A comment in response to:
Economy of Poetics – A Sketch
Art is the forming and shaping of incoherence into something that is recognizable - in emotions elicited from memories, in associations drawn from patterns in our lives. Can we reshape this fractious world into a rediscovered ecological aesthetic that will manage to include the beer guzzling fans of violent games and nature raping machismo mating calls? What could possibly tear such eyes away from the pseudo-community of commercial patriotism, from the corporate mindset of winning at all costs - including the bankrupting of their descendants futures? Perhaps by letting them into the bigger game, the wholeness of life itself... perhaps. But judging by my personal encounters with that all but unanimous horde, I'd bet that we'll likelier see the darkness of apocalypse than such a dawn. Only because of some fluke will any of them be reading any of this.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
Threading the Needle
My response to another article on Culture Change:
Arab World's Turmoil May Spell Sudden Petrocollapse
found at: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/702/1/
As I try to imagine how people will react to the collapse of civilization, to famine and epidemic, to the unavailability of drinking water (technical pump and energy format), to extreme cold and heat, to the loss of transportation and communication, to hopelessness and desperation... and fear... I wonder if there is any way we can avoid adding brutality to this misery. Some experiences of famine have resulted in weakness, in passivity - which conserved what little vitality there was, rather than in aggression and fighting. However, long before people reach such stages of acceptance and optimization, in situations where catastrophe looms yet 'defensive capacity' is still an option -- the horrible capabilities of humanity have emerged. Ultimately, if our species avoids premature extinction, population will fall to sustainable proportions. The question of how we'll get there... as kindly and gently as possible -- or after passing through the worst hell we can construct, haunts my imagination and fills it with anxiety. In these circumstances the emotion of fear is evidence based, and if we don't harness it to rationality and use it to motivate a quest for the softest landing we can obtain, it will darken our nightmare. But I know which strains my imagination more -- the easy to picture apocalypse, versus the difficulty of threading the needle to an eventual heaven on Earth.
Arab World's Turmoil May Spell Sudden Petrocollapse
found at: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/702/1/
As I try to imagine how people will react to the collapse of civilization, to famine and epidemic, to the unavailability of drinking water (technical pump and energy format), to extreme cold and heat, to the loss of transportation and communication, to hopelessness and desperation... and fear... I wonder if there is any way we can avoid adding brutality to this misery. Some experiences of famine have resulted in weakness, in passivity - which conserved what little vitality there was, rather than in aggression and fighting. However, long before people reach such stages of acceptance and optimization, in situations where catastrophe looms yet 'defensive capacity' is still an option -- the horrible capabilities of humanity have emerged. Ultimately, if our species avoids premature extinction, population will fall to sustainable proportions. The question of how we'll get there... as kindly and gently as possible -- or after passing through the worst hell we can construct, haunts my imagination and fills it with anxiety. In these circumstances the emotion of fear is evidence based, and if we don't harness it to rationality and use it to motivate a quest for the softest landing we can obtain, it will darken our nightmare. But I know which strains my imagination more -- the easy to picture apocalypse, versus the difficulty of threading the needle to an eventual heaven on Earth.
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