430
IHAS HASSAN
In
a day. And the hummingbird, fluttering its wings at sixty wingbeats
per second, consumes more than its own weight in an hour. Process of
the deep, iridescent action.
10
There was/is a depression /recession. Furthermore, a culture of ris–
ing affluence/expectations, sufferi ng from uneven rates of change, must
experience disappointment/stress. Sociologists tell us this and much more.
Consider, though, a more speculative notion.
In
the last decade,
American society has been more widely politicized than in any other
era since the Depression, perhaps including the Depression. Some see
this as a benefit, which no doubt it is
in the short run.
But what if the
political consciousness - Right, Left, Center, note the linear terminology
- proved inherently limiting? What if,
on the long run,
politics proved
an absurd drama, a solemn and destructive branch of 'Pataphysics'?
Thus politicians
(i.e.,
everyone) reenact ancient compulsions within a
fixed set, a theory of games. Thus they rearrange elements of reality
without a ltering that reality
enough.
Politics: in the short run, the difference between life and death for
this person, here and now.
Politics: on the long run, a tautology of actio,ns.
We can not do without politics; it will not do for us.
Admittedly, the notion is speculative. Yet have we not all seen
revolutionaries, young and old, whose imagination is essentially limiting?
Caught between the motives of spite and justice, they
(i.e ., everyone)
cannot free their actions frem the weight of the familiar. Thus we all
feel more at home in Orwell's ]984 than in Huxley's
Brave New World
or Skinner's
Walden Two.
We ,can take political terror so long as it cor–
responds to our psychodrama, our own terror.
Parapolitics: the science of the implausible, the action of the new.
Imagination takes power. But how? Where? When?
Proudhon: "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the
statesman's prudence."
11
Hannah Arendt says: "Progress ... can no longer serve as the
standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes
we have let loose." We can, of course, say the same of reaction,
But the issue is not the New Conservatism or the Old, the New
Radicalism or the Old. The iron plough was feared to poison the
earth; and man was never given wings. Goddard was thought a fool,
Columbus a charlatan, Galileo a heretic. There were others in memory,
a few far greater, and many more politic. Life renews itself as it can.
The issue - I am not sure what it is - comes to me in an Image.
The image brings a query:
