I am reminded when the staff of the high school where I was teaching voted to improve the lighting. The delegated agent of change made sure that the new lights were installed by a Monday morning. I opened the door and the entire vast staff room felt like an aquarium. Grow lights had replaced the fluorescents. And as each new individual came in he or she put a defensive hand up above the eyes, bent the knees and moved forward in a hunting posture.
What was this place?
It was the first time I saw the shock of disorientation so clearly.
It was the first time I observed the effect of disorientation on individuals, one after another. Left without references we are put on alert. We are so shaken to the core that we cannot trust what we are seeing.
We blink our eyes in resistance.
We ask ourselves, “What am I seeing? Is this thing a chair, a table. Were they always there, in that place?”
And so it is with every startlingly new element in our experience. How do we acculturate ourselves to the introduction of a new element of belief/behaviour?
“I do not like it,” we will say. We will resist. “This new element, this new style, this new belief, this new required behaviour does not fit me.”
We feel it too tight across the shoulder, the waistband feels too high or too low. We mock the new fashion and strike back by mocking those who dare to sport it in public. We call them fools but really we see them as a threat to our construct of reality. I observe this behavior around the issue of wearing masks.
We tell ourselves that they cause us to feel as if the scaffolding, the supports in place around our structures of belief has been weakened, if not totally removed. How will we stand up now?
“What if everything that I believe is wrong?” we silently ask ourselves.
What if the cosmology, the configuration of the stars, the rituals of self-protection I call upon to sustain my life as a mortal are all in error. What if I am as clumsy, as primitive, as reliant on superstition as the ancestor tribesmen wrapped in the furs stripped from the hunt.
We seek the solace of superiority. It is the way of the mind. We seek the reassurance that even though we have built our house of sticks in an earthquake zone that we, at least, have had the wisdom to build on bedrock. The firm and correct beliefs will stand no matter what the disruptions of the earth.
Our ancestors looked at the stars or cast bones or viewed the tangle of entrails spilling out on the ground from the abdominal openings of animals. They had rituals of assurance.
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But we now find ourselves clinging to a mere, thin vine on the cliffside. It is like a scene from a movie. If we could see ourselves like viewing a movie we would say, “This is impossible. It isn’t enough to hold us in place.”
The belief that only a few deserve to survive persists. We cling to our idea as the hand grows more and more numb from closing tightly around a thin green thread of belief.
We do not have the legends of our forefather, our connection to nature and spirit that sustained those who lived in a mythic world.
There is no spiritual sense of connection to the earth’s damp heart, to the sky’s delicacy of cloud messages, to the voices talking to us in the forest, to the shifting moods of the ocean’s waves.
We can, at least, have the sense not to trust what we have been told to cling to. We can at least know we will inevitably fall into a new world unknown.
We remember the many times our legs have jerked ourselves awake as we dreamed of plummeting down from the substantial rin of the land and are pulled by dream land’s gravity towards what we cannot possibly see. Images are pulled past us as we are out of time for recognition. We are out of control. We lie still as we awaken. We should have had thoughts, we think. But there were none.
We should have had ideas or realizations, we imagine. But there was nothing other than falling. We were dropped over the edge into a vacuum where the only truth was the sensation of falling hard and fast.
We were unearthed. All references were gone. It was too fast to keep up with mere questions: Where am I? What will happen next: Will I die?
The legs jerk us awake. We reach back into the dream to try to retrieve some clue. But there is nothing there.
My art. Reconfiguration
Everything changes but more and more it is everything at once changing. Our greatest fear is landing in an open space. Will we be called upon to strip off all of the garments of belief, all of the costumes of normalcy and leave them discarded on the floor?
Who wrote this move?