Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Memories Of All Time


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.


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