Letting the Vision Breathe

Given the complexity and long historical sweep of our navigable world, it takes a certain vision to cut through the noise of it and anticipate it and navigate it while living within it, while managing to avoid becoming lost. It might take letting that vision breathe a bit, letting the size and sweep of that vision take a little space of its own. Or in other words, it might mean taking the risk of being a bit of a crank. 

Landscape Affect

In the same day you can wander through a meadow kind of carefree and feel at ease, and then traverse a craggy ridge and just be completely on edge and carefully calculating and choreographing every step. The landscape and the necessities of that environment can play a significant part in ordering your conscious experience and resulting behaviors. 

And then we go and structure our society like that craggy ridge, with its mammoth rising and falling "competitive" enterprises, which themselves under the pressure claw together their "moats" and "retaining walls" to establish their monopolies and keep their shape, while between them exist yawning chasms where the billowing tatters of social safety nets sway in the breeze. If you squint you can make them out when they catch the light, like glinting spider webs. 

And so it is no small wonder that so many people, facing such an environment, live with a constant tension, some of them acting like complete maniacs and predators to traverse their splintered homes. 

Easing Up

I thought I'd take a break from the successive sketches of the character and movements of capital and do a little light posting here for a moment. Mostly because of how busy I've been and how physically tired I am. And I can always get back to elaborating on the heavy stuff later. 

I'm going to try to ease up on writing the apology pieces for dropping the ball. Mostly a lot of it was for my own edification anyway. I doubt that anyone coming across this was too worried about it. 

But also, there is just such a high volume of quality content steadily coming through everywhere else I frequent that I'm not sure it is even a big deal to have periods of silence here. And again in the meantime I'm usually soaking a bunch up and absorbing it to be integrated and worked in later. 

There is something else going on here that is related to that though. I've heard a number of creative people expressing that it has gotten more difficult to put a lot of work into a creative piece on the Internet and then to have it last and generate enough interest for enough time before the interest melts away and shifts to something else. There is a perceived continuous acceleration of change and happening that is increasingly difficult to keep up with. 

As the folks at the wonderful This Machine Kills podcast discussed in a recent episode, there was an assassination attempt on a major presidential figure, which has already largely dissolved back into the news cycle and vanished; something they found really strange. 

Which is not only an Internet and "Information Age" phenomenon of course. Just a week ago I was sitting in bed and starting hearing gunshots, and then the hail of bullets came, whizzing through the trees around me - I could hear them hitting nearby trees and ricocheting off of nearby rocks - because some blockhead wanted to fire off some rounds into the forest. Maybe dump some of that summer and social heat eh? And now that event has passed in the rearview. On to the next one. 

In general you could say the notable events are cropping up in greater frequency. Lenin's "weeks where decades happen" perhaps. This is certainly something meaty that I'll have to get deeper into at another time. 

Not that I'll discontinue my self-critical and reflective pieces - here's one of them now - just that if there is a lapse and I wash downstream, I'll just pop up somewhere else again (probably and hopefully) and try to resume where I left off. Out of necessity if anything; these things just keep coming.