Our tragic nature

"You "know where things are headed" and you go there. You do not get out a map and agree on the route you will take. You engage, you link up, you get in sync... I am generous and optimistic about the human spirit. I believe that most of us want to do the right thing. But I also believe we are insufficiently rigorous in our analysis of exactly how murderously confining our traditions and beliefs are, and how very contrary our traditions and beliefs are to our actual innermost desires, and how many ways those thwarted desires adopt innocuous disguises to achieve distorted purposes. In the 1960s we tried, for a brief time, to figure out if we could live closer to our natural and relaxed state of desire, if we could be more open and less shamed about what we wanted. We tried to stop parroting fictions about the human condition and live more fully within both the difficulty and the joy. We wanted to see if we could be both existentialists and sensualists, if we could both admit our tragic nature... and still exist in, or at least on the margins of, mainstream capitalist American society. People differ on how well that turned out."
- Cary Tennis

Art by Svetlin Rusev