In this array of cells, synapses, and conciousness, we collect our memories and move forward, pulling with us our accurately described emotional baggage. It's as if we're homeless, at heart. We take what we know and then go forward. In this wild chaos of so many possibilities, oppertunities, and events, our enviornment shapes us and defines us, teaching/telling us what we value, hold dear, and love. Some of these are a bare truth, and others have so many cloaks of defenses that it's impossible to see what really makes it work - is it a clockwork God content to let events unfold as they may, or is there fate? Are we on a track?
No surprise that the Renaissance comes, in so many forms. The inante human desire to find what matters, which leads to those existential questions, those wide-eyed faiths in dieties, or those hardened distrusts of anything beyond this. The gamut is endless and our religions aren't getting along. ARguably we all worship the same God, for those of us that are spiritual. Inevitably, everyone thinks that they're right.
Between what is escelating as a war between idiologies and morals and money, which has been fought with everything from petitions to peaceful protests to maces and swords and rockets and armies, the undercurrent here is everything. It's if gays are allowed to be recognized to love, if science can take a foothold in human life with stem cell research. It's feeding tubes, clones, abstinence, ceremonies, rituals, and art. And art - what of it? Why art?
And we grind ourselves down to computer monitors, typewriters, deadlines, paychecks, and maybe we're left wringing our hands over a cup of coffee and uncertainty.
Rollins called it the Black Coffee Blues. A routine that yields no expansion, development, no ecstasy. Do you feel young? Where's the amazement?
The answers are aggravatingly close. "I just wish I would have done...". They exist. Dig your hands into the soil. Pull and push.
Art, then. It's a challange in itself, and unfortunetely it's turned itself into a form of defiance, which is partially needless and partially unrequired for it to exist. But much of it comes not from defiance, but from a refusal.
In this sometimes violent reclaimation of the basic human rights of being alive and stimulated, art becomes more important. It's the soul or whatever you believe in - - surfacing. Comes up and full of glory, gasping for breath, taking in the sky. This emotion, this activity, can come through in a paintbrush or guitar strings or almost anything. We scurry to feel some touch of something, some assertion and affirmation from one to another. We toil at it. This job pays in something better than money, and we work.
These projects blossom and explode like a pyrotechnic rose.
The possibility of commucating, really saying something to someone, something that matters to you. But you feel so strongly that someone else has to feel this, HAS to, which is looking for spirituality on a decidedly smaller level. This isn't a glowing diety to welcome you to your nirvana in the clouds, but rather the more available (believe it) connection to another human being. "Rewarding" doesn't do it justice.
You friends, you lovers. You're the anchor and the wings, the paintbrush and the critic. You are responsible for so many things to me, and to each other. I can only hope that we see some resurgence of what really matters, which is love, trust, the terrifying motion of putting your faith and heart with another person. It's the intimate, naked exchange of sex, of a statement inside a kiss, of a letter, of words.
With these fragile connections, life becomes full and alive - that sensation of being here now, of having worth and being moved. How can anyone possibly exchange this? How could anyone sell it?
Please be good to one another - it's all we've got, after all.
edit: Just in passing here, "Beside You In Time", off the new NIN album, is one of the best songs in recent memory and practically moved me to tears.