On Active Imagination

Scarcity can be good for the human soul. Fully Automated Luxury Communism / Capitalism makes the muscles of body and mind atrophy. In absence of gravitas everything becomes trivia, fodder for game shows when so much that could be saved is in jeopardy. The grindstone sharpens individuals and society giving them a precise edge. Freedom requires this sharpness. Dullness prevails when no work of our own is required, when there is no block to thrust against.

Boredom with the way things are becomes an asset. Boredom was a gift to Generation X. Combined with feral free time it gave us an era of analog creativity: zines, scenes, bands, music you could hear, people you could touch, words printed on paper to be found like treasures. The absence of the ease of the internet search meant that finding the others was valuable. While there is nothing wrong with copying off the successful innovations of the past, Star Trek replicators will only lead us further down the path of replication crisis.

Growing bored again can be a form of salvation, because boredom will lead to daydreams and other forms of active imagination that require us to think of alternate ways of doing, being, relating.

So much criticism of new music criticism from the late Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) and Simon Reynolds (Retromania) has focused on how in love with the past it is, we must remember, not only that pop will eat itself, but that these previous eras todays regeneration of musicians feel called to, lived in a quieter media environment where there mind had more freedom to roam. Because of this freedom the imagination was sharp, because it had been whetted against the grindstone of boredom. Now we have what music historian Tim Mohr called “too much future” in his book Burning Down the Haus. While we aren’t living behind the Berlin wall with the stasi following our every move, we are living in a world of extensive digital surveillance, where the digistasi are collecting our data to readvertise at us in service to an algorithmic propriety that flattens the contours our imaginations might otherwise give in absence to this spectacle.

The “too much future” of the youth behind the berlin wall was in response to the way everything was preplanned for them. Meanwhile the punk rockers in Thatcher’s England had declared “no future” because it had all been eaten up and what was left was getting fed to the wolves of neoliberal economics. Todays youth and the Gen X parents who gave birth to them, have a different set of problems and predicaments. The force feeding of predicted tastes as channeled by cool merchants recuperating any vital signs of autonomy and putting them into an endlessly scrolling tube that drips content, not creations. Putting firm limits onto these feeds that create positive feedback loops of reinforced artificial idiocy is one way to curb escalating brain drain.

The imaginative dissonance of negative feedback is needed to put the brakes on these severed signifiers. The sign of the times are all there, but we would do well to tune into layer of symbols that exists beyond what W.B. Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.”

Passive imagination is the dead end in a space station become tomb, that fully automated luxury capitalism / communism leads to. This is the “Tomb of the Cybermen” prophesied by Doctor Who (Season 5, 1967). A living culture, while informed by cybernetics as systems, can be resurrected from this imaginative stasi stasis, by seeking out contact with the microrganisms of the living soil, and macroorganisms of winter starlight. Enjoyed down here on earth, the light from those stars does not have to be filtered through the protective lenses and glass on the space station tomb.

Other tomes are available if we would read them. We can check them out from the akashic ark-hives, from the library on the dream plane in the upper, from the library on the inner, where you don’t need to know morse code or computer code to make contact. When our nervous system gets touched by beings of intelligence from these other planes of there, and when we develop the disciplines needed to translate those flashes into works of active imagination, we will began to see the rise of new transcendental mentalities. The old faith of staunch materiality will be replaced as the seeds for new perceptive organs root and grow like upside down trees rooted in aether.

After the harvest of past culture made by the eminently copy-able nature of the internet has reached its past pull date, those souls born with a cellphone in their hand will enter a winter of deep hibernation. Deep listening, deep dreaming, deep sleep in the womb of earth, embraced and suckled at the teat of the bear mother as the light from midnight stars begin to trace out new songlines, faint tracks in space to be explored and walked down by others who receive the seed transmissions.

Listen, in the wake of internet noise music of talking heads analyzed conundrum.

Listen in the boredom, the radio chatter of banal algo-arithmetic of supervised society, turned down.

Listen, and the distant sound of Sirius. It can still be heard.