The example I would use to illustrate my eclectic word expostulation would be the "La Machine - La Princesse", a huge mechanical hydraulic spider as big as a house that costs millions of dollars and is operated by 9 men sitting inside a framework attached to the lifelike creature that is enormous and walks with spindly metal legs. When I first saw the "La Machine", it was being covered in a news story. The spider was walking down a street in liverpool England and caught everyone unawares. It was a piece of in situ art, or better said, in loco art (art in motion). The folks behind the whole plot sprang the spider on the city that day, and had a story line where the spider escaped, fireworks were flashed at it to try and corrall it, and finally it was calmed to sleep by a snowstorm (artificially generated).
All this aside, my initial raw memory was that of a huge metal spider, piloted delicately by 9 men (looking exactly like Apollo 11 mission controllers in their short sleeve dress shirts and glasses) perched on top of and embedded within the machine, bravely piloting a metal daddy long legs through a raging snowstorm. A rude pragmatist might sneer that it was an incredible exercise of futility and wasted effort that served no purpose, but I looked at it and was mystified and awed by the fantastic vision and visceral commitment to make that a reality. It was somehow thrilling to see intelligent and scientific men embarked on such task worthy of a scene from "The Never Ending Story". The poetry of ludicrous feats enacted as if they were significant, in some interesting way succeeds in making the ludicrous significant.
Now, that does not mean a show like Jackass could become significant merely because its actors are consistent in their devotion to nihilistic anarchy and defamation of all mores. Far from it. Bacchanalian revels worthy of True Blood's Maenaed Mary Anne are not expressions of art. They are simply overt demonstrations of excess that draw the curiosity of the majority who still stay within the boundaries of propriety but love to be be titillated and live vicariously through the flagrancies of the few.
What I am fascinated by is the feeling of liberation when we dare to do something beautiful, different, and unique, sometimes even rebellious. It is like the heroic quote from Salvador Dali:
“If I’m going to be any more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further in everything- in art, in life. And everything they think is real: morality, immorality, good, bad- ...I… we… we have to smash that to pieces, and we have to go beyond that. We have to be brave. No limits.”
It's what you find preached in Fight Club, hit bottom with a vengeance, punch through the pain into deeper meaning, never be complete! Its found in the Matrix, "There is no spoon", the mundane, predictable world out there of Starbucks coffee menus and subway time lines and being sequestered in our little office cubicle is not the only world unless we let that be the only world. We have been taught that we are organic creatures with a finite amount of life who must use that finite life in a very finite manner. What is wrong with being extravagant with this amazing gift? Why should any one of us even feel close to ending our lives where there is so much to get out of living? Whether beautiful or tragic, we are playing roles in a production of Shakespearean proportion that is occurring every day in real time. Therefore, we should at least play our roles, and if we can, play them well.
Our movies are filled with magic and mystery penetrating ordinary reality. From Vampires to Harry Potter, there is this dichotomy of the muggle world contending with dreamtime, and it seems, at least in art, that dreamtime is winning over the prosaic.
My point is that while it would be wonderful if more giant mechanical spiders were to walk down our streets in fake snowstorms for the pure hell of it, what is most important is that we all begin to think the way those people thought when they came up with these significant and ludicrous acts. We don't have to pilot a spider down mainstreet, but instead of acting like a stuffy adult with a pragmatic stick up our butt, we could appreciate it the way a kid would. I was running with someone the other day, and out of the blue, he did a random cartwheel and I thought it was coolest thing. If I acted the complete adult, the proper response would have been, what the hell is a matter with him? But, the kid in me recognized another kid, because ultimately, our bodies are the only things that age, and our personalities develop, but who we intrinsically are as children remains the same deep down. In fact, isn't that what someone a lot of people agree is the Creator of the Universe said, "that to enter the kingdom of heaven one must become like one of these, a child?".
Antoine de Saint Exupery knew this when he spoke of those tiresome adults to whom children have to explain everything to because they just don't get it. We all need to be like the little prince and where some folks see a shapeless hat, we see an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor.
Or an amazing spider navigating through a snowstorm.
La Princesse - la machine
What do you see... an old hat? or....
a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant?
We always have our inner child. The question is, are they awake?
We always have our inner child. The question is, are they awake?
Then, after thinking about a little more after two days...
The World is Cloudy with Patches of Light
I wrote recently of the strength of the ludicrous when linked to the significant. I STILL had my terminology wrong... although I wasn't too off the mark. I should have said: the strength of the ludicrous when linked to the infinite.
Okay, I am beating the dead horse? Did I grind this into the ground so that my original meaning is rendered shapeless by myopic introspection?
No... it just takes time and and a couple of mental steps to sort stuff out sometimes. Maybe a good idea takes a couple minutes, maybe even a couple of days.
What I want to express, COMPLETELY, is that only when there is a radical but cooperative paradox is the incredible possible. Yet, when you really approach the "incredible", when you slow everything to single beats of a hummingbird wing, incredible things become very simple and ordinary things that are different only by their different/increased perspective.
So, to find the extraordinary in life, you must find a paradox. This paradox can be found only in the ordinary, the mundane. It will be "hidden" in plain sight. Search for the jewel, the elusive pearl across the Gobi Desert and the Black Sea, but ultimately it will be underneath your very mundane, poured concrete garden step stone, placed there by the Fort Lewis Equity Lawn Service.
We have seen this before in thousands of stories and myths, but familiarity has bred contempt. We think of Moses, Charlton Heston in a bible robe with a big white beard climbing impossible cliffs in the desert only to see the perfect olive tree framed in a perfect National Geographic Still natural rock formation that has a glowing saintly flame in the center; appropriate background music plays as a bass profundo voice booms King James at him. In reality, Moses was a America's most wanted contender fleeding a murder charge, and is working a temp job on a lawn crew, he has a stutter, and is weed eating the baseball field when a blackberry bush with a strobe light speaks to him. There's more than one story like that, whether Alice and Wonderland or the Russian movie I just watched, Dark Watch, and I just happened to choose one from the bible but they have all become part of our everyday metaphors and have lost their power. The other ironic thing is, the most amazing people in history were not that amazing when they were alive. Julius Caesar was short and bald. Abraham Lincoln had a high pitched nasally voice. We don't realize how ordinary and mundane they were, and that it was due to their persistent confidence and the few people who became radically devoted to them that their ideas eventually took hold. The great battles, the great heroes, if we really saw a true count of the battlefield or the size of the lizard, they'd probably have to redo Braveheart and Beowulf (we could diverge into a whole sub-argument saying that the original story gets eclipsed in myth, petrified into tradition, and locked into a safe dogmatism that breeds the whole evil cycle again (samsara), but I won't go there).
So I guess the endstate would be we seek the extraordinary in the ordinary, but do not mystify the ordinary into the extraordinary because then the extraordinary disappears and you are truly left with the ordinary without the magic. A matter a million times true as the ancient Egyptians say.
If you ever drive at twilight, or in a convoy before the days of night vision, you know you need to deliberately see with your peripheral vision. In the gloom you can't look at things head on or else you just can't make them out. The textbook version is to see with your rods and cones. You can't see this vision of the otherworld straight on, you must see it out of the corner of your eye, but see it deliberately. Almost anyone can catch a glimpse, but it takes dedication to remain self-aware.
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So, once you find the paradox of the ordinary shell hiding the hidden pearl, the second layer of discovery criteria is a unique blend of the ridiculous and the infinite. There must be laughter, there must be a child's heart, and there must be a sense of play; yet in of this, a sense of almost tragic, almost deadly sincerity and seriousness. There is no flippancy in this, but a blend of joy and sorrow.
Ultimately it is a personal and visceral choice to truly accept ourselves and the world as it is and not as we have it to be that frees us to see the beauty and simple magic in regular life.
We must seek the paradox as something valuable, not merely as an inane oddity.
Animals experience coincidence; true humans live in synchronicity.
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