Picture who you are right now. Not the fabricated mask
orchestrated by a million motivational obstacles courting your personal best.
Look in the mirror at the interior, hiding behind bells and whistles, the fractaled,
less than optimum, though genuine self. The one flitting about when no one is
looking. Know that person, for it is all that is left of the child who came
into this world – the elemental self before the world formed the person to be.
If created by myriad influences, images and narratives singing like demented
sirens through the airwaves, then uncover the vibrant being from before all
that. The path may rock this way and another by circumstances you did and did
not create. There is no getting around it. You can forget what is best about
you, located within the confines of initial wonder.
The mirror transforms over time. If we live by story, let us
create unfathomable myths from our origins since all we are and do is connected
to this elementary idea. Regardless of material possessions, status truthful
and negligible, we respond to archetypes slathered with culture. Look at our
most precious and long-lasting images/ideas, and you will find most transcend
time, place as well as culture. While meaning may vary, we long for the
fantastic, for something not of this world. Dragons, mermaids, angels, aliens,
giants, various monsters, heroes, ghosts. What we call reality, the ordinary
issues of life, does not serve us fully, especially in times of great turmoil,
great dissatisfaction or fear. Turning to the imaginary bolsters the day no
matter what the current administration or the university’s president’s office
may think. Circumvented art, once it became a slave to commodity, lessened in
its universal properties by imitating the market it serves. The notion of
wonder, or of philosophic understanding of ordinary reality, moved to the
supermarket shelf. Buy this or perish. Can we really go on with such
content-less machinations?
Put aside the need to comment on current issues per se, to
look inside the human condition. If there is no attempt to consider other
worlds outside the daily practice of living, spiritus mundi suffers. Without
delight, or the sublime, we never move out of one view. Art, poetry, dance, all
those things provide a glimpse of elsewhere, allows a reprieve from wanting too
much order, and the inability to maintain it. Without elsewhere, we shun the
other. When order/disorder eliminates the day dream, our existence becomes
thinly regimented.
