A long time ago a person I hardly knew gave me a recording of The Soul of Black Peru, it was a magnificent orchestration of Samba music, if that is samba as I am not an expert. Today as I sit to write this and I think how her acquaintance with me had fulfilled so many sweet moments and yet I did not know her at a personal level.
I don’t know what motivate her, it was an unexpected gift, but her kindness drew me much to think of her often, to enjoy the music and now as I write this I am looking at the CD and reaching back to her smile, and her soul.
When we are at a football match, and hundreds of thousands are watching with us, we are entangled in community. Our fervor our actions our anxieties are all troubled and inspired towards the same cause, football fans all over the world synchronize their humanity to overwhelm themselves with the feeling of community, the game is a secondary result, a means to an end.
Mickey Mouse has a lot in common with many of us. Personally that forever happy ringing smile is a nuisance, but many of us fall prey to its salutations, many of us feel something in Mickey that we don’t need to feel at some profound level, but that smoothly moves us to feel a sense of happiness, a somewhat conventional happiness, of children joined together round and around chewing lollipops.
A soap opera combines together an essence of common worries and trivialities which amount to a personal tragedy but can not impact much beyond that personal sphere, even as the acts, betrayal, lust, grief, sin, gossip are themselves exponentially replicated throughout families and relationships, they never become events of a universal order, this is true even of dolphins who practice rape and birds and frogs sodomy. The events are in themselves localized by the low energy impact. That is, the world will not collapse nor will it endure a war based on those machinations.
A television set rises into being from our need of exercising a communion with the world. The telephone joins us with those individuals which we feel we must have a personal connection with; planes, cars and ships link us live to that place where we feel our history or to that person that our longings can not ignore and thus turn into desire.
News and commercials are how those parts of the world that we are not willing to excert energy upon, contact us, reach for us, so that they don’t lose themselves from the lack of our attention. The degree of magnification of any type of propaganda is defined by the level of attention that we circumscribe to it. A terrorist is yielding to an explosion of desire to be heard by us all. An acid rock star can not hear himself and is yelling to drown the cacophony of silence between his desire of self and himself. An impressionist is listening to the silent strings of nature, Picasso was dislocated, cubism senses how difficult it is to join the endemically disjointed nature of the universe. The surrealist were seeing how reality blurs with mere observation, the realist are trying to stare hard to avoid surrealism, Goya was seeing how feelings paint reality.
The world is written based on our desires, the most common desire is to be entangled with all of our humanity.
RC
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