The (lack of the) Mysterious

in a tangent from the Giving Up Coffee thread in which Chaotropic started telling amazing stories about his cryptozoological expeditions on Dissensus.

I think it's important that some things aren't grounded, aren't accepted, aren't codified, aren't nailed down. So, the important thing about my kind of cryptozoology, isn't finding things, necessarily, but simply that the act of looking allows other people to have faith that the world is larger than they've been led to believe. In the same way that surrealism does. It sortof sanctions dreaming. Does that make sense? It's like, somebody in the world has to be doing this, otherwise nobody is doing it, & that what a boring world it would be if nobody was doing things like this.

I dunno. Anyway, Zhau, that's why I do it. It totally relates to music. I'm serious.

it does make sense and i understand/agree with/am all for those reasons. but at the same time it also makes counter-sense: in the act of "destroying" the mysterious you want to remind the world of the mysterious.

and similarly the surrealist agenda is 2 fold like this: one can convincingly argue that the basic impulse is still to bring the dark to light, make the unseen seen, the "conquering" of the irrational by the rational mind. surely what is not seen or represented is the real frightening mysterious?

but i think the work of Gabriel García Márquez and Salmon Rushdie functions slightly or a lot differently from the above. and some films and music and art do too. i like the idea of making things which jolt people out of their routine, quotidian reality - and the fact that this is needed (very much so IMO) is testament to the sad (in melancholic sense) state of the world.

the reign of the rational in "the west" is ridiculous, boring, and fuels an absurd sense of self righteousness. it is horrific and laughable that people do not believe in the possibility of something if no photo has been taken of it. people like to, and do, think that they are more or less standing on a complete set of knowledge about everything under and above the sun, and this is simply far, far from the truth. (add this to the list [URL="http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=5607&highlight=critique+science"]here[/URL])

chinese medicine has maintained for 5 thousand years that the balance of the world and its inhabitants is being systematically destroyed, and that this is the main cause of all the collective sickness (environment, etc, etc etc etc). too much light, not enough dark.