How we understand the world and how it molds us through interaction, inevitably colors our interpretive lenses.
On the shifting interpersonal relationships, there is always flux. Stasis is illusory.
There are various Dialects of language just as there are infinite flavors of Dialectics.
Was taking about my own current inner demons and angels with a long lost friend. And the conclusion was that the “answer” is usually “That’s to be determined.”
On the soul shift in my theater, well, It’s an inextricably intertwined two character play, that’s yet to be completely written. It’s going into the next scene, next act. I’ve long since stopped counting the numbers.
But change is a-comin’ whether we like it or not. Such is the fleeting and mercurial present.
What do we do with the change and how do we even begin to look at it through ideological glasses?
In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot writes,
paraphrased here:
“Come under the shadows of the red rock, I’ll show you something different than the Shadows behind you at morning [Birth, the past], different still than the shadows ahead at dusk [Death, the uncertain future].” Eliot finished the idea with the famous line
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
(Brackets mine)
There’s a referent to so many things with so few words its increíble poetic finesse.
In shadows, fear, and dust Eliot creates an entire interpretive lens, a rejection of the past so common in modernist writings and modernity proper.
Dust:
The prayer of the Anglican Church “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust” with all its religious implications. It reads in one interpretation that the thoughts of dead men, the legacy caked in dust, is built on fear, and destined to decay like the rest of the past, Cynical and pre-conversion, it’s the antithesis of the later sublation of the older poet who finally found wisdom in the ages, in the religious essence, not the religious form, corroded today into that dust as much now as it was then with the prosperity gospel bullshit more ashes to sprinkle on the cake blowing away in the winds of time.
Shadows and their movement
Thisbuild for us an interpretation of the irrationality of time itself as a static entity, and waxing philosophical into the Augustinian paradox of what lies outside. The shadows binding the infinite, what an interesting contradiction of imagery.
As the fate the past and future held/holds is cloaked (past tense and perfect future tenses) in shadows. There’s a place in time far enough back where we can no further observe; it is naught but dust of time forgotten. Of the future, it speaks of what we can’t yet see, the end of the observable universe. And logically following, the present is fated to that same dust.
Fear.
yet there is an undeniable tension. The old gods and the new. Between the weight of our ancestors reaching into and bearing down on the future, and the pushback from the future waiting to be born, to make an identity of its own accord. They’re a Freudian coloring here, between the contradiction in motion the ever moving present always shedding itself into a past that shapes it and ever evolving into a future shifting from “to be” to “is”
Diving into its form, we’re forced to find an ideological lens through which to interpret it.
We are materialists. Thus our tension is mappable. It is dialectical contradiction. And further the contradiction is an antagonistic one (From Marx to Mao).
So what to do with the shadows of the right now?
Pick any moment in time, it looks like this.
♾ <—> ♾
…<—2—> 1 <—2—>…
♾ <—> ♾
The shift from 2 into 1.
Aufheben or Aufhebung
Shelter in Shadow
So he invites the reader to instead take shelter from the desert sun, under the shadows of the rock. To embrace and “Be not afraid” of the inevitable eventuality. The salvation from the fear of the Unknown, is on the now in the desert of the Real, the uncomfortable IS that exists without interpretation into the linguistic and symbolic universe. It is not the in subjectivity of past or future.
Yet…
There are layers to even the ideology of interpretation, as mercurial as the subject thereof.
“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
There is a sweet tension in fear, similar to the lead up to climax. Both serve us in continuity of procreation.
“Flash! Give me rampant, cold, intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash! Give me a fucking break”
Flash! Give me Ennui.”
Invisible Monsters.
Seems my two favorite authors are themselves in contradictory antagonism.
C’est la vie…
Cut! Again from the top! And…
ACTION!
We’re still writing this play, remember?