I am me

My brain is rambling today — not about the need for a new residence, but because of people, society, and culture. There is an absurd level of fragmentation made worse by the volume of anger: even those liberal minded folks have their version of Donald Trump. And then there are the posts with some variation of “unfriend me if you like Trump.” It’s hard for me not to see this partisanship furthering the fragmentation as we embed ourselves in a sinkhole of our own views. And when we speak, it’s not so much to inform as it is to seek agreement and like minds to prop us up with meaningless epaulet so we know the hierarchy and our place in it with the implicit notion that we must strive for the top.

I was reading Yeats’s poetry again today and always go back to “The Second Coming,” not because I like it, but because there is a line that hits you over the head with sublime truth: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Bertrand Russell intimated the same sentiment with is own version of this concept: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

I like to think of truth as some omnipresent thing, and each of us imbed ourselves in a section of it like parasites feasting on what will sustain us and our worldview. And we discard the rest so long as we find our group of like minds in our cordoned off little section — a sinkhole of myopia, a mistake that occludes one from seeing true purpose and does violence to the human spirit: the glaucoma being all the screaming voices that distract and seduce you and pressure you into parroting them with vicious intensity, then positive reinforcement once you acquiesce to the mire.

To get unstuck, I read poetry or look at art. I reset and move on. And with that, I leave you with my thoughts on one of my favorite paintings,“Wanderer Above the Sea Fog” by Casper David Friedrich.

Everyone has seen Twilight Zonesque type shows or movies where the protagonist escapes the maze only to realize their freedom is now the ability to see how grand the maze is and that they are still in it. Sometimes, that futility is the conclusion. But the story I tell myself with this painting is of a man at the precipice. He conquered one challenge only to see the vastness of what’s next. It’s almost meaningless in some way, but he’s neither daunted nor discouraged. Instead he stands tall and regal and unafraid, and most importantly, alone. His back is to us, but we see what he sees, so he’s not shutting us out. Instead, there is some goal out there made invisible by the fog. It could be an impossible dream, but that doesn’t matter – obstacles don’t matter – because his determination is unbreakable. Our man here is the pinnacle of the everyman, from the child standing up to a bully, to the exhausted single parent with two kids working on a master’s degree, to those that were never more sure there was never a heaven than there was a hell on earth and made it. This man is inviolable purpose – the definition of the human spirit.