Poets Are Our Modern-Day “Quixotes”

A Sociological Essay on How to Live Purposely

There is still much to be done in this experiential fabric called the historical process, inserted in our space-time. It seems that everything is done and said, but that is not the case. On the one hand, the paramount thing to do in a praxis or well-oriented practice is to try to organize mentally any conglomerate or group. Yes, our western organization is disoriented in its daily experience. The idea would be to organize this conglomerate or group of millions of beings that euphemistically are called society. Social orientation is essential for these groups that are really willing to be guided, without being aware of the lack of guidance.

There are authors, we would say, teachers, who say that the serious problem of Westernized man lies in his state of consciousness. It is because he is asleep. That is, he is asleep until midday, in full sun. Even when they believe they are awake, the man and woman of these latitudes are asleep. This is the subject, called a human being, lives continuously in that condition. These teachers say that the Western man and woman do nothing to awaken.

It seems we exist without paying attention to the environment where we live. That is why the ecological is a serious problem before which the human being has no answers. We are in society but it seems that it does not exist. We have no idea of the reality that surrounds us. Yes, we have become very efficient when it comes to doing things. But we do it with an automatic stop. What we generate we do with a certain utilitarian conscience, yes but … we realize it as if we did not need our conscience to execute the important matters of our life: the essence of our creativity. Because we do it automatically. This has become mechanical, automatic. Then we function as if real robots. That is why we look like machines, not men, or women.

Part of a poet’s job is to awaken self-conscience

It is necessary to guide those who are not asleep. For if this was not so, the biblical saying would be fulfilled that a blind man cannot be the guide of another blind man. Being asleep is as much as being blind. And when we talk about being blind we do not refer to the physical defect, but it is the way we see our life with a closed spirit, with little vision, then we have the blind spirit.

Social orientation is essential. If such a premise is put into execution, it could be seen as the mental exercise of a series of individuals, occupying the space of that character of all times, who became master of the conscience of his time and left on the loins of his horse, next to a dumb assistant to fight against some real windmills, leaving sown the seed of the nonconformity in front of the bewilderment,  and the negligence that has characterized the unhappy western man, product of his dependent need of being conscientiously mediocre and poor spiritually. Of course, you breathe: but you’re still standing idly on the side of the road.

Now, those characters full of metaphors, colored strokes and musical notes, with their internal music as coming out of shady woods, and which are so real, persisting with certainty in their madness, energized by a loving and crystalline poetic communion, of making the creative act the only good that as a seed fills little by little the furrow and leave it there, satiated. And those, the unbelievers call it crazy acts and enjoy that: but the visionaries of deep sensibility ignore and persist in leaving the tracks when they place the seed, and in that they look at each other and know that there is a lot of pain, because it is reflected in the faces, in the furrows of those faces; there is despair all around, because reality involves desolation and delirium. For being the cause of what we perceive at every moment: apathy and bewilderment stimulated by a reality that encourages discouragement and submission, generator of the dormant being.

So, if that is the case, there are only 2 ways to travel. On the one hand, try to minimize the degree of social intoxication. When we speak of social intoxication, we refer to all that socioeconomic structure, which drives the social individual not to analyze with judgment the dense skein in which modern society has become and in which he lives; not to think that social life depends on each one as a man, as a woman. In addition, this intoxication is a factor that clouds, that numbs and that keeps the man in a difficult situation and with few possibilities of escape, if he does not wake up to consider that his life is in an imbalance reflected in the confusion that generates dissatisfaction, uneasiness, doubt, and anxieties in which he coexists with other human beings who are in identical condition.

The second option is that of cultural organization, which contributes in depth to creating the necessary values, the basis for sustaining social specificity. Now, it is the wasteful society of collective resources, in most of the countries that have to be balanced, because all the entities that fall in love with it disorient the path through which it must travel, such as maintaining a critical judgment constant, nutritious and enriching to any individual who considers it worthwhile to live in peace and with justice. Culture does not mean just the act where a beautiful painting by a famous name is exhibited, nor does it mean the concert given under the dome of a luxurious enclosure. Culture is everything that has a human seal, which has been created in order to achieve the adjustment of the man with his environment, for being the man so natural that he feels he belongs to that something that fills him with life and existence as it is nature. To understand that we believe we must be awake.

In today’s societies, there is a high content of negligence and a great degeneration of the socio-economic, political and cultural life system that dominates the low activation energy of men in groups. It is the force of corruption, the one that keeps us in, whatever happens, we join that condition; to accept that state of affairs. That is why we are disoriented and believe that we have everything because we are led to judge that everything is well calculated, that we have no responsibility for the actions we carry out individually, selfishly and intransigently. That implies social responsibility. And in this lies the dispersion, both individual and collective; being the general confusion what inhibits any popular option that could foment the putting into practice of the projects with a collective sense. The family is a project, which has diminished in the importance it has socially. If there is no family project, we cannot imagine bigger projects. We talked about the project of living together as a family. That is as simple as that!

Don Quixote in the mirror

The progressive debasement in the society is an unequivocal sign of a persistent and masked crisis of modern man. A crisis that numbs and ends by extinguishing the odd spark that leaps from the collective consciousness, however widespread it may be.

But the option is there, waiting for our action. Only from a cultural organization, it is valid, to transform the entire media apparatus, which some of it exhibits power to manipulate and intoxicate a whole crowded number of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the cities and urban centers, in total confusion in its historical process. From there the presence of the “Quixotes” who launch against the windmills: the poets. For being the conscience of the people.  A poet is a creator. And what kind of challenge awaits him!

VIATCRN Staff
SOURCEDavid Rivas H.
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