A Broken-Down Idealism

I came across a phrase this morning, that kind of resonates with me: "a broken-down idealism." Kind of sums up where I'm at. Kind of like Kerouac's "beat" from "beatific."

As life goes on, pop culture's eternal nowness, our quest for some kind of suburban, consumer utopia seems like such a poor substitute for nature's perpetual creation/destruction cycle.

The old conception of "tragedy" has been absorbed into a greater absurdity. It's our quest for immortality, for a life with no pain, that renders us mute when "bad things happen to good people." Maybe we should be mute.

But absurdity is really a poor substitute. Life is not just absurd. Although it's that too. If we take the dark things away, (they never go away) we sanitize our lives of a richer meaning. Now that meaning is not really revealed to us. It just hangs over us like a pile of laundry, on the line, sopping wet, dribbling down upon us.

We laugh not at the absurdity of it all, but at the baffling beauty. The clue-less-ness that we bring to the occasion.

So anyway, is this the greatest song ever written? Morphine doing "Cure for Pain."