arrests, surveillance… Until recently, they had draped these techniques with beneficent speeches about ‘Freedom from oppression! Freedom from enslavement! Freedom from violence! Freedom from tyranny!’  But the reality of Freedom from above is a forced march of standardization. By producing a unique universe, a unique way of thinking, a unique way of acting, a unique way of producing goods, a unique way of living, they have slowly but surely created a new totalitarian logic in the name of their cherished Freedom. On the contrary, they are the fanatical enemies of Freedom. They are totalitarian because they want to impose commercial and legal uniformity as the incontrovertible rule for all: the same clothes! The same men! The same women! The same city centers! The same entertainment! The same jobs! The same suffering! The same nightmare!

This standardization produces remarkable identities that are ever more distant from life as it is lived from below. The European Union is merely the last Russian doll in this system. It swallows up the various States and subjects them to a methodical unification. These same States had already effaced all local peculiarities in order to merge them into large national entities. Statists and pro-Europeans both suffer the same syndrome, since they are equally bent on destroying the worlds from below. It’s always about producing a unity that is ever more distant from concrete life, from local life, from practical life!

It’s not up to Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin, or Madrid to determine the size of a tomato, nor how we should live and produce! It is not up to Brussels to decide for Paris, but neither is it up to Paris to decide for Eymoutiers, for Mont-de-Marsan, for Colmar! On the contrary, it is from below that the common rises! No two apples on the tree are identical. But according to those from above, the French apple must be the same as the Romanian one! The apple from Landes must be identical to the apples of Normandy! This undifferentiation from above is the result of an imaginary idea detached from reality. Such top-down indifference does not take into account the abundance of difference. It generates a dead and standardized life.

So we, men and women from below, we Yellow Jackets, we embody particularities. We stand for character, nuance, chance. We stand for other ways of life! We stand for the rich diversity of life, and not its impoverishment! We are not here to not represent the abstraction of ‘Man as such’, detached from all familial, social, and cultural ties, this cosmopolitan, gray Man cast in a mould! We defend the rootedness of particular men and women, the fruits of that immense capacity of the living to produce variety, not insipid identity! The universe from above seeks to produce a groundless and monstrous Man. The world down below wishes to rediscover the warmth, color, and curiosity of alterity!”

First published in lundimatin#174, Jan. 14, 2019

Translated by Ill Will Editions

[ataturquie]

Cinéma : quand la répression de la liberté d’expression dans la Turquie d’Erdogan mise en scène dans "Yellow letters" alerte sur la nôtre…

En salle depuis mercredi, “Yellow letters” de İlker Çatak, Ours d’or au festival de Berlin, s’inspire de la vague depurgesorchestrées par le

[sloth-hallo-hier-bin-ich]

[ataturquie]

https://www.liberation.fr/culture/cinema/berlinale-2026-le-palmares-couronne-une-charge-contre-la-turquie-derdogan-et-sacre-sandra-huller-meilleure-actrice-20260221_M6ZFRLUGIJH3RKSTYG3MKBTPBQ/