by We live in a bored world of consumption of expectation. The new and the fresh rarely find a moral or aesthetic foothold in our mainstream minds because it takes too much effort to think about, and consider, the foreign and the challenging.
Our Gordon Davidescu was onto something yesterday:
I am not much of a fan of scary movies. This has not always been the case. When I was a child, I used to love seeing the new Friday the 13th movies and the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, even though I was far too young to be watching such frightening stuff on the screen. I think I somehow knew in my mind that what I was seeing wasn’t real and so it didn’t bother me at all. Perhaps now that I have seen some of the real horrors of the world, I don’t care to see the artificial ones on screen as much.
What Gordon was honing in on was this: We get back out of the world precisely what we place into it — and if we go along with the flow, even if we are bored by it — we are part of the problem of not actively engaging and involving our thinking and that leads to a nation of somnambulists.
When we place expectation back into the world — instead of surprise and enlightenment — we create a Möbius strip existence where we never escape from the horror and war and cheating and deception already surrounding us.
We need to make a massive effort as a social whole to put the uncommon back into the hollow of our lives. We need more love and respect and mutuality and less death and desperation. Coexistence is the key to survival, not separation.
The uncommon in the hollow doesn’t mean pablum. The uncommon must have tension and effectiveness in the example and then becomes part of our cultural meme that we can share and discuss and deal with together instead of just blindly osmosing the expected and the dull into our shared aesthetic consciousness.
The initial rarity and uniqueness of the uncommon experience will create a microsecond pause in our thinking, and in that hollow, we can finally feed new thoughts and seed fresh understanding in previously numb minds. We can remove paralyzed emotional reacting and replace it with aggressive change that heals us all and no longer individually condemns.
I’m all about coexistence. I see it so vividly when Chaim Yosef is so friendly toward everyone, regardless of who they are — he doesn’t see race or gender or anything but he sees people being nice to him and he is nice back!
It’s interesting how children are naturally open when they’re young — and then so many of them become closed as adults. I wonder when and how that change happens?