Impulse – Volume 10 Number 2, Winter 1982

Forces press against. We resist and become tired. The forces continue. If these were positive and not oppressive, all would seem well. We are in the winter of 1982, and are to say the least, not overjoyed. The suggestion of change is met with argument. Opposition is announced in the name of morality, law, pragmatism, the status quo.
Against his complaints and better wishes he’s pushed into a cage, shoved rudely into a car and carried 200 kilometers into the forest. Confused. Frightened. Arriving at a shack beside a swamp. Cowering as all senses of the environment read as hostility. He hears them drinking, laughing, eating. Smells the smoke from the fire but is too far from the flame to be comforted. The next day at the first opportunity he runs blindly into the woods. Wild without direction. Escaping. By nightfall completely lost, completely unbounded. Not the faintest sound of their presence. His freedom has been short lived; the cage is now undefined distance and direction.
Weary, we mythologize a sense of ever more vague potential, but this promise could shift as easily into destruction as creation. Our myths become shapeless. Exhausted, curled into himself for warmth. The strange animal odor of fear fills his air.
Every day, it is necessary to deal with the spectre of vague forces. But eventually that which looms as opposition must be named or measured. The common scales of measurement are now exhausted and rationalize repression. A new set of archetypal positions and actions must be formulated and articulated.