Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 7/10/20
Life’s image being self-evident, in that I am in possession of memory, feeling, consideration and the like, and because I am perpetually faced with the predicament of life’s varied show, to consider the inverse of my perspective on these shows is of considerable benefit. It is helpful to state the rationale directly, or to posit what form the rationale must take, rather than build toward the discovery of that rationale through the depiction of ephemera. We cannot go but an instant before we are faced with the question of what to do with a human life, and a rationale appears prerequisite if we are to endeavor to resolve this tension. The background has always been manifest, but the negative, the quantity that would make the background robust, the foreground trivial, has not been present at hand.
Ephemera run amok occludes the awareness of the rationale precisely because it is insufficient; and therein lies the answer. Music, or the discovery of music that seemed to demarcate the survey of who one could be, a process which reliable led away from a free rationale, was inadequate, until a perception of life’s contrast caused me to cast aside playlists for the play of sound in engaged equanimity. Games of every sort, much as they monopolized my attention, and the attention of my peers were no more than a compelling distraction, a compulsion, and therefore inadequate. As online content made ints inroads into the collective, coherence, that is to say the rationale of which I speak, suffered tremendously.
Reviewing the negatives, I find there was sincerity, attraction, and its handmaiden affection, who tendered her gifts along the shores of Michigan, in cars, and along avenues; there was amazement and the matter that is more than show could guarantee. Still, ephemera remains part of the picture. The inscriptions above the Ba’hai temple’s entrances were internalized and influenced me. Drives presented themselves as necessary but led nowhere and frustrated. A shooting took place as a car pulled out the wrong way down a one way street and produced a handgun, and shots produced from the handgun. Televisions played without a hint as to how its viewers related to one another, or themselves. Controllers were dashed to pieces on the tile of a neighbor’s basement in acute instances of pathetic rage. One could walk from the East to the Hudson and not realize there was more to life than show. Fraught nights in Paris raged in utter ignorance of how near at hand was feeling and the practice of feeling.
The insight achieved, ephemera can now shift, and invention marry the matter to the art, the art to the matter. However lazy influence is, it is infinitely preferable to command, especially in a society that cannot seem to do but fall at the foot of the implements of command in worship, as does ours. True influence is an ordering of life. It progresses day by day and does not move in reverse. Its purpose is unquestionable, its remedies innate.
