Today I discovered David Leo Rice. Planning to listen to wake island, and looking forward to reading Drifter, Stories.

I enjoyed feast of fools:

• Modern culture as a carnival that never packs up, where the line between real and unreal, sacred and profane, town and circus, has fully collapsed. it is now the condition of daily life: chaotic, grotesque, yet fertile, pregnant with potential.
• The fools at this feast know they’re fools; in this way become wise.
• Rather than renouncing trash culture, we must digest it creatively, or be consumed by it. Finding the "Seedy”. not shady (corrupted) or shitty (sterile), but full of latent energy. Reclaiming the low, the grotesque, the obscene as sacred creative matter. The artist becomes a filter.

In a crumbling world, the fool digging through absurdity and filth may unearth deeper truths and creative "fuel".

But, does this also legitimize what lurks in the "trash"? nihilism, corruption, greed, harm, self-indulgence? Nietzsche's "will to power" was abused in grotesque, monstrous ways...

For Rice , the artist must metabolize trash without becoming trash, must enter the carnival without losing conscience.

For Ortega Y Gasset, we are destined to (re)create ourselves out of our circumstance. To make (and remake) our own life with the things offered to us. To seek truth through multiple (not equally valid) viewpoints and continuous reexamination.

Ultimately each of us must ask: Am I becoming more sensitive and alive through immersing in the chaos of the carnival? Or am I using the feast to excuse decay—mine or others’?

#creativity #culture