You don’t need me to tell you how the mind is powerful. It’s relentlessly broadcasted as some fashionable segue into more neuroscience or self-help jargon.
In its usual presentation so it’s delivered with a “but we’re in luck!” – a deus ex cerebrum so we shall save ourselves this day, shall parade around how we’re going to be a million times more optimized, smarter, clean and streamlined toward our Goals, toward our Profits – Projections looking healthy today, Roger.
What I find myself more attracted to is the other portrait – the one where the canvas is ripped up to look at its frame for an insignia left by some woodworker. Breaking it down more.
You’ll know the moment when it comes. To increase your chances it’s best to roam around secure enough rooftops, if you’re lucky to have access.
With the last flight of stairs so you may drop all those conveniences our mind affords us. Conveniences like how these days shall continue forever. Having a “place” in a world. Having a phone. In medias res.
A back-pocket theory I cart around is media succeeds from its capacity to capture that in medias res. You’ll follow the protagonists along and they’re just IN it – so intensely to where you wonder how could this not exist? Becoming a “household name” was the natural progression. To overwhelm the viewer with the NOW of the author’s mind, I guess. It feels alive.
Stack more and more things, more conveniences, assumptions and relationships until we’ve scaffolded out a tunnel cramped but powerful. How immediate our day-to-day then seems, letting it swallow everything.
So you’re at the last step, and maybe you somehow leave that tunnel behind. You drop your badge and name-tag on the ground along with all your pasts and futures, and step into the high-rise concrete oasis, letting it shake away any other contingencies. Discarding everything until you’re the floating eye. The wind drowns out the chatter.
One may step forward to thread fingers through chain linked fence, peering down for all the passer-bys in their tunnels below – panning up for window studio snapshots of cooking, relaxing, cleaning rituals all for an evening to notch. Notch as another day in a perceived forever between foreclosures.
One may certainly find something visceral in the newest books or shows, newscaster highlight reels – but I must admit there’s nothing so raw as to spread your arms about the rooftop. An unfiltered view into one’s world can be terrifying and depersonalizing, though it may also gently remind one of how there’s something’s larger out there.
As the windows shutter and the pedestrians scatter you may come back to your senses and step down back into your tunnel below. But maybe you decide in a split-moment that perhaps you’d like a different tunnel altogether. Or that you won’t be so cramped in whichever one you choose. That whatever worries you is but a droplet between the nebulas around.
A bit ago I was fanning through some old anime OSTs I used to enjoy. It’s what reminded me of my back-pocket theory on immediacy and how it determines popularity, success. Maybe you’ll see the phrase “a timeless classic” in a new light.
If you go far back enough in your immediacy tunnel you may find it all crumbling around you. I guess it’s another way to get a raw unfiltered look at reality and how it moves along with or without us.
With the above tune – even though the accompanying apartment complexes are still around and the people too – all of the assumptions formed upon its day debut broke with our cycles forward.
It was an idyllic summer. It will always be, I suppose.
Do you think this will be an idyllic summer, too? I wonder what schemes we’ll cook up next to patch our tunnel walls.