It Takes A Deep Commitment To Change

So Why Do I Write, Torturing Myself To Put It Down? Because In Spite Of Myself I've Learned Some Things. Without The Possibility Of Action, All Knowledge Comes To One Labeled "file And Forget," And I Can Neither File Nor Forget. Nor Will Certain Ideas Forget Me; They Keep Filing Away At My Lethargy, My Complacency. Why Should I Be The One To Dream This Nightmare?

It Goes A Long Way Back, Some Twenty Years. All My Life I Had Been Looking For Something, And Everywhere I Turned Someone Tried To Tell Me What It Was. I Accepted Their Answers Too, Though They Were Often In Contradiction And Even Self-contradictory. I Was Naive. I Was Looking For Myself And Asking Everyone Except Myself Questions Which I, And Only I, Could Answer. It Took Me A Long Time And Much Painful Boomeranging Of My Expectations To Achieve A Realization Everyone Else Appears To Have Been Born With: That I Am Nobody But Myself. But First I Had To Discover That I Am An Invisible Man!

The World Is Just As Concrete, Ornery, Vile, And Sublimely Wonderful As Before, Only Now I Better Understand My Relation To It And It To Me.

The Blues Is An Art Of Ambiguity, An Assertion Of The Irrepressibly Human Over All Circumstance Whether Created By Others Or By One's Own Human Failings. They Are The Only Consistent Art In The United States Which Constantly Remind Us Of Our Limitations While Encouraging Us To See How Far We Can Actually Go. When Understood In Their More Profound Implication, They Are A Corrective, An Attempt To Draw A Line Upon Man's Own Limitless Assertion.

In Those Days It Was Either Live With Music Or Die With Noise, And We Chose Rather Desperately To Live.