Postmodernism, Civilization, and Creativity

J.M. here.
When you see a multiform culture that is in Being not Becoming, you see Postmodernism realized. It is the Modernist view of Civilization as Grand Narrative that colors our perceptions of what social existence implies. The Western Canon is a fairly recent invention, a Modernist attempt at Order out of Chaos and successful in the establishing of a baseline of reference in thought and communication, a baseline that must exist and which Postmodernism seeks to define by convergence across disciplines and by a community of personal myth.
However personal the demon of creativity, one ultimately plays to an audience. It is the nature of the thing that it be experienced. Writers write because they are driven to do so. They write to make to money. Ultimately and essentially, however, they write to be read. We write in shared symbols out of neccessity, not convention. I may reject the legitimacy of a Grand Narrative and embrace the timelessness of Being, but I cannot reject that Becoming is a state of existence in its own right. Post is not 'after', it is 'beyond' and must coexist with narratives of large and powerful extent however limited one considers them to be in a true existence.
Multiform culture includes Modernism and its Grand Narrative. It's an uneasy peace we keep in a complex world, philosophically and geopolitically.
Do well and be well.
'Chances', available on Amazon.com.

The New American Myth

J.M. here. When one looks at the philosophical mix that informs the American Mind, one finds an emergent Game Theory above all with various older constructions that are dated to the point of qualification, i.e. neo-Schumpeterian, post postmodernism. The stars are moving in the intellectual universe and where they will be when they are in conjunction is only a guess.
Still, in the midst of this vacuum and confusion, we build and we buy and we live productive material lives. What drives us? What myths ordain this heroic behavior?
For me, the metaphors of sport are significant in motivating and structuring my behaving. Football season is here and, while I don't memorize stats, I do follow the game. When I start a difficult project, I suck it up and fire out. When I face obstacles, I broken field run. I am metaphorically a player in a very large game and now there's Game Theory to back that up. Sport is the American mythology in my personal experience and it is translated in the best of American performances into Benjamin Franklin's succinct, 'Do well by doing good'.
Do well and be well.
'Chances', available on Amazon.com

Life and Art

Basil Brylcreem here, watching sales of my new book, Chances, on Amazon.com and starting to write my next one. While waiting for the next sentence to manifest itself to my creative mind, letting the language generate the phrases, I contemplate the nature of Art or in my case, as Dylan Thomas put it, 'craft or sullen art', and the nature of Life. They differ.
I am not a minor god creating new worlds of imagination. I am an instrument of culture and language managing a creative process that is undeniably human, synthesizing language, paradigm, and database to a negotiated conclusion, as illogical as Life but different in its complexity and composition.
Why do I do what I do? That is the question I pose in 'Chances' and it is a very real problem in the analysis of human behavior. What motivates artists? Freud said, wealth, fame and beautiful lovers but that presentation is the way of artists who too often do not know why they create. We writers have an inside joke of graphomania that points to the compulsive nature of the creative process.
Prizes are nice and a lover who makes you smile when you break from the drudgery of compostion is indispensable, but are they truly the motivation for what I do? No. My motivation is my promise to myself and my God to contribute to a civilization I love in however small a fashion. I write because it is what I am in a culture that places some value on that endeavor.
Do well and be well.
Chances, available at Amazon.com.

Workin' at it

Labor Day. It evokes the whole of the tumultuous Twentieth Century. From Pope Leo the XIII's pronouncement of the morality of the struggle for reform of labor conditions in 1894 to the rise of the trade professional in an entrepreneurial context in the 1980's and 1990's, it assumes symbolic importance in the life of industrial nations. It is the bookmark of the grand narrative of the relation of man to machine and as technology raises the bar to dizzying heights in the last act of that grand narrative, we are left to wonder at what we have done.
Pause and reflect this Labor Day on who ran the show in the Twentieth Century and wonder about how much of the struggle for worker's rights and living wages was simply a desperate reaction to the tail wagging the dog, to the machine structuring human society.
Today we stand eyeball to eyeball with technology. The list of tasks that machines do better than humans is grown long and worrisome. Whose world is it anyway and what good is a machine in the quest for meaning that is human existence if it drives the process.
What does meaning mean to a robot?
The die is pretty much cast in terms of technological context. The bar is pretty much raised. What we are left to ponder is our treatment of the dispossessed and our individual, empowered, visions of the future.
What kind of lives will we make in this world we have made?
What better day than Labor Day is there for we dogs in the technological car to worry that bone?
Do well and be well.
'Chances', available on Amazon.