Because I am a human person inhabiting the earth in the year 2017, I am inundated with stimuli on the reg. Same as you, same as all of us. Visual, digital, emotional, physical, imaginary, invisible, ever-present, engulfing, overwhelming bits of constant life-changing, useless, important, pointless "information". As a result, the very chemistry of our brains as a collective and as individuals is changing daily. I won't bore you with the "when I was younger | simpler time bullshit" that I want to but to be extremely clear, I believe our psyches are too taxed, overwhelmed to a near-critical breaking point.
Evolution hasn't kept pace with technology...hasn't kept pace with whatever this 'modern' world is. I believe we as a society will pay a possibly | unavoidable cataclysmic price for nothing more than our biological inability to 'keep up with' and our ironic celebration of the fallible nature of human existence, our perceived collective resistance to being acutely aware. Being 'aware' is everything to me, you know? Being in the 'is' IS everything, right? Being 'aware' however is not only the accumulation of nor simply having access to 'information'. 'Information' in of itself doesn't make one intelligent - the critical evaluation of information does though and that takes time. Time, unfortunately is the sworn mortal enemy of modernity. That sucks. If ever there was a need to take a breath and think deeply, it is now.
When I was at State, I had a professor from North Dakota. Big dude - crazy intellectual. He was the first to warn me of this at the time at least, still developing phenomenon. He of course spun it into a teaching moment about how understanding the inherent dynamics of one's environment and recognizing it's ever changing character would | could | should make one a more sensitive and expressive designer. For reasons much more ridiculous and as it turns out more detrimental to my internal spirit than I care to admit, I dismissed it. I dismissed this spectacularly insightful statement not because of the content of the said but regrettably because of the conduit through which it was delivered. There's a lesson there I'm sure, but even had I heard it then, it wouldn't have changed the manner in which I woke yesterday. Had the seed he endeavored to plant in fact found the purchase it sought, my every waking thought since yesterday's morning might have been other.
It is not in a facetious manner in which I earlier touched upon the modern stimuli specifc. It's a very real thing, for me at least. I'm a person who physically pines for the opportunity to internalize a visceral understanding of every single stimuli no matter how mundane or epic. Sometimes however it's too much.
Yesterday, I awoke enlightened. Enlightenment quickly turned to astonishment when I realized I had involuntarily said aloud "The diamond boy passes a bar." I don't pretend to understand the nature of the impetus of nor the need to ascribe meaning to a person's dreams but this one was different somehow. I'm not shy about the specificity, content, situation or any other aspect of the dreams I have - I've shared freely prior to on this blog. This was a dif animal; an epiphany unequaled. I started my day with a renewed sense of confidence, an unexplained swagger...like I had been given a gift!
As days tend to do, the day trudged on and I forced myself to digest more and more the veracity of this statement that in my morning haze meant so very much but in the stark light of day meant absolutely nothing. I've resolved myself to this fact - that was my brain fucking up, attempting to reset itself. The constant barrage of nothing and everything, right? The deadlines and headlines and box scores and documentaries and red lights and song lyrics and traffic jams and winks and nods and fights and kicks and claws and bites and wet paint and dry dust and likes and hits and blurbs and facts and promises and lies and news and innuendos and dreams and nothing at all and all the unspoken bits of terror and hope and anticipation between the spaces of the letters between the words of the lines.
All of that stimuli successfully soaks and seeps deep into my gray matter and sifts down through the layers of my subconscious, through every fiber and filter and coalesces finally into this nonsensical single platitude, "The diamond boy passes a bar." I'd like to believe that those six meaningless words mean something magical but it's late on a Friday night and I can't imagine what it might be. Maybe someday I will.
Meantime, I will enjoy visualizing a moment in the future when I will discover why I've discovered now the punchline without ever having heard the joke...the underlying circumstances that precipitated my finding of the key years before finding the lock...the underpinnings upon which the foundation of having found the solution without the problem being revealed. I've got the moral to but I've yet to write the story.
The diamond boy passes a bar.
I'm sure of very little, but I'm sure of this....I need to take a breath...and think deeply. Same as you, same as all of us.
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