The Disrupted, Unsatisfied, Troubled Imagination

Events conspire, and we fall back or are propelled back to the basics. If you are a writer, you write, a painter, you paint, a poet, you poetize, a singer you sing. Pushed from the public square (you know the place where they cheer the new leaders, it's also the place where they hang the new transgressors), back to your lonely room.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a movement and a mob.

The lonely room is the natural habitat for some of us: cast aways, refugees, renegades. In opposition. To the prevailing national conversation. Being in opposition comes naturally. When I was a wee lad there was the culture, and there was the counterculture. From my perspective, in my lonely room, I could see clearly that much of the fun, creativity, beauty, love and wisdom was with the counter side of the equation.

In my imagination I will fall back on this dichotomy: Nixon vs. Lennon.

Time is not linear. Time is a wheel. Time is an illusion. Events unfold. Progress is not a given. There is action and reaction. We can waste lots of time fighting the forces of reaction. The fight doesn't have to be in the streets, or the public places, although it probably will be fought there, but more importantly it will be fought in our heads. In our lonely rooms. 

A revolution in the head.

So dark times can create works of light. I am not talking about "political art," most of what we consider political art, art that directly addresses politics, is pretty much dreck. I am thinking of deeper, subtler works, works of the deepened heart and the disrupted, unsatisfied, troubled imagination.

Light in the age of the darkness.