lavanderism

Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998)

The nonsensicality and fervor of childhood- growing pains, as the world around you doesn’t make sense, and for as long as time allows it- doesn’t have to make sense. Looking at the mirror, upon our reflections. Don’t know what the adults are up to...only this solitary, spatial home. All we’ve ever known are setting suns, the color of honey, and bees. Wandering around other wastelands...childhood is the only time in life that you are ever whole. Whole of compassion, of innocence, of cruelty, whole of your heart. Before long things will start making sense, and an obscure yet intuitive sense of existence will expire and the heartful and instinctual connection to existence will cease to exist. We will no longer be blessed as children were, to be granted the omniscience of knowing how to live as the birds tell us and move as the wind takes us, all the while knowing nothing at all.

What a tragedy that it seems adults forget what it was like to be a child. Nowadays they like to throw around a modern aphorism: ‘inner child’- an expression they generally use to label or give excuse of their childish actions or trauma. I always cringe at the notion because they say it as though it is actually an existing entity inside them. For me, that isn’t what a child is. Children are not angels. They are merely creatures of instinct. They are innocence, yet innocence delineates all things pristine, cruel, carnal, spiritual.

To me now, childhood is reminiscent of the dreariness of memories, nostalgia, incoherence. Spirit of the Beehive hearkens me back to visions of my childhood, hazy and disorienting, but also static and languid. It doesn’t have to make sense to engage your subconscious- through color, expression, space, sceneries- shots, it will always trace back to the indelible marks and memories left on your heart.