Pirate Dispatches and Disordered Minds

  A pirate dispatch is simply non-ordained behavior into a narrative vacuum, doing something because it is contextually important that it be done but nobody qualified or credentialed is doing it. The classic example of a pirate dispatch is John Nash, the mathematician, going after what we now know as String Theory because no one else was doing it even though he was not a physicist. The process apparently disordered an already disordered mind into institutional insanity, the classic pattern of a pirate dispatch which is by its very nature insane. Just seeing the opportunity for a pirate dispatch is an exercise in alienation as psychiatrists use the term.
Writing a novel is a type of pirate dispatch. Writers rarely have subject matter expert credentials in their content although a few exceptions come to mind. Neither Steinbeck nor Fitzgerald was formally qualified to speak of mental illness yet both did, 'Of Mice and Men' and 'Tender is the Night', and both to good effect. Writers traditionally cultivate disordered minds by drink and drugs to clear debris from their neural circuits and allow clarity of artistic vision. This is not a flirtation with dementia as writers characterize it; it is a recipe for it.
We are in an epochal period of Western Civilization in which the intellectual landscape is littered with failed narratives and opportunities for pirate dispatches abound. This window of opportunity, and it is a window, the scientific surround of new narratives is largely in place, is the author of our present intellectual anarchy and such painful process will continue until the cultural equivalent of Kuhn's scientific revolution is created, made common currency, and subsequently ordains legitimate, credentialed dispatches.
Such process, for all its cost, cannot be hurried. It must be allowed to happen, fostered but not rushed. This is a difficult task when pirate dispatches characterize the intellectual life of a society yet the future of civilization and, indeed, the planet and the solar system depend on it.
(This blog is a pirate dispatch.)