'Historicity' or 'Holy Shit, There Went My Life'

3/4/2010 - Historicity is a beast that sleeps in us all. It can be a lion or a cur, depending on when we sense its stirring, what preparations we make for its impending rise, the nightmarish stretch of limbs we never expected to recognize.

What awakens in me is the surest knowledge that we are, and have always been our own best hope for fashioning a better world and a life worth living. Our odds are long, but not unbeatable.

Can we create, actively sculpt, a culture from the raw materials handed down to us? Can we be lucid enough to sift through the wreckage of the Old Order and salvage our parent's love? Our parent's compassion? Are we not their wager against the incumbency of their mistakes? What will we risk that our sins not visit upon our children?

Right now we are stuck, passively awaiting our culture to appear around us. Too many of us are not even looking. Worse yet, many of those who are have lost their capacity to choose or to believe in anything. The rampant pathology of our snickering milleau is the senseless play of symbols, the erosion of all metaphors. Our sarcasm is so pervasive that comedy/tragedy is an increasingly meaningless distinction. Art is now admired, lauded, for its influences, its antecedents, rather than its statements or its insights.

I hope this for my generation: that we find the real living value of the semantic freedom we've inherited. That we root in it and grow however we can. That we be the bright, new phalanx that breaks the lines of complacency that await us in life's bitter fields. That we, knowing our opponent plays a masterful Sicilian, not open with a gutless and altogether lamb-like e2-e4. That we not drift so easily into such a comfortable silence.