 Our technological advancements sometimes create complacency, and prevent us from truly learning skills we need when our tech fails. For instance, the flashlight. It is creates light when we need it, unless of course the batteries die. Then we are stuck in the dark. We used to know how to light and create our own fires. But this information has largely been replaced by cheap batteries and even cheaper flashlights. The LED lights last forever, until they run out. And when they do, we are just as lost as we were millions of years ago. My solution is to put my kids into Scouts so they learn the analogue survival skills necessary to survive the zombie apocalypse, then keep them close when the Everready’s stop being ready. What is your blackout backup strategy?
The Moai, giant stone statues from Easter Island (far off the coast of Chile) do not stare out at the sea and stand guard against intruders. Instead they look inland, watching over the clans who made them. According to some accounts, these clans were hedging their bets with the afterworld, appeasing their dead ancestors through these statues, trying to negotiate good fortune, while jockeying for a good position after death. It didn’t work out too well for them. All the trees were cut down, presumably to maneuver the heavy stone statues. After being stripped of the foliage, the birds began to die. Entire species on the island were wiped out, and the human population dropped from a height of 15,000 to about 3,000. Clans fought clans, statues were toppled face first into the earth, and eventually the cult of ancestral worship was replaced. I look at the natural beauty of this island and the haunting, iconic faces of the Moai, and I wonder why human beings insist on limiting their ability to accept alternative possibilities until it is too late. It sounds like a real-life version of The Lorax story. It also feels like foreshadowing for items on the news about global warming, fanatical dogma in politics, environmental degradation, and extinction. If we need to build monuments to our past, perhaps we should make them facing outward, so we can see each other instead of only ourselves. Perhaps if we can learn to focus on the needs of the world as a whole, accept different styles of thinking, zoom out and take in the bigger picture, we’ll have a better chance.
 Alexander Ceron’s Beautiful Mess chair Human beings are ‘messy machines’. We have a structure that is so complicated that it took us millions of years to map our own DNA, our own make-up. We can live for over one-hundred years, or get cut down by a simple accident. We have a basic understanding of how we function, but we still cannot replicate it, nor can we fix all of our own problems with disease, accidents, and even psychosis. Chaos Theory is based on the premise that there are interactions too complex to understand. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Canada, perhaps this will cause a chain of events that lead to the diversion of a hurricane in the Caribbean. There are so many minute factors to consider that it is impossible for the human mind to absorb, assess and make patterns. We run out of RAM. We end up calling it Chaos. Or we call it God. Or we call it Fate. We label and externalize what we cannot understand. And in that labelling, there are moments where a connection is made, where a glimpse of the big picture is gleaned, where a pattern, however fleeting, emerges. Where order, however loose, is grasped. These brief moments of brilliance define us as human beings trying to live beyond our own potential. This drive can cause great calamity and great joy, sometimes both at the once. This messiness is what gives me hope, that lets me know that conspiracy theories are too clean to be true, that evil is not a default state, and that spaghetti sauce will always find its way onto a white shirt. I respect chaos. It is a challenge to make order, to attempt to understand the beautiful mess that has been put before us.
Excerpt from The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme In the early nineties I got it into my head that I was going to create a graphic novel of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father. It’s a bizarre and unlikely story about a giant patriarcal creature, half-dead, half-alive, half-man, half-machine who is being dragged across the country toward an unknown fate. Not since Kurt Vonnegut had anyone played so playfully with language: tossing tenses and pushing poetic license. And it was incredible to read out loud. I didn’t get very far—I believe I pencilled in one letter-sized page before collapsing under the weight of my own ambition.
Now that I am a dad, the book reads very differently, even though, according to the Dead Father, “A son can never become, in the fullest sense, a father.” When it is said that “the responsibility of the father is chiefly that his child not die,” it rings true. It is funny and horrifying at the same time. It reminds me of the crushing responsibility that bore into my being when I held my daughter for the first time almost ten years ago. I stared into her squashed, squinting face and I sobbed great not-knowing sobs. I mourned the death of my own childishness. I expressed my fearful unpreparedness, my unready and unstable character. I exposed my insecurities and inadequacies. I stared into my daughter’s blue eyes and I saw my future and my past reflected in perfect unison. Then I gave myself a strong mental shake, pulled myself together, and crossed over into adulthood improv.
Being a parent is a lot like being an artist. Read another Donald Barthelme quote from his essay Not-Knowing:
Writing [and parenthood!] is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they’ve done a dozen. At best there’s a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch. The anxiety attached to this situation is not inconsiderable.”
So the next time you feel fraudulent or insecure about your work, remember that “the not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”
The Dead Father Graphic Novel Chapter Six Sketch
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. If you hand a child a musical instrument and ask them to play, they dive right in and do it. They try everything. They aren’t worried about the end product. They don’t think about the notes or the technique. They don’t think about not being good enough, or about training. They just create: spontaneously and without judgement, in the moment. Ask an adult the same question and you will hit a wall (most of the time): I don’t know how to play; I’m no good at this; I never studied music; I’m not musical. It’s a litany of excuses.
As adults, of which I am one, we don’t just take things and play. We are overly cautious. We are overly self-conscious. We are overly judgemental. We are scared shit-less. And why? Because someone might think we aren’t very good? Because someone might laugh at us? Is that really as scary as doing taxes or driving a car?
Last weekend when I was in line to buy tickets for the Lorax, a father and son were in the line-up behind me. They were both wearing ridiculously huge orange mustaches and giant eyebrows, mimicking the iconic creature from the film. Everyone around them was snickering. I looked at the duo and nodded in approval. I could hear the son ask the dad why I nodded at them. “I think he recognizes us!” the father exclaimed, with excitement and a playful smile.
When was the last time you did something genuinely silly? I know it’s cause for embarrassment, but I like silly. It shows that you are not afraid. It shows that you still know how to play, even if you have to make up the song as you go.
|
.png)
Show Hide 1 comment
I’m singing right along with you. IKeep getting hair in my mouth from the moustache, though.