running note about art...

you wear your symbols out

as i sat at treetops eating my hash browns, fruit, breakfast, and some bad grapeade, i look around as i usually do. today's been unusually sunny and bright-70's they say. guess it's a good contrast as to the weather and the feels of las night, or it's a reminder of an eventuality, an inevitability that "the day is darkest before the dawn". heh.. as i looked around, all i saw were these explorer entourage and phillies shirts. they got me thinkin-besides the amount of consumerism and supposed loyalty they imply, it got me thinkin about symbolism. (from this point on, i will be talking about the same hypothetical person, but dressed in typical garb, for all intents and purposes.)

so what do symbols mean? in history people have worn symbols on them all the time. it is found in their clothing-representing class, ancestry, location. it is found on their bodies-tattoos have been used for aesthetic value, but also as an implement for expression-love, hatred, loyalty, pictures, a symbol of lasting ideas. symbols have been used to represent ethnicity and religion-the Jesus piece, the swastika, the yarmulke, beads, the white hood, the queue are some of the major forces of elemental behavior.

you are not a still-life. you are not a snapshot. if historians were to find a picture of you, dressed up in a suit, posed very confidently and nonchalantly, they could make inferences on your class, your behavior, possibly surmise your prior and future actions, and perhaps the purposes behind your own self-structuring. however, pictures alone do not tell the whole story: they are a capture of time. you may have been dressed in a suit, but maybe it was halloween. maybe you rented the suit for a party; maybe you wore it on a whim or for a dare. what we can see at first hand can give us a glance into the life of the individual, but in comparison to other recordations, the picture is very short-sighted.

so we move up from there; the video. the video is a set of frames sped up at a particular frame rate to establish the illusion and capturing of movement. the video is a truer form of capturing the symbols and has a better chance for us to understand the context of those symbols in a truer state-one of action, interaction, and reaction. of course those symbols again are dependant upon the wearer. how one decides to utilize those symbols is especially important-truth or ironic usage. perhaps it may even be concident that they have those symbols on them, and really, they don't intend to imply anything. you may have been wearing a shirt with a smiley face on it, but meh. you might have been feeling sad. you might have been wearing a gag gift. you might have been forced to wear it, you might have worn it for other people. hell, it could have even been laundry day and you had no better alternative, because nudity doesn't work for you. videos: they capture a bit more, they give a little more of the story, but again...it's only a piece of time, a segment, perhaps pieced together, set-up, idealized, drawn out, merely compiled..

and so what do you do, to look for and to understand the truth, the truths that people may or may not have laid out in front of them? how do you break through the facades, the illusions, the fronts? how do you find the reality of people, whether they are living high or low, what their true feelings and intents are? how do you find out and experience how life really...should be?

what you do is look deeper. you go forth and you try to understand people, what they do, how they do it, how they feel. you look at them, on their good days and bad ones. you analyze their experiences, you propose and speak truth to them. you don't dilute your life with unnecessities or superficialities, but you confront them with reality. you do not escape life by way of physical pleasures or psychological dependances, but you embrace life. you rip down the walls, the things we use to hide from others, the walls that we use to make people think that things are "going ok", or good, or whatever, those mere formalities of speech and custom that we're so used to.

the only way to look deeper is to be with them, to be with those people. it is, dare i say, the most genuine, simple, yet articulate, understood gesture one could make. to spend time with them to find the truth, to be relational, to help them fight their problems, to enjoy their pleasures, to understand the troubles, trials, and tribulations that although, we may not have experienced them ourselves, it is that thought, that expression, that presence that makes people know "yes, this individual is taking a step".

the symbols we wear are, like my professor says, facts. facts only express some concreteness in the world among us. however, it is our interpretation, our meaning, our representation of these symbols that make us or do not make us. the question is-are your symbols right? do people understand them the way they were intended? are those symbols characteristic of an importance, an unsuperficialness, a genuine heart? are those symbols going to make you right with others, and are those symbols the way to go, in terms of bringing people together, exposing the truth, and living it? do those symbols mirror reality, or are we merely putting up more fronts, more walls, more blocks, preventing us from being effective with one another?

we wear our symbols out, but have our symbols become us? are we our symbols?