If There Is (To Be) A Light...

"That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America, selling 'consciousness expansion' without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all those people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create. A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
From the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

That mystic fallacy is our weakness today as well. We need to realize and be honest with ourselves (before it is too late) that the light isn't there. The utopia is not there. It isn't just there to be arrived at as long as we just keep moving. If it is to be there, we have to make it: if that is possible, if it is tenable.

But more likely, it is just a goal that we have to strive for as long as we believe in it. Strive to get as close as possible. Like Sisyphus, striving but knowing that we will never achieve. Like Sisyphus, that is until we no longer believe. Then, unlike Sisyphus, we can and need to find another challenge. Then we need to find another light to chase or boulder to push.

Art can't be simply an attack on power. Power goes wrong because it either has nothing to believe in besides itself or because it is working towards a light that is only an illusion: not real and more importantly not tenable. Deconstruction and attacks have been overdone; they only lead to jadded skepticism and cynicism. Art needs to create a new light.

That is what art should be doing these days. Art needs to be a creative activity of myth creation and reality weaving. It should not be simply an activity in deconstructing the structures of meaning or power that keep us from reaching the light at the end of the tunnel. The light is not there. The light is not longer believed, is no longer  practical or believable. We need a new light, and to have it we need to make it and believe in it.