Listening: A Guest Essay

It’s good to listen to your gut, it’s always the right thing to do, it always says what you need to hear, not what you think you need to hear but the real truth of the matter that’s being actualized within.

Yes, it seems our way of life is overwhelming us. Personally, I think this is the great capitalist achievement! The three pillars—commerce, the church, and human nature—have conspired to make consumers of us all. Yet just when I’ve given up thinking about this stuff a superman like Adorno comes along and gets me thinking again about the culture industry, the proto-fascists in our midst, and the large psychological problem we are facing: that we need to understand early rather than late that our minds are sick and in need of healing.

You know how when you drop something small on the floor and it’s round and whatever it is that you’ve just dropped rolls only so far away from you that you know where it is but you can no longer hear it rolling? You’ll most likely then to be reading Wittgenstein ask, No. 309, ‘What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

 But keep listening to your gut, dear reader, stick to listening, listening won’t harm you. Dance to the music you’re hearing—Blonde on Blonde, Thelonious Monk, Bill Frissell, though if you listen to Stravinsky’s La Sacre Du Printemps you’ll probably be hearing nature having a panic attack.