Not being an advocate for the dreariness intrinsic to compulsive self-denial, I accept the need for almost all forms of human excess " with the exception of those actions and pursuits that are deliberately cruel, belligerently ignorant, and sadistically or mindlessly destructive.
You can pursue excess to the point of collapse, as far as I'm concerned, just don't harm any innocent bystanders or leave others to cleanup your mess.
These forms of excess are anathema: the agendas of the corporate/consumer state that are reducing the spicy resonance of the global agora into a bland shopping mall food court, and demand excessive work hours and debt slavery to maintain the system; overfishing that has reduced the stocks of large fish in the world's oceans by 90 percent; the carbon footprint, created by excessive industrialization, that has become an iron boot on the neck of all living things; the commercial/ entertainment/public relations/advertising complex, specializing in endless self-referential spectacle, that offers neither revelation nor cathartic release; the defining traits of our present economic system which are identical to the actions and attendant rationalizations of an addict on a death-besotted bender " desperate, joyless, and devoid of the shared sublime of a communal bacchanal.
The Road of Excess might lead to the Palace of Wisdom but one cannot arrive there by modern jet travel or by any interstate highway; conversely, one has to give oneself permission to get lost in a wilderness of inner states of being.
Wander long enough, descend deep enough, take enough wrong turns, resist intransigent power creatively enough, and when the night becomes dark enough above the tangled tree-line you will find your lodestar.
Nowadays, one must cultivate a high tolerance for being lost. Because, in a doomed culture, in order to have a chance at gaining an original sensibility, one must wander far beyond the royal court of flatterers, uninspired fools and scheming courtesans who are driven to spend their days truckling before a senile king nodding on his throne.
We find ourselves, currently, stranded in a crisis of selfhood, engendered by a system that demands that the untamable yearnings of the human heart be expressed almost exclusively within the limited lexicon of consumerism, that the path of self-expression be obstructed at the velvet rope-fortified domain of corporate state show biz types and elitist-approved artists, that the imagination is useless unless it generates vast monetary rewards for the one percent.
In short, because the known thoroughfares now dead-end into a wasteland.
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. -- T.S. Eliot
The vehemence of the imagination motivates. It rages against oppression, as it, in equal measure, both protects and frees one's heart. It creates and endures. The heart, the alpha and omega point of the imagination, rebels against sensible centrism as it serves to transform demons of conformity into recalcitrant angels who are the sworn enemies of mindless power.
Moreover, the implications of this predicament extend far beyond the essential struggle for individual selfhood, for this situation is interwoven with a larger struggle for the survival of our species -- a crisis that is rapidly reaching the ecological tipping point.
How we negotiate this perilous landscape will not depend on an ability to adapt to the prevailing madness of the present order. To the contrary, our chances of avoiding catastrophe will hinge on an ability to embrace novel understandings wrought by imaginative engagement with emergent realities.
This approach will also prove helpful in withstanding the inevitable conflicts that will arise with the defenders of the societal arrangements of the present whose reactionary tactics will grow ever more ruthless and brutal in direct proportion to their escalating level of panic, inevitably provoked by the collapsing certainties of the entrenched (but unsustainable) order with which they have aligned their fate.
Those are the types of fears that have kept us estranged from each other, atomized, alienated, mistrustful of the vitality of communal engagement, afraid of movement building"waiting for instructions from the powerful on how to proceed through life, as opposed to going about the business of making the world anew.
"It takes a worried man to sing a worried song. " I'm worried now but I won't be worried long," so go the lyrics of the traditional folk song.
By what means do people who have experienced a lifetime of economic hardship and official oppression endure and continue to sing out in defiance?
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