Systems

I saw a dead pigeon lying in the middle of a street this morning. It reminded me of yesterday's freak plane crash involving baseball player Cory Lidle in New York.

I thought of how rare it was for a plane to go completely out of control like that. I thought of the rare occasions cars on our roads and expressways go out of control. Every day, millions of encounters, vehicles side by side by side, inches away but only very rarely touching.

Our adaptable minds are contructed to fit into patterns of systems, including those which enable our highways. It's our conformist mentality-- not so much the narrow highways themselves-- which allow this.

Why do we think our minds operate differently in other situations? Our brains are trained to discover a comfortable groove and fit into it. This is certainly the case with the literary industry, whose members believe the myth of their own independence, while traveling conformist highways of universities and bureaucratic offices. We've seen with the CLMP affair these people unable to jump their minds out of their grooves of conformity in order to view their own system from the outside.

Systems are great for pigeons, airplanes, and cars, but detrimental to the creation of new art.