Let your sight be blessed,
so that everything you See, Sees you.
****
I've made it a habit the last six weeks or so to drop by random blogs here on Blogger. It's quite easy. At the entry page, and before logging in, there's a little flash screen that shows all the blogs updated at that time. I pick the ones with the interesting titles and snoop around. Most are mediocre; a few horrible. But a small fraction are good, and a tinier fraction still are great.
It was then, looking over the good and great blogs, that I noticed it: all of them to date--and I mean all of them--have, post after post after post, zero comments. Nobody is bothering to let these people know that their work is superlative, has made their day better, has brought beauty and grace into their life. Nobody.
It could be that nobody is aware of these blogs. (And in the next few weeks, I'll be featuring any that I find. Not that people pop by this blog in droves; but hey--I'd like to help, however meager that help may be.) People get entrenched in their surfing habits, I'm sure of it. I know I do. Most of the Internet is nothing more than one giant cesspool; I get it.
But I also think that our culture is so mechanized, so coggish, so coldly automatonic that most people do not make a conscious effort of any kind to look for beauty, to enjoy it, to bring it into their lives.
I see this every single day here in Imperial Beach when I go to the Pier. People seem utterly blind to the incredible beauty all around them: the wide stretch of tan beach, the marine layer gathered like a tidal wave offshore, pearly-white and solid-looking, the Pier as it stretches over jade waters, the seagulls drifting overhead, the surf as it catches the sunlight. The blindness of consumption has them: they are here to get a tan, damnit; they are here to pack in an hour or two of "rest and relaxation" as an antidote to the fact that they are a faceless component in a corporate machine; they are here to air out the kids and to jog off the flab and to push pamphlets about Jesus on the unwary.
Anything except to
let their sight be blessed,
so that everything they See, Sees them.
****
So I've been leaving comments on these blogs.
The blog owners, with only two exceptions (out of perhaps the hundred I've commented on), don't bother reciprocating, of dropping by and taking a good once-over of my work, of commenting back. (This blog is equipped with not one but two site trackers. The stats don't lie.)
I've been leaving comments because, honestly, I'd like my work to be looked at, and I'm tired of being a solipsistic little whiny baby, and figured that, to recall something my mother used to tell me all the time, if I want a friend, I must first be one.
So I've been one.
To my way of thinking, the person who makes the first move to initiate an encounter has done something remarkable, because absolutely everything else flows from that. Everything. Whether for good or for evil, the resulting relationship, whether long-lasting or temporary, has changed the universe. With the encounter comes an essential isness, what in the novel I've imagined and termed as an aecxis (pronounced "i-sis"), an ineffability that has the potential to change reality itself. A calculus of potential, one entirely dependent on the free will of both actors to maintain and empower it.
(Of course, the act of initiation itself has its own aecxis, which, try as the Machine might, has already brought change, as infinitesimal as that change might be.)
But the bloggers don't seem to care that some random dude has just dropped by and commented very favorably on their good (or extraordinary) work; and, without more ado, it occurred to me why most blogs don't have any comments on them.
It's a two-way street; and these bloggers want it to go only one way. The work to make their own sight blessed is too much; and so they don't (won't) See, and so others don't (won't) See back.
****
And then their blogs fade, are neglected and forgotten, and perhaps so too their work, the creators feeling like no one cares, no one understands them, no one appreciates them. I've been through it many times myself, so I know, I know.
The thing is, it's crap. It isn't real.
****
We live in a world where, with very few exceptions, most of humanity has chosen to sell their essential isness in order to become Plastic Dolls. This is done for all the obvious reasons, for all the usual suspects: status, security, cash, power, fame.
Wind up the Plastic Doll, and watch it. You'll get bored, fast. It's the same thing every day: wake up, dress, coffee, work, work, work, kids, soccer practice, home, dinner, television, bed. Sleep is the wind up. "Sound psychological health" is found in "accepting your inner angst" and wiping your troublesome self from existence. (Look on Gaia.com for many, many examples of this.) Because your troublesome self keeps telling you that you're a fraud, a brittle, aging, rusting, gear-driven tin soldier who has, in cowardice and fear, chosen a life not worth living, one that cannot See, and so one that the world cannot See back. White lighties call coating their plastic shells with lubricant "authentic living"; they label the process of capitalizing status, security, cash, power, and fame (Status, Security, Cash, Power, Fame) "finding their purpose"; they call those Plastic Dolls that continue blindly on as Plastic Dolls "ego-driven" while they, through an act of internal violence, disconnect their limbs from the gears and, sitting there, motionless, vegetative, congratulate themselves for being "enlightened" and "meditative."
Yoga helps to keep the plastic from getting too brittle, of course.
****
The process of aliveness occurs with everything--except people.
I came to this insight this week whilst on the trolley on my way to a client.
Everything outside was Seeing me. It was my inner sign that I was all right, that I was not a Plastic Doll. But when I looked at the bobble-headed dolls sitting on the trolley with me, I could See that no one was Seeing back. Humans have that ability: to switch off their humanity, their essential aliveness, their essential isness--their aecxis--in order to do, and be, everything except Who They Truly Are.
Beauty hidden; beauty unobserved. Beauty condemned. Beauty destroyed.
Plastic Dolls; zero comments; zero reciprocation; zero Friendship; zero courage; zero change.
Afraid to be our own Hero, we lay that responsibility on someone else, then, when the inevitable disappointment sets in, we satisfy ourselves that even the incompetent and ignorant can rule the world.
And we wind ourselves up for another day.
~~*~~
Fractal Image: Crumbling by SM Montaigne
Posts
Stumble It!
