Worlds On Worlds

Another recessional lesson: that the primary pleasure or enchantment to be drawn from human life is in one's brain and the quality of one's thoughts. Look at what a recession is, and what a recession does: throws individuals back on their cognitive resources, and either the cognitive depth is there to move the whole she-bang forward, or the human life is essentially over. For the walking dead this might pass muster, but not for me. Imagination is an expression of cognitive depth: so that, when an individual gazes into the night sky, into space, they can draw some kind of imaginative strength from the possibilities of drawing down "space" into their life or consciousness, and thus extending the space their cognitive capacities takes up. This, when quotidian reality sinks into the trough of the lurid and/or macabre. As to where else to look, for what might be genuine cognitive sustenance in a heavily recessional time: the answer to me is crystal clear- high art, philosophy, and science. These are the best human repository spaces for the highest cognitive vistas the human race is capable of opening and exploring.

As per the place of a settled expression like Keats' Odes in all of this- it pays to remember that, if created with enough imagination or cognitive depth, the best products of high art, philosophy, and science create their own self-sustained, self-justified universes, to be inhabited by whatever brains have leave to inhabit them. All the cacophonous garbage stuffed into our brains- pop culture crap, media drivel, inane conversations, in fact everything which denies the truth consonance of humanity's triumph only in the cognitive- looks lurid and macabre in the middle, or in the bottoming out period around or after, a major recession. This vulgarized garbage, if the situation is steep enough, can turn a decent human brain into pulverized mush. There is nothing more macabre then a decent brain, crippled by inanity into lies, duplicity, and denial. In fact, that's what's so eerie about a recessional period- how many people are willing to deny what they see. In certain situations/contexts, the claustrophobia of complete denial is so intense, so demoralizing, that it is difficult to imagine getting through this without suffering grievous wounds. Still, que sera, sera.