November 6, 2024
What won't change, and what will, at Running After My Hat
For starters, I’ll continue posting installments in my 23kpc series. There will be some changes in the schedule, and maybe in the visibility to non-followers, but these changes have been brewing for a few weeks anyhow and have nothing to do with anything political. I expect I’ll also continue the #jesstorypix series; again, nothing political about that series. (But don’t be surprised if the tone of the selections darkens a bit.)
All of which said…
I’m feeling very anxious and frustrated this morning. Much of this feeling has been brought on by social-media sites which make it easy for members to share memes of frustration and rage, sorrow and unsettlement. The people who voted for Planet Cheeto seem themselves temporarily muted and tentative, urging love and respect from us the day after they assured the return to power of forces which represent neither virtue.
But, you know, it’s true what they say: living well really is the best revenge. And making art in whatever form we can is the best way of living well; this includes not only art for art’s sake but also the art of protest and dissatisfaction — as well as the art of satire, laughter, and ridicule.
So anyhow: I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. But I’ll also be looking, and looking hard, for ways to use “what I’ve been doing” for some of the very best, most subversive ways of living well.
About the photo: the complete caption as posted on Flickr continues on from the title:
[Hope] is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live.
The quotation comes from John Steinbeck’s The Log of the Sea of Cortez.