We have assumed that progress and all that it implies comes about by and through those who lead from the front. The ones who are ahead, on the edge and pushing forward. They have something, or they can see in the dark, but march forcefully into the void anyway. We look to them. Often in hindsight we notice and belatedly understand what they were doing. We learn over time to appreciate what they understood and where they had carved the passage that the rest of us walked without even knowing it at the time.

But what if what we most need now is a push from behind? In the last 100 years since we experienced humanity’s most recent decisive break with the past, obsession with the new became our ritual and iconoclasm our idol. So much so that addiction to the repetition of it, the mechanical and spiritual reproduction of it, has satisfied to some extent for a long time. We thought it would be sufficient to continually recreate conditions of disorientation, impose them on others which then eventually propelled things forward into expanded territories. 

Now we are at the end of the line. There’s an edge. We are on it and we can’t go any further. Not even over it. An abyss, but we can't even enter it. We will be crushed against it until our very existence is extinguished.

If a constant hyperawareness of terror - our own and everyone else’s - was central to our plague then we could at least imagine a cure. Simply find a position away from fear. However, there’s something else that is wrong. We are disintegrating and coming apart at a cellular level. Maybe grief causes that, but neither the absence of it or numbed distance from feeling fixes what’s broken. 

The way we remade the world 100 years ago when it shattered uncontrollably around us tossing the best of us into nihilistic freefall? We must do it again. Because it didn’t work the last time. We did not solve the problem of regression. We did not elevate the human condition. Not really. Not at all. The same monstrosities, the same horrors, the same unthinkables have overtaken us. Again. There has been no progress. None that matters to us the way it did when we once found assurance, confidence, a new faith and hope. Hope in ourselves and the supremacy of man(kind) to renegotiate the terms of our created limitations. 

We thought that as we excelled in chaos authority it would drown out and overpower the terrifying frailty penetrating every orifice. We were impaled, but with sufficient obliteration effort we could come down. And rule.

Can the exhausted tactics of avant-garde inheritance and the bankrupt trendiness of breaking things continue to move us forward, or perhaps “onward” is a better word? The passage of time no longer has the same linearity it once did. Isn’t the sensation now more multi-dimensional than simply forward or backward? Isn’t there a pull we feel that it is possible to go inward or outward, or further into the visible to see more as well as accessing the invisible to see less?

We want something other than that line. That ruler. The Order. We desire a knowing beyond and better than any granted by external consensus. A circle is better. A circle can help us escape, return and go back. To be behind and before the now we wish was not eternal so it might be possible to go another way. The authority we bestowed to the collectivity of permanent containers for our intellect, labor and values exchange, we reclaim because everything is worse off. It seems so at least. Now.

We found we can no longer author chaos. Not that we aren’t trying. We simply can not manage to generate generative disorientation because there are not any standards, or centers. Anymore. There are no remaining preeminences from which to adequately resist, resent or rebel. We are one with all of it - the sublime and the ridiculous - unable to react to the thing we have become.

So we must go back.

Return to a fork in the road somewhere.

Take a different way to avoid the now inevitable.

Even though it’s probably too late.

We have assumed that progress and all that it implies comes about by and through those who lead from the front. The ones who are ahead, on the edge and pushing forward. They have something, or they can see in the dark, but march forcefully into the void anyway. We look to them. Often in hindsight we notice and belatedly understand what they were doing. We learn over time to appreciate what they understood and where they had carved the passage that the rest of us walked without even knowing it at the time.

But what if what we most need now is a push from behind? In the last 100 years since we experienced humanity’s most recent decisive break with the past, obsession with the new became our ritual and iconoclasm our idol. So much so that addiction to the repetition of it, the mechanical and spiritual reproduction of it, has satisfied to some extent for a long time. We thought it would be sufficient to continually recreate conditions of disorientation, impose them on others which then eventually propelled things forward into expanded territories. 

Now we are at the end of the line. There’s an edge. We are on it and we can’t go any further. Not even over it. An abyss, but we can't even enter it. We will be crushed against it until our very existence is extinguished.

If a constant hyperawareness of terror - our own and everyone else’s - was central to our plague then we could at least imagine a cure. Simply find a position away from fear. However, there’s something else that is wrong. We are disintegrating and coming apart at a cellular level. Maybe grief causes that, but neither the absence of it or numbed distance from feeling fixes what’s broken. 

The way we remade the world 100 years ago when it shattered uncontrollably around us tossing the best of us into nihilistic freefall? We must do it again. Because it didn’t work the last time. We did not solve the problem of regression. We did not elevate the human condition. Not really. Not at all. The same monstrosities, the same horrors, the same unthinkables have overtaken us. Again. There has been no progress. None that matters to us the way it did when we once found assurance, confidence, a new faith and hope. Hope in ourselves and the supremacy of man(kind) to renegotiate the terms of our created limitations. 

We thought that as we excelled in chaos authority it would drown out and overpower the terrifying frailty penetrating every orifice. We were impaled, but with sufficient obliteration effort we could come down. And rule.

Can the exhausted tactics of avant-garde inheritance and the bankrupt trendiness of breaking things continue to move us forward, or perhaps “onward” is a better word? The passage of time no longer has the same linearity it once did. Isn’t the sensation now more multi-dimensional than simply forward or backward? Isn’t there a pull we feel that it is possible to go inward or outward, or further into the visible to see more as well as accessing the invisible to see less?

We want something other than that line. That ruler. The Order. We desire a knowing beyond and better than any granted by external consensus. A circle is better. A circle can help us escape, return and go back. To be behind and before the now we wish was not eternal so it might be possible to go another way. The authority we bestowed to the collectivity of permanent containers for our intellect, labor and values exchange, we reclaim because everything is worse off. It seems so at least. Now.

We found we can no longer author chaos. Not that we aren’t trying. We simply can not manage to generate generative disorientation because there are not any standards, or centers. Anymore. There are no remaining preeminences from which to adequately resist, resent or rebel. We are one with all of it - the sublime and the ridiculous - unable to react to the thing we have become.

So we must go back.

Return to a fork in the road somewhere.

Take a different way to avoid the now inevitable.

Even though it’s probably too late.