Laughter In Dark Times

Today, surrealism, our “super reality” according to artistic leader André Breton, is our coping mechanism. collective “fuck it.” Fighting absurdity with absurdity.

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, puts it more strongly: “We are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe but how we believe…. People all over the world are making such shifts in belief—to be more precise, shifts in belief about

... See more

In general, whenever human history darkens, this impulse—to obscure meaning, to flatten affect, to don expressive masks—emerges. Chaos erupts, entropy spreads, mistrust multiplies. There’s some occult math at work: Overturn enough treasured assumptions at a proper velocity, and we will begin to doubt even our most basic impulses.

And then a strange thing happens: I feel fierce. I feel clear. I feel free. I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’ve got nothing left to lose. I’m willing to take risks that I wasn’t before. I say true things, things that are true but that you’re not supposed to say. And people notice. Hell, I notice. It turns out despair is its own kind of power, its own

... See more