ponderously

I believe unabashedly that art is ultimately a study of self. What I refer to here is a sublime intersection where the study of self through an artful medium, be it drawing, writing, singing, or some alternate form, is couched in scholarly study. The result, at its best, creates profound resonance far beyond the mind of the artist alone.

I find The Wake to be one such divine convergence. It appeals to the primal mind through a growing sense of foreboding while gathering a collection of vibrant tropes in the form of myth from various cultures throughout human history. It deftly places places this collection in a story that shifts between a dystopian future, an allegorical current, and a divergently alien past.

Without giving too much away, the first five issues positively tear through a primary story in the near-now revolving around the discovery of a scientifically unknown, competitively intelligent, and devastatingly hostile mer-creature. Flashes of future and past create just enough context to instill a feverish itch which demands the immediate acquisition of the next issue.

In short: find The Wake. Read it. Think about it. Then read it again. For your humanity.

What is amazing to me is our capacity to see and to construct a conceptual reality based upon perceived difference.  I begin seeing the human world as a congealed mass of self imposed confusion and kneejerk hatred.  While I hope we have the capacity for the type of unity I attempt to describe here, on a deep level I fear that we will ever remain distracted and caught in minute and repetitive posturings of self interest at the expense of others. 

Setting deeply ingrained fears aside for the moment...

As time goes on I find myself leaning more and more toward the idea that the profound potential of perspective to affect behavior speaks more to similarities than it does to distinctions between us. We are all entities responding to the world as the result of our unique experience from our positions here or there. We are in essence the sum of said experiences.

In my hyperactive mind 'progress' might appropriately be assessed by finding ways we may commune and relate to one another based upon actual similarity as opposed to perceived disimilarity. I believe seeking common experience, cultivating empathy, and working through perceptual media to construct conceptual bridges rather than create artificial barriers has the potential to produce net improvement in the whole of organic existence.  Regardless of the absolute philosophical truth (as if such a thing exists!) of any of these explorations, is it not more pragmatic to seek common ground and build rather than seek boundaries and tear down?  Educate and empathize.  Dig.

...in the words of the opportunely intuitive Henry Miller: "I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time. and beyond it."

...anyone who states that comic books and/or graphic novels are adolescent, or a waste of time, or somehow inferior to novels both has not done their reseach and is missing out on a colorful, joyful, profound, magic, innovative, beautiful, ancient, and viscerally enriching form of storytelling.

...a populace that does not revere and listen to the lessons of history from various perspectives is fundamentally flawed and ultimately doomed.  Further, the death of reading for leisure and pleasure will be humanity's first step toward outright annihilation.  I am aware this is a cliche and I don't care.  I'll stop harping on it when we start doing something about it...or when I am no longer capable of coherent thought.

There are circumstances--usually instigated by insecurity and a resulting sort of morbid focus--in which I feel I become a walking exhibition of the archetypical traits I detest about humanness.  The base, mindless, purely physically driven beast lurking beneath guises of enlightenment and intelligence. It slobbers while mumbling incomprehensibly and gropes greedily, angrily, and ultimately impotently at the conceived embodiment of its desire. Conscious of the potential in me to become caught in the trappings of such deluded hyper-focus, I am in a process of seeking to understand my desires and to inch closer toward what I actually want.  

I have the sense we are all connected by invisible strings of emotion and shared experience. Both to other humans and to the natural systems of the world. Fundamentally my mind and body seek resonance, seek story, and seek to pluck those connecting strings to see what will happen. Deeply I am interested in the goings on inside other heads and deeply I desire that other heads be interested in the goings on in mine. The story of emotions and how they interact with the physical provides the fuel that feeds my desire to be near others. For me such desires extend profoundly above and beyond the physical while still including it. I seek to resonate with those I am close to the way a chord rings when it's deliciously tuned. I want that resonance to hit the frequency of the barriers between us and shatter them.  I want each pluck of the string to take us to new and interesting places where value may be measured in experience and progress is not only up but sideways, backwards, and every other direction.  These desires are the stuff of myself.  I've sought said resonance for as long as I can recall though I  have not always known, and still don't truly know, how to ask for it nor how to express the magnitude of the concept. Accepting such confusion while still seeking to explore the way through it is a fundamental part of intimacy as I understand it.

This first re-entry will be personal, future posts when they occur will be less so.  For 7 years now I have been sprinting through relationships, friendships, stimuli, media, and ideas in an attempt to find, perhaps even to create, limits.  A wise friend of mine told me awhile ago that time only speeds up as we age.  I am inclined to agree, and in agreement, I have slowed enough to begin questioning my eagerness seek the end of, or a change in things instead of allowing them space and time to happen on their own. 

Encompassed in the accelerated activities mentioned above are the acts of assuming as opposed to asking, being presumptive rather than perceptive, and controlling rather than collaborative.  I am now forcibly seeking to slow down, and be aware enough of self and impulse to expand my life rather than contract it.

I am in the process of moving. Both in mind and in residence.  An effect of this process is the confrontation of history as I sift through artifacts from the past thirty years. I find myself handling things I haven't seen in many moons and time traveling as a result.  This morning I found an old Italian Aria I last sang in 2007. Without thinking I began running through it.  Softly at first and then with more confidence as I realized it is still as present as it ever was, still suits me as well as it did then, and still gives me delightful shivers even as I type about it now. 

Today as I continue to sort through the physical evidence of my life, I feel better than I have some great time. So, I suppose this is the point where the unconscious collective dictates a point, or a moral, maybe even a lesson be presented.  My lesson is: facing the past in the interest of proceeding to the future is both necessary and rewarding...if also occasionally gutwrenching and hard. 

It is rare my monumental ego finds someone else's words accurate enough to express what I am feeling (<--this is both massively true and massively not) but today this song by Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Ries (I'm assuming--possibly dangerously--that one or both of them wrote it) is ringing so true I cannot help but quote unabashedly:  

"Autumn's ashes summer's embers, suddenly I can't remember any lessons learned. Now that I'm a migrant picker, trouble minded tin can kicker, I wish my skin was thicker. The air has turned. I can live alone I said. I can make my lonesome bed.  I don't need a hole in my head. I don't need a lover. But he took me by surprise. I fell down and saw him rise. Till he was larger in my eyes than any other. How suddenly the summer died. I couldn't bring it back to life. I couldn't sing it back to life. But I tried"