Progress

Been thinking about that thing called progress, and how maybe it's the last notion I need to be disabused of, in my long sordid history of what I'll call disabusement, even though that's not a word. But it is rather presumptuous I guess to call it the last. I've got quite a few more years to live, if all goes according to plan that is, which means many more opportunities to get stuff wrong, or at least fail to get the proper angle on it. What I'm trying to say is that I thought the way things worked was that it was important to lay the groundwork for a desired better future, and I've always tried to participate in that in my own way. But what I missed is that nobody is ever going to agree on what that groundwork is because they don't agree on what that future should be. Well, I guess people all agree that slavery is bad? At any rate, this seems tremendously obvious, but I had my reasons, and besides that, each of us is always the last one to know. So what we have then are streams of preferred ways of being in the world that run side by side. And even if one stream seemingly runs its course I think it actually continues by splitting off into another potential reality. The stream can appear and disappear. And people, by which I mean a particular aspect of a larger, macro identity, will pop in and out of existence to experience it. For some reason the music Bach made is fully consistent with the feeling and attitude of jazz, for example. There's a spiritual or aesthetic tribe that is out there and at different times finding its expression. But it's not linear. It could even be that the Modern Jazz Quartet influenced Johann Sebastian. I guess that's the point.