There are some, read many, things that can only be learned from experience: failure, love, triumph, loss, compassion . .. yet our world is predicated on book learning and reverence for the written, even spoken word. All of that manner of learning is based on interpretation - one’s ability to clearly understand an experience and to the transform that knowledge into clear language such that others may also learn. Nobody writes neutrally, no one reads neutrally each process brings in another layer of interpretation over the original experience. Only someone who has looked into a lover’s eyes as they bid you adieu can know that feeling, and then it is only through the prism of the perceiver's prejudice will it be processed.
It is a small wonder we have gotten this far with the crude instruments for communication we are saddled with. The much maligned animal mind is not besot with such conceits as ours; animals are able to sense the temblor by physicality, and act on pheromones for sex minus the glib conceits of ever-after love from romantic delusions. This is just at the one-on-one, which when multiplied by nodes of socialization from “degrees of separation” gets goofy with strangers weighing in on issues about shit for persons they’ve never spoken to and you can begin to see how societies get obnoxious AF in a hurry - i generally avoid society, finding it lame and full of obtuse intellects which remind me too much of myself to ever really be comfortable.
And there’s another of life’s paradoxes - growing up i had an elder brother separated by a sister, both magnificent specimens of beauty and grace, even of penetrating intellect. He, my brother would stand for hours in front of the mirror in the bathroom we 4 children shared. I could never understand what he found so fascinating, partly because of my vision - i assumed he saw something i could not because he was able to see himself without glasses, which for me without glasses i could not read the fingers in front my face. I realize now decades later he was engaged as best as he could with trying to understand himself. Ma the artist, the very left-handed artist in a family of 6 in which half were also left handed might help to explain what anchor my brother might have been searching to release himself from.
Unfortunately for him, he was too pretty and popular to suffer enough to give him that additional juice that comes from failure. So as near as i can tell, he has stumbled through life, probably still looking for the “magic” mirror that all in my family have sought wracked with pain all the world feels but cannot or will not see, for it is each of our interiors through which we reflect the world around us. For those in the audience clued in - that last sentence would be in literary terms “Deux ex Machina;” how can an interior serve one and at the same time as lens and reflective surface¿ that is a question? Mirroring is an early childhood development method to show a developing human how they appear - the trick, as i understand is to do so neutrally in order for the human being mirrored to begin to perceive itself through the eyes of others. Our mother, while graced with much, was, and likely remains at 92 as has been said better elsewhere given much and asked of much - Lo ! what she reflected was not so much what she perceived as much as what she felt.
I know this because much later in our charged relationship she would remark with the authority only a parent can pull off - “you are bludgeoning me with your words” · she was not content with relating this fantasy about my reality to me, but would recount it as fact to all who would listen. This is very likely how she mirrored me to myself as a “Toddler” - through the prism of her own highly charged interior. My challenge as an adult is how to understand her, but also to forgive her for egregious falsehoods about who and what i am as a human. I know this; i love my mother for her magnificence - a truly indomitable spirit in a world of dreck · i commiserate with her for her suffering and forgive her at the time she has spent riding on my back because she was too weak from her delusions to fend for herself; emotionally and intellectually - what i resist and will do so to my grave, is accept her interpretation of my experience as reality, nor will i cede to any living or algorithmic creature that prerogative.
Note: cyber spooks; consider my candor a line in the sand rather than paranoia, you fucking effete pussies too spooked to show your faces and wage conflict like true warriors; i mean that in the nicest possible way.
jts 29/11/2020
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