History turns up false.  Industrial age economic crash, societal collapse, capitalism the last clawing old man cringing under cold, natural skies.  Who dies?  An entire westernly civilized paradigm is devoured by its own financial, socially-engineered black hole.  Ho ho!  The irony twists us on a mobius strip back to the Neolithic.  Marxism and communism and socialism and anarchism and paganism and conservatism and liberalism and feminism and phallicism must fuse all of their fallacious compartmentalized theories into a real practice of living.

The ground is icky with battery acid, the sky red and too warm and ice blue thunderstorm cold with the extremism of the released fossil fuels of industrial civilization.  What is progress now?

 

What is progress now: a symptom of a communal pathology, a fractured understanding of life, a life lived under microscopes and in cubbyholes and behind microscopic and telescopic lenses.  "Welcome to the desert of the real."

 

All your movies and books and songs come together here in this steeply graphed landslide mapped out in convergent dimensions, interdisciplinary art and science.  The video reels rock, loop, and reel, sending us higher and lower, riveted to and ripped from the imagination-stoked scenarios of apocalyptic fits. What next?  Now that the world has ended in fire, economic collapse, stagnant pollution, permanent military bases, betrayal by corporate interests, conniving greed at the highest levels of governmental power, who are we and how do we gage progress now?  Is it a fetishized thing, after all, these hundreds of years of driving inhumanity in the name of a higher industrial good?  Can we tap the magnetic electricity that surrounds the Earth, warmed by the sun, to light the way?  To rot here in a post-industrial festering apocalypse is too cruel, although it may be what we deserve.  Let us have mercy on ourselves.

 

Let us cooperate.  We eat our debt.  We grow produce in our own backyards.  You kill it, you grill it.  Let us store grain and beans and harvest vegetables communally.  Let us eat cake and potatoes, let’s set the table for our animals and ourselves.  We need to transform self-destructive speculation into creative speculation and cooperative production. 

 

Work must be life-affirming and life-sustaining.  I, for one, must be allowed to create—to speculate?  Within bounds.  I take time and energy to photograph my imagination on pages, blur it, smear it, express.  When I have done that, and only then, when this personal requirement is met, I work for the common good on common land.  Or is it the other way around?  Work the commons first, then undertake the individual creative project?  Yet the individual creative project also benefits the community.  The order varies.  We will get by.  We do, after all, need good stories and soundtracks of live music to make our labor more meaningful.  Ideologies must be merged and made malleable, must be tempered with the more human qualities of flexibility, creativity, individuality, compassion, criticism, intelligent debate and disobedience.  The collapsing economy and pestilent, pitted environment cannot be propped up and band-aided with one plan only.  Artists, farmers, mechanics, militants, bakers, quilters, engineers, mathematicians, seamstresses, fisherwomen, and bridge-builders of the world must untie their prejudices and preconceptions, pour their fear into compassion, their frustration into determination, their anger into resistance of inhumanity.  The fusion we need is cultural, but not homogenous: no hegemony of a dominant idea; no dominance, no singular authority.  People want freedom.  In order to be free, we must communicate intelligently and regularly.  We must cooperate together.

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