October 12

Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I have never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the sixth extinction, as well as the contemporary geopolitical climate, I decided to watch the play. I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work, but I want to recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w Forget analysis, interpretation, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdest art. Instead, tend to what rises up spontaneously in you: thoughts, feelings, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive and that is the point. I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdest in nature as well as its various related and ancillary forms. From what I have said already, you can see that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear "absurd." This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more "rational" approaches. What faces us in the coming "collapse of everything" is not absurd. But the conscious collective response to the collapse is absurd at almost all levels and in all directions. I find, for myself, that almost all present collective conscious efforts in dealing with what confronts humanity to be absurd. Rather than falling into nihilism, I experience this as a necessary condition to develop a more radical individual effort. So what does one do from this perspective? Small, slow, simple, local, human-to-human, dwell in negative capability, create and listen to the dream and...