The Mechanics of Seeing —Part Two

Presented by Steven E. Counsel

Being different is not Bohemian, or interesting, or romantic, or chosen. It simply means you don't quite fit. Drawing, acting, singing opera, memorizing Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear did not make me popular in Albert Lea, Minnesota. It just made me ostracized.

In the third grade, Mehta Schleiter fired up in me, an obsession for reading, not as literacy, but as escape, like drawing, music and poetry. And what I wished to escape was a glib trajectory of the ordinary that most kids around me hailed as normal and all the cool kids were.

After all, if you are, through no fault of your own, different, what’s the point of being ordinary? And some people do not have the growing-up gene. They learn to don big-people masks. But, behind the mask is Peter Pan. Never Never Land is oh-so-ever a land to discover, paint about, faint over, versify and diversify the stale mix of things just-so. In the broad polity of what should be, what should not be, and what needn't be, we are put in our place. In the private polity of what you need, to feel alive on this earth, it’s what your sense of wonder demands you to be.

I’ve always pursued lost landscapes and tried to find them. Symbols are tickets to rides you may never have ridden. Fairy tales are memories to lives you've forgotten. Magically, the shaman emerges in your days like an unwanted itch, and you will scratch for the rest of your life. Under the surface tension of skin, under the highlights of a blemish-less life, shadow is at play. All being different is— is to have one foot in the unknown — a yard from returnings, inches from unretractable immersion. The measure of a man is where his feet take him. Once you leave the centimeters and inches of routine, you know things measure differently and other worlds appear.

The terrible beauty of myth is that it is never outside you — it stains every pore. For the amnesiac of the strictly material, what cannot be seen, cannot be. Like, say, a thought, consciousness, or a self. Show me the strict mechanics of creativity under a magnifying lens. If what cannot be seen, cannot be, then we can not be other than matter. We cannot ever know what we are, or were. We navigate through memory into the unknown of us, and when we pass another Tinker Bell, another myth different, but the same, if we don't believe in fairies, we, like Tinker Bell, will pass into the material nothingness of nonbeing. What cannot be seen, cannot be — right?

Where are we within the vast flux of matter and meaning, being and becoming, faith and the shifting ground of fact, the physics of suns or the physic of identity? Where are we within the calculation of story as history, hagiography, or the histrionic particularity of our fading light? Don't we all feel there is more and more and more and mor and mo and m and....

The terrible power of myth is that we are confronted with a choice. What kind of poetry will we write ourselves into? What landscapes will we use to erect the seasons of our personal self? What kind of air will fill us with lightness? What star will we shine with? In the oceans that tide through our soul, where do we really wish to be taken? On the earth that grounded our view of beauty, where do we stand? What will we be when we are finally nothing and everything at the same time? When the alembic of forever has burned away all the impurities, will we not again be a myth ––