THE "PROBLEM" WITH STORIES

"How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification."    

                                                                  --William James, The Will to Believe

STORIES MUST BE BELIEVED; TEXTS HAVE NO POWER.

WE ARE "COOL" TO THEM; THEY ARE "COOL" TO US. Coolness is that strange (non)affective stance whose defensive and protective genealogy is no longer recognized; we use it so often.

When we believe (& risk making a perhaps foolish investment) in something or someone there is a Jamesian liveness, an interactivity that opens us up to something cosmic.

The problem with Petit Recit Anti-Culture is not that the mystical, mythic, atavistic wellsprings go anywhere -- it's that people are numb and clueless to what is moving them.

When seized by these powerful impulses, they become, literally....

IDiots.