Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Purpose of Shadow


It is what we are made of and yet it’s all we can do to control this mass of organic material that clings to our consciousness.

Much less turn to the window and without any idea why, rant at the light – trying to enrapture its charge in the folds of our mental cloak; enable a lit idea that eludes us.

To capture shadow is to be forever free, and in the way of frequent arousals, find a basket of forever thoughts.

And yet

Thinking as some do, and some don’t, and we see that when they do they won’t.


Isn’t it odd to have a darker world that follows us wherever we go. A world that has been associated with bad things. More than sadness shadow bends beyond the walls. It shifts past the break in surfaces; it elucidates the barrier that surrounds the image of our moral selves. The equating of shadow to our sense of drama pulls at us like the moon pulls the ocean.

We live so close to the shadow world but then without it we would be formless, flat shapes of color, walking around like characters in a Miro painting. Two- dimensional figures pressed up against a landscape without a hiding space.

Then we always think of ourselves as being born out of darkness – a reflection of our individual births from the womb. And then our shadows irrepressibly stay with us as alternate selves; they are a reflection of our bisected minds compartmentalized by the barrier between positivity and negativity, living spirit and wasting death. For want of reason we cannot consider our corpus as negative so that leaves our shadows as such.

And so the more shadow we surround ourselves with the more we tend to think of ourselves as unreliable animals, unpredictable. That is because perhaps the more shadow that surrounds us the more we live in a world vibrant with imagination – beyond the social mores that contain us.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Observations on the Human Condition 6


We Are Curious

Look into any dark closet. Search out something that could be something else. A dimly lit edge of a hairbrush or the deepening inner soul of a shoebox. Study the closet closely until you can find the shape or form of something unidentifiable. Is it inside of us or outside? Is it real or imagined – maybe the edge of our subconscious or the tip of it so that our unknown mind is just beginning to emerge there. See a vague thing there – we don’t know if it is a part of us or something apart. When we fall asleep we begin to dream like we are in the closet. We have stepped into another room where a performance that has no narrative is being acted out by an illuminated impression of our memories. Things occur randomly and we recognize some, not others, we are afraid, or saviors.

But then anything, if not us, becomes us – a man with a wooden box under his arm – a woman with blazing red hair – a hard-walking Asian woman whipping her hair away from her face, partially exposed, a sort for children to adore. We mentally swallow these things and they strengthen our arms and legs with new and thickened dreams. The beat of music with an exotic flaring principle shifts into view. Accordions exhale their dismal tone until another chord fills those expanding lungs. Every step a new door - a black lady twisting her hand upward and forward toward energy and focus, her words follow – a white man in a white shirt with a white cell phone affixed to his head crossing the street leaving his pants behind – a visitor from the other side of the table with his own electronica and a turquoise scarf - while crossing the street with old tennis shoes and a dog’s tail and a friend with a sign and a mind that is filling quickly with coffee drinkers, while sign bearers are ejected from the street corner and an angry dancing shirt walks into view and music that makes the body twitch makes now the mind twirl – that’s dreaming man.