And that is all I can stand to do because your essays are so compact, tidy, and beautiful. Little rock gardens of neatly-trimmed thought and rigorously organized critique I can only hope to attain one day.
I recently began reading your Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. I love it. It might become the ‘textbook of our class’ you so fondly reference. Though I’ve only read 6 thus far–just finished “Histories in the Making”–I confess I did skip ahead a bit to read one that stuck out. I am a filmophile and enjoy Kubrick’s work as much as he did Futura. So I skipped to number 32.
Perhaps this has already been pointed out to you. Perhaps not. However, here is some Beautiful Evidence for you in correction to your essay, Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design. (Please see p. 104 of the book for the text I’m referencing here).
The few lines in Part One fromfashioningarchitecture‘s post contain a richness not seen in average everyday conversation. The metaphrasis that occurs during translation is such that a type of poetry of association occurs. As we swim through the language–in keeping with the previous metaphor of a fish–we not only feel the thick water passing over our fins, but we also feel from whence we came. We feel the ‘now’ water as well as the ‘then’ water. At the same time.
The liquid asset of a soul in Donnie Darko
While it’s not time travel and not evidence of a soul, the use of the words now and then describe the physical act of translation that happens. We hear a Chinese phrase. If English is our first language, our first instinct when learning Chinese (or any new language, for that matter) is to translate everything heard to the original, the one we knew before, or English.
This phenomenon is perhaps extreme with Chinese and English. The grammar of both is exceptionally different. The pronunciations are more intricate in Chinese. There are ten different duns, for example. In English, we might just have ten different and entirely separate words.
One thing I’ve noticed about our English language is that having so many words creates a massive library of stored information and associations. This thing is a rock. This rock is granite. This granite is gray and brown. This gray is like the Long Island sound on a winter’s day crashing into Block Island. This brown is like the rich earth underneath the leaves in a forest.
This fish moves with the fluency of so many a tuna. Think of all those countless associations above and the millions of offspring associations they can and do all make. Then imagine multiplying that exponentially with a second language and all the dialects languages naturally beget. Not only does the form of the grammar shift, but also the nature of the associations.
Everything is Illuminated
I once watched the film Everything is Illuminated with a Russian sitting next to me. There are two languages in the film and much of the struggles Elijah Wood’s protagonist Jon-fen goes through have to do with things lost in translation. However, listening to the English, reading the subtitles (and their version of a translation), as well as having the benefit of a native Russian present to speak the English out loud was an immersion I will never forget. The Russian’s commentary on the poor translation was another level of filter that not all of us have access to every day in hearing another language.
This four-fold experience of language no. 1, language no. 2, the print (and established) translation of language no. 2 into language no. 1, and the oral translation of language no. 2 into language no. 1 imprinted the film into my mind as evidence of something I hadn’t noticed before. Even within my one language of English, this happens every day, no matter what the grammar mavens (Steven Pinker’s term)say.
Think of it within the context of moving as a kid. Especially if you moved from one language region to another. Imagine your surprise if you moved from South Carolina into the heart of New England’s language cradle (Boston). Trading one accent (markedly different and distinct even from other accents within the South) for another can be quite a culture shock.
Now imagine this same principle, this same feeling of ‘otherness’ as further enhanced by an entirely separate language with its own thousands of years of distinct evolution in descriptive subtlety and shift in accent.
Same feeling. Maximized effect. More variables. Total immersion in another culture.
Beijing, as the newest of the world’s capitals might be the perfect place, as a non-Chinese speaker to experience this phenomenology of language.
Look at the cliche, but French unwillingness to acknowledge foreigners in Paris (though they often speak English themselves). Are we becoming the same in NYC? Are servers going to start ignoring foreigners who make the attempt to learn our own elaborate tongue? Maybe if we start paying them more than 3.30 an hour.
I think the people in these environments will determine the parameters of their acceptance as well as their boundaries for the allowance of foreign tongues to ‘contaminate’ their own. One thing that shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is the richness that follows a culture’s acceptance of the many.
Remaining stagnant or gaining the attribute of bigotry in a world that is becoming ever-more global and increasingly infused with more dialects, both hybridized and pure, may not be an intelligent choice. If the nature of language is fluid, then this pond should remain murkish.
It has been said the vulgate of the Roman Empire was a form of French. Perhaps the true legacy of Empires is the languages of its peoples. The most honest forms of exchange and the purest makers of culture and ideas are happening all around us in the streets. With the words we choose to speak and to share, we consciously participate in the formation of something greater than ourselves.
After cities have dissolved. After buildings become skeletons, stories will still be exchanged by some distant and future campfire. Even if we mutate beyond the necessity for an oral tradition, the language of the people will remain the most honest.
The vulgate will be the most beautiful then as it is now. I only hope we enjoy the language of the #rightnow in the present tense.
I’ve been wondering of late about the nature of language and our constant desire to make it a static thing that doesn’t move or change or evolve. The longer I speak, the more I write, the more I immerse myself in language–the more I realize it is a slippery fish, perhaps not meant to be caught.
Check out James Jean’s SCULL from 2009. Thanks to MonsterFresh.
Most recently, I’ve become fascinated with my girlfriend’s changing method of speaking as she spends more and more time in China. Rather quickly (within two months’ time), her language has begun to flip-flop. She will place predicate before subject, etc.
“At the very least I hope you are impressed at how syntax is a Darwinian ‘organ of extreme perfection and complication.’ Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time. Science has begun to crack the beautifully designed code that our brains use to convey complex thoughts as words and their orderings.” (p. 116, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker)
To continue the metaphor of the fish, her syntax goes back and forth through “the water” of a day depending on how she needs to communicate during that space and time. Much like the fins of a fish change and undulate depending on where the fish needs to go and how the water is behaving around it.
While this is humorous to me, without any context for its occurrence, it is beautiful evidence of her “swimming” with language. I am only observing the trails she’s leaving behind and smiling. A photograph would capture it as a blur.
This does not mean that she is devolving, or that she is losing her English. It means she is gaining a new form of grammar that she previously did not have. She is constantly immersed in Chinese, but also its hundreds of dialects and accents –not to mention the hundreds of misinterpreted and amalgamated forms of English we ourselves are privy to every day. (Twitter. #thenewgrammar.) For her and for those in her situation, these strangers in a strange land, I nod my head. She is fearless in her enthusiasm and insatiable curiosity.
However, within the framework of Chinese society, these strange versions of our language are not ‘incorrect’ though striking. Our language has changed in China, but that does not make it poor grammar, or even ‘incorrect,’ if such a thing is possible. While I am not sure I have ever attended a
“Dinner tasting the Pingyao”
or that the dinner only (or that you can ‘taste’ a city)
“features snacks”
or what it must have felt like (or how a main course of granola bars looks)
“swim two hundred years ago, Wall Street”
or how that fish swam towards the (have you met my friend, Wall Street)
“– the Ming and Qing Dynasties ancient street.”
I am sure that a snack at dinner sounds a little too light, but if I was a hobbit?Needing 14 meals a day, I might enjoy both the main course and a snack at dinner. Never forget your audience, no matter their stature.
I am sure that I would love to travel back in time just to swim, but I suffer a unique and chronic water addiction.
I’m not sure I’d like to swim on Wall Street, but I am sure there used to be a Wall there and I’m pretty sure it used to keep the flood of English colonial rats away from the civilization of New Amsterdam several hundred years ago–a drop in the bucket as far as the Chinese are concerned. But I thought Wall Street was only New York City?
For certain, language is a changing, amoebic thing. We, as a specie would do well to remember this an asset. Instead of hanging on to old paradigms that call for order out of chaos (and yet still that pesky chaos rears its ugly head), we might want to observe and experience the world as is. Hanging prepositions and all.
The fish keep swimming all around us, despite our attempts at phylogeny. Will we keep trying to order them, or we will learn to swim?
We call it Retirement. AARP membership. Half-price discount at Denny’s. Hilarious whispered memoirs of past exploits tweeted through dentures. Texted tales told without a cellular phone in an old folks’ home about sex from a little blue pill.
A menopausal Ouroboros. Death eating away at life like a caterpillar. What will the currently retired leave behind for the rest of us to live? Will the current chrysalis of the Boomer generation be the undoing of America? Will the butterfly that emerges be a youthful generation ready to take on the problems of a collapsing domestic infrastructure and global economics? Or will the dialogue again frame itself around capitalism and imperialism?
It doesn’t look like my generation will get any of that rest, that twilight of a siesta that slowly congeals later in life. It looks like we are going to be the first generation that will have to be okay with living the rest of our lives chained to debt and passing that debt on through death.
Instead of the pyramids we read about as kids and the treasures we saw in Indiana Jones, we get to leave a mountain of stinking debtor feces to our offspring. Our afterlife will not be some pleasure place where we will be surrounded by the positives in life. It will be the place where we pass the pitfalls on as debt to our sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews.
And yet, I have found someone that has caused me to discontinue following this line of thought. As overwhelming and massive as all of this can be some days when the news is on or walking by a newspaper stand, or scanning the television even once or so a week, or perusing the twitterverse and facebookland. As massive and all-consuming as all of that noise can be….
…when she walks into a room, or when I hear her laugh, all of that becomes the sound of the bubbles leaving Dustin Hoffman’s mask in The Graduate. Even Simon and Garfunkel’s “Hello Darkness, this old friend…” does not penetrate the warmth of her fire. Where once I saw insurmountable piles of junk, I now seek metaphrasis. That is, I seek a new translation of an old story–the complexities of our time–into something more distilled that people can work with–I don’t think solutions is the right word. The world and its problems are not some math equation to be balanced. The Butterfly Effect is a very real threshold to consider carefully when crossing.
This is not some sappy case of rendering my mind ineffectual. In fact, it is more likely, I will retire in peace. I see the wave more clearly now. The fairway lies in front under a little cover. But the skies are blue, the grass is green and lush. Life is good and now we can get down to business. Right after I take a nap. That Senior Omelet filled me up.
Humanism does not need to contain polarity in its dialectic. Good and evil as concepts are both flawed.
There will be a grand acceptance that lying, cheating, and stealing is very much within our nature. And resistance to these precepts is just futile. They are traits we need for continuing dominance of the planet.
Thank you, Howard Bloom. Please read The Lucifer Principle for a better elucidation. Listening to Deadmau5 Alone with You might increase the level of clarity while you read. Enjoy!
Perhaps, we’ve already reached that grand enlightenment? Noticed the Stock Market of late?
Un Achieve a BlueWhere are the Foundations?Strange Avenue near Port Authority, Manhattan
None of this was caused by me. I did what they all told me to do. My parents. My teachers. My coaches.
Go to college. Do what you love. Be good at it. Be really good at it. Love it. Love your job. Love your work. The money will flow from all of this. THIS PASSION….THIS ENERGY….THIS WORK…
“Don’t worry,” they said. “I know you were poor your whole life,” they said, but they didn’t know. They… Who are They anyway? Do you remember when it was easy to define the They?
How each of them mattered to the outcome of your day? How each little thing They said or did mattered? How those collective additions or subtractions could result in the sum of a good, or a bad day? The ones that mattered when I was a child were so many.
I recall staying awake all night just thinking over each single moment of my day and how each They that mattered would think of each little moment if They were in my shoes. Going over and over each moment with someone else’s thought processes, obsessing over the details and the differences in perspective, and the puzzle of pleasing so many. Was it ever possible?
They call that anxiety. They have magic pills for that.
I’ve never taken a single one.
That sleep you do during the day? We call that Depression.
In high school, I found out the Spanish called it a siesta. And yet the Spanish They live longer than us. They were healthier when They were alive. They worked less. They played more. Theylived more. They took naps.
The World Bank They downgraded the Spanish They status as a creditor nation. They call it Retirement. King Juan Carlos might have called it Elephant Hunting. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/9273066/Spanish-royal-family-in-fresh-embarrassment-over-role-of-blonde-aristocrat.html) I wonder how much of the same gene pool the Royal They share in Spain. Estimates for the English royals shared alleles is quite a high percentage, but I leave the speculation and research to the reader as I care little for the backwards breeding practices of kings or Ozarkians. And yes, I see them as the same They.
AARP membership. Naps. Half-price discount at Denny’s. They early to bed. They early to rise. It doesn’t look like my generation will get any of that They rest. We don’t even get the slow build They get to a good night’s rest late in life. Let alone a They nap in the middle. We get the tail end of the never-ending Ouroboros. We have to eat our way back to the head.
Lack of Clarity in Advertising the ImaginationThings Get Clearer, the More we SwimThe Layers Must be sifted for focus
So what is the head, and what are They dreams? What does the snake head think as They sleep? Where is its tenacity? I think They might be at home with Mom and Dad right now, unwilling participants in the systematic and internal destruction of a solid middle class They.
The Ever Lasting in ManhattanWheres Harrington in Manhattan?
Here are my thoughts on the current generation:
They Schism
It is difficult to find one’s place in the sea of people and constant communication in today’s world. Identity is a literal crisis in today’s society. Once you believe you have discovered one piece of yourself, you might also discover that piece to be at odds with one of the They mentioned above. You may have discovered a piece, but the media and society will systemically eradicate any sense of unity or solidarity you might have with those sleepy-time They we held so dear.
In the ’70s, there was a schism in gender. Look at the separations this has created in our society, our peaceful plaintive pastoral concept of the Nuclear family has been picked apart to the point where it is the norm for a child to have multiple sets of parents. This in turn, creates in early childhood, and more dangerously,in early adulthood a grand schism in the They. A detachment from the most basic of relationships of child to mother or father. Is it any wonder They focus on things like education?
I am not of the belief that feminism challenges the ideas of family, but I am a firm believer in the concept of divide and conquer. Imagine a child’s mind is like a cell. The first division that must take place for it to create the They that exists now outside of the self, must be the division between mother and father and child.
Next, and an ongoing schism that is actually easier to capitalize on is the myth of the term race. They would like us to believe the races are different. Eugenics sought for a long time to prove this difference with the tenets of science. (Again, do your own research into eugenics, please.) Our jawlines might be different. The amount of melanin in our skin, our noses, our eye color, the shape of our ear lobes, the texture of our hair, our ability to cope with various thresholds of the physical environment, etc. etc. Ironically, attempts were made during the separation of the family unit to unite the races. Several key figures in this movement were assassinated in a visible and culturally powerful way. Strong leaders are not good for the They.
Next, a schism inside your own head. McLuhanites may disagree that technology wields power over minds, but I believe any system–especially organic ones like the role of public opinion–can be hijacked for any purpose. Whereas the idea of technology as an extension of some physical aspect of mankind is an appealing one, there are certain parts of the body that, if extended are not readily controlled consciously. The central nervous system, that McLuhan would say was extended outward from the body with the power grid and electricity, is not a conscious physical mechanism at this stage of human evolution.
Since the dawn of the television, public opinion has become a ruling factor in almost every aspect of human life. Advertising performs the same role it always has in advertising itself (McLuhan). The ‘campfire’ which created the ‘global village’ is also a box used for transplanting (ironically, even in a linear fashion, once you become desensitized to overstimulation in cities or on the interwebs) ideas. You are able to say one thing thousands of miles away that could take perhaps dozens of days of travel to deliver. I can speak through television in Denmark live if I so desire.
The nature of television, however, cannot extend beyond that campfire metaphor readily. It is a simple device and much like the one guy on a camping trip that always ends up staring at the fire for hours, television has a similar effect. Linklater’s Idiocracy is an expression of this numbing/dumbing effect. Breaks must be taken from this device, however, Americans’ intake of television has systematically increased since its invention. The trend of late, however, seems the reverse. They have decided the Internet is more suited to their needs.
What They also introduced around the same time as the television is an actual physical barrier to the human assimilation of its own extensions of itself in the form of technology. Drugs. Chemical control of the species would be essential. Divide the organic, more easily transient bonds and relationships made with one another, and you’ve taken a step, but the human mind is a resilient thing. Chemical warfare must take place. Perhaps even the invention of various ‘disorders’ that might have existed before, but now we have ‘knowledge’ of all of the sudden. What did imbalanced people do before They told them to take medicine for that?
And the final nail in the coffin?
TRIP 1
Create an impenetrable abstract system of exchange capable of overwhelming all of the senses at once. The end game of capitalism is not and never has been money. Financial wealth is transient. Even the Pharaohs of old knew their earthly treasures could not be taken with them. Capitalism performed its duty efficiently for about 500 years–the duty of creating constant competition inside the specie, of extending the conflict for natural resources to an external idea–however, new models will be required in the coming centuries.
The current methods of control will not work in a slippery Age of Information where people once again regain consciousness outside the warmth of the campfire. The Internet allows for the old linear Capitalist Economic model to be extended only so far. Supply and demand become too easily manipulated and/or stopped by the public opinion which now becomes an organic system reminiscent of the Earth’s weather patterns.
And like the weather They cannot predict, this public opinion and the role it plays in the formation of other systems (like the movement of winds and waters and its role in the constantly shifting thermodynamics of this planet) becomes equally as unpredictable. The observation of an electron as it is stopped changes its physical nature, not just the physics of its movement.
Theydo not, of course want to see us keep going on the current path. Certain boundaries must be put into place. The wall of the Patriot Act, however, will create the wild card of Julian Assange, who now has his own show in Russia. Even the brilliant predictive cynic Orwell could not have predicted the complexity of the evolution of these systems of constant and ever-shifting propaganda. Next time you see a conflict arise, look two meridian lines to the East or West. The age of the Briton might be at an end, but the age of They‘s influence is not.
They can no longer wield the same power over the human psyche, and the old systems of economic/cultural control are breaking down. Those that are doing the breaking are working more quickly than those doing the building. Even the former world’s great capitals are fading. They may or may not notice. All the fight in the world is not, however, going to stop that Hegelian sun from rising. They fear the invocation of that orb more than others. Natural law dictates this exchange of energy, however, and the form it will take will be constant. Flux is real. Stasis is They. Learn to swim. Learn to move. Learn to adapt.
Creating this environment of constant conflict has resulted in a quickening not just in our ability to manufacture technology, but also a quickness in absorbing its evolutionary benefits. Game theory failed because Nash failed to account for the human in mankind. Show me the math that predicts the nature of humanity, and I will show you the constant and inaccurate models predicting the behavior of electrons. They created a dream. We’re making a reality.
We’re waking up. Time for They to go back to sleep. Time for us to manufacture their further dreams of control. Time again for a new form to take hold.
The little pink button that makes the biggest, most beautiful explosion the world has seen yet, will ever see, or wants to see again.
The greatest possible Trojan Horse to enter our collective unconscious since man first sat with a friend in a cave and ingested a mushroom.
A fantastic Ouroboros of a pipe dream.
Salinger’s undream.
Philip K. Dick’s private joke to those of us that know is that eventually there will be a massive unveiling. Only, the form that unveiling will take is the joke within the joke. Inception‘s Dream within a dream. There is no spoon. And there is no dream. Let alone a veil or an unveiling.
After reading Simon Critchley’s analysis of Dick as a philosopher in the OpEd of the NY Times (also on The Stone, a brilliant philosophical feed) and the philosophy within Philip’s Exegesis specifically, I wondered about what that meant to a writer, living and working in the age of Twitter. Let’s keep this to 72 characters or less please, including spaces. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/)
If the dream within the dream does not exist, if the dream itself does not exist, Kant’s noumenon seems more real than the phenomenon of the ding in sich. The thing in itself begins to manifest, that is to be observable.
Calculus’ imaginary numbers begin the formation of a reality in both form and the crystalline architecture of urbanity. Further, the sensory structure of identity begins to merge with environment so that man isn’t just using his senses to observe, but becomes them. McLuhan’s Extensions of Man have become probiscii that anyone can access at any time with sufficient electricity and a reasonable accumulation of language. The mathematics of time begins to fold into itself and we have a reality wormhole which forms a forever unreality. The painter painting an abstraction of himself. The abstraction revealing itself as a reality. In the modern fashion, these abstractions are more real.
The great unveiling that Dick’s American Gnostic viewpoint foretells is not one of loud trumpets and blaring, thundering chariots and thousands of rows of horses. It will be the whimper. The tactile trumpets played on the aural streets of Chicago by countless, weary sensory-deprived sidewalk prophets. It will be sad and terrible and beautiful and concrete. It will be the sound of thousands of centipedes’ legs in a stone jungle and it will go unnoticed by most. It will be constant and unavailing. A tsunami of constant language. Steven Hall’s (http://steven-hall.org/ca/) inkblots made of Ludovicians that thought they once existed. Enter your password for Twitter. Tweet that. Tweet this. Share it. Like it.
It is simply a natural phenomenon. It will smell of sulfur and swamp and Haribo gummies. That’s it, they will ask? That’s the Great American Novel? Anomie?
The Great American Novel is being written now. It is here. We are living it. It is breathing because we will it so. So open all the doors and windows and go outside.
“Hey, I am calling you, but no, I do not want to speak to you.” I am calling you because of some overwhelming and innate desire to see your work, to piss on it, to say mine is better. No, I am not your friend.
Artists don’t have friends.
But yes, I do want to see your work.
And before I take a good close look, I hate it.
And now…
Oh wait, yes, don’t worry I hate you too, now that I’ve come all the way out here to see this work I hate, I’ve suddenly realized I have an overwhelming burning hatred deep inside my soul for you–not just your work, but you.
Look at how you fuck the camel hair on your brushes. Look at the splatters everywhere. You use a can? A straw? That’s not art. You’re not an artist. You’re a fake, and I hate you. Goddamn Lasceaux straw blowing fool.
Your work isn’t even work. It’s garbage. You are Delaware and your ‘art?’ Your so-called ‘art’ is an attempt at weening what little hope you have of feeling for any of the pathetic minstrels we now call humans from your hands onto canvas. It has nothing to do with form or color or line. Your ‘art’ is self-serving creative masturbation. Intellectual vanity at its worst with the highest of labels. Salingerian in its scope of phony. You sick, sad fuck.
“Do you have any wine? How did you mix that red? Where’s that girl, the pretty one with the curl in her hair that’s always around? The one that brings you bread and cheese for lunch? You know, the one we all love?” She has a kiss on the left side of her cheek, right here?
Yes, that’s her name.
I hate her too.
What if these miserable stains of ink were to practice meditation? What if their calling wasn’t so wrapped up in their egos and emotions? What if these people were professional and on time, and practiced controlled fits of meditation where work fell out of their tongues and hands and eyes and poured onto their canvas or onto paper? These people are the practitioners of something called design.
Artists hate them the absolute most. Warrior visual poets sent from hell to make artists look like the wineo burnouts they are in movies. Modi with a Cuban accent. Designers aren’t actors, we might use drama, but only for a purpose, not the chaos it causes or some perverted sense of the warps in the wrinkles of time like Dali.
We’ll clean you up, or we’ll leave you out. Or, maybe, just maybe, we’ll be both. You can have your dark corners and your cigarettes and coffee and your too-skinny, too tight jeans. We prefer comfort to suffrage. We have received the call from those artists. We chose to hang up the phone…
As a disclaimer, I must say I consider myself both a practicing artist and a professional designer. For those of you who are professional, practicing artists, this is not meant for you. I admire and respect you greatly and as a professional designer, I would gladly practice professional art professionally as a practitioner of art for the purpose of bringing income–at least, in practice. I am envious and hope to follow a path that bridges many of the gaps so often thrown up between our ilk.
And maybe one day I too will make the call and don the jeans and pretend to be Italian and sad when I am Cuban and happy. Maybe being an artist is just being a circle within oneself.
What is its form? Is it context-sensitive? What function does it perform? Is it collective or firmly rooted in the psyche of the individual? Can we see its grid lines? Is it possible to manufacture such a thing from ideas into physical form? Are cities representation of it? Is money? Is language? Is love?
Is it possible that schizophrenics merely experience more reality than the average mind is capable? Is it possible that burning bushes really do speak? Is it palpable to think that entire systems of belief–including the ones we hold most dear–are based on misrepresentations of the physical world, lies if you will? What makes one lie better than another? Why do some become ‘memes’ passed on not simply from one generation of memes to another, but from one physical and genetic generation to another?
Reality is not a faith-based endeavor. Whether you choose to believe in its happenings or not, it is there. It can be touched or experienced through our other senses and then translated into data for our comrades in experience to share or to refute. Somewhere along the way in this extremely complex process, something happens to certain experiences. Perhaps a mind-altering substance is ingested. Perhaps there are certain disturbances in the force lines of the world that are refracted and reflected when two specific people come together–or love, sometimes even lust.
I believe that these moments of experience are always framed by choice. That in this sense, reality is one hundred percent manufactured. Reality, like the ever-famous Mother Nature is an uncaring force which cares not for our choices even if it allows them to take place within the confines of its physical space and boundaries. Reality is not the tree in the forest. It makes sounds whether we are there to hear them or not. Perception is not requisite for this force and neither is choice, though our experience within reality is often determined by our choices.
Many complicate life by alluding to irreality. Newton famously balanced the world of calculus with imaginary numbers. This is not coincidence. The only way to make some things real is by belief in them. Extended into a faith in them, an even more complex choice is made. People will die for this faith in the imaginary. Consciously choose to do so–sometimes en masse–simply because others believe in a separate irreality.
And yet, in mathematics, it is this very irreality which allows us to send satellites into orbit, or fly to the moon, or overcome the overwhelming force of gravity to enter space. It is not a belief in them, but the articulation of a separate reality that brings new realities into existence. For example, if we began to practice various psychic things like ‘remote viewing’ on a grand scale, what would happen? Would the grand practice of such things we think are not real prove otherwise? Why is this so radical an idea if billions of people every single day practice a belief in a grand, unformed and all-encompassing force that knows all, sees all, and is everywhere at once? Why is it so radical to think that the true power has lain in our own minds all along? That any and all form of belief or faith stems from the human mind…
Reality is…what we make of it. If we want more, we can have it. If we decide to, we can continue being people PacMans. We can keep eating, consuming, believing in ideas like money and God, all the while ignoring the amazing things all around us–one another. We can kill for having separate beliefs, or we can disregard the beliefs that do not assist the evolution of the specie. And focus more on the ones that do. We are the only specie that can articulate our own destiny, and by belief in it, make it happen. Instead of focusing on today so much, we can focus on the 3rd and 4th steps. Or at least delegate a portion of the population to do so.
Reality is manmade. It is full of color and our desires and passions and beauty and hate and death and fear. It is both terrible and wonderful simultaneously. It is impossible. It is possible. Reality is human.
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place…” –Oscar Wilde
These are some things I learned at a young age while the seeds of heroes germinated in my heart and in my mind. I call it the Great Before. Before I had the knowledge that there were real people involved in the creation of myths. Before my imagination became cultivated…
For you, Maurice.
Occurring, growing, or living in a natural state; not domesticated, cultivated, or tamed.
Max was the only monster that wasn’t nude. He had to wear a suit to be a monster. The illusion was so perfect they made him their king. Maybe it is better to live naturally, to untame the primped lives we lead.
Not inhabited or farmed: remote, wild country.
Take a walk down a street you’ve never been. Try a new food. Try a new form of transportation, like sailing. You never know what adventures you might encounter when you disrupt the ordered rows of our lives.
Uncivilized or barbarous; savage.
No need to skip a meal, but maybe try eating with your fingers for one. Eat a turkey leg at the fair. Roar in your backyard as loud as you can. Run as fast as you can and leap at an oncoming wave to scare it back into the ocean. Dance loudly all night.
Lacking supervision or restraint: wild children living in the street.
Question authority. If you do not, you might not ever learn a thing. Strike out on your own. Suffer the consequences. Accept your punishment. Apologize. Be forgiven. Experience the joy of unconditional love with a warm bowl of soup and a note from Mom.
Disorderly; unruly: a wild scene
Now and again, enjoy a wild rumpus. With your friends or with complete strangers that put you on a pedestal. Don’t forget to forget where you are once in a while. Maybe even who. Change it up.
Characterized by a lack of moral restraint; dissolute or licentious:
Get Lost. Be angry. Yell. Get red in the face. Evolution dictates a certain tithe of pain for all its benefits. But, it also created love in the process as a salve for live’s great sadnesses.
Lacking regular order or arrangment; disarranged: wild locks of long hair.
Wear mis-matching socks, or a full costume. Go to a masquerade. Mix things up. Grow your hair out. Shave it off. Grow a beard in November and a mustache in March. Let the mess on your desk build for a week. Take a picture so you remember that not all costumes are worth wearing.
Full of, marked by, or suggestive of strong, uncontrolled emotion:
Fall in love. Miss the ones we’ve lost. They would want us to move on. Bawl like Sally Field in Steel Magnolias. Lose yourself in a candy store. Run naked across an open field. Bungee jump off a bridge in New Zealand. You’ll be back to your old self in no time.
Extravagant; fantastic: a wild idea.
Don’t forget the Great Before. The things we learned there are probably the most important. If you missed out on a few, it’s never to late to learn something new. If you need to, practice the ones you haven’t done in a while. After all, practice makes perfect.
And so on, and so forth.
Things do not end. Stories continue after you put the book down. Did you ever read an amazing story and then try retelling it to one of your like-minded friends? The Great Before allows us to tell stories poorly as long as we tell them with enthusiasm.
Did you save a favorite book from childhood and reread it to one of your children? Or buy a new edition for their birthday? Because the other was too faded or worn? Or because you wanted to hold onto that one piece of the Great Before as your own, and they could have their own?
A man’s life of storytelling cut short is not ended if we continue to enjoy his life’s work. Read your favorite today. Share it with your loved ones young and old. Continue the cycle. Honor the Great Before. Honor one of the men that made this wild time possible. Honor Maurice by being wild, even if only for a day.
citizenfable 