Culture (as a con) is only good for about 35 years on average. I mean, some people are impressed with culture till they go to the grave at 90, some people are thoroughly apprised of the fact that it’s horseshit by the time they’re 19. But the average person’s experience with culture lasts about 35 or 40 years. In the past that was enough. Most people, then, were ready to die without ever blowing their whistle on the game. What is happening here is: we are living past the age—by the millions—living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all. They simply are—after, you know, the ten thousandth piece of apple pie, the sixteenth Mercedes, the five hundredth whatever—it’s just seen to be intolerable, unbearable.
The felt presence of immediate experience is not negotiable. It has no price. And yet, this is what’s taken from you when you go to the job, when you dress for the image, when you kiss up to the power establishment, when your time is turned into money. The felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved—I mean, let’s be frank about it: is enslavement—it’s simply that the rules of the game have been changed.
The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That’s the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is.
How much love is there in this culture? How much love has been carried intact from the plains of Africa through the Minoan civilization and the Medieval period and the spread of people around the planet? How much of what we call true humanness made the journey with us to this new time? We’re going to find out. We’re going to find out by pooling the love that is in each of us in a form in which it is co-extensively shared by all of us.
I’m very grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.
