Image - white canvas spread out on the table. Slight tang of the hot glue melting. Needle and thread in hand. The only sound in the room is the ticking of the wall clock.
It is about 8.30 p.m. and I am working alone in the art room, creating the "body" for the horse puppet. I have been working for about an hour, first cutting the cream-coloured canvas, then stitching it together strategically, and shortly, I will hot-glue down the seams.
And this is when it dawns on me, the question of puppets and puppeteers and who is creating whom. Is this a puppet that I am creating or am I a puppet being created as I create this? The thought doesn't go away. So who is the puppeteer/maker – psycho-social constructs that are mindlessly passed from generation to generation or contemporary to others? What, after all, is “joy”? Is it just a rush of adrelanin you feel when something happens [or you see something] that you have been programmed to view in a “positive” way? What is hurt? Is it a rush of adrelanin you feel..... “negative” way? Boil it down to the purely physical, that is all that it is – joy, pain, fear, nostalgia, anger – chemicals being released into your blood stream that make your brain tell you that you are “feeling” something... If you were blindfolded and handed a cube of ice, and told that you were holding a burning coal, you would feel a burning sensation in your hand, not cold... what makes you “feel” is what your brain tells you that you are feeling. If you were to observe all of this objectively, you might begin to wonder about what exactly it is [or is not] – and that of course leads you to wonder who decided [when, where and why] what a person is supposed to be feeling, and indeed who made the value judgement of good/bad, beautiful/ugly....
Finally, the thought strikes me: there's not a thought anywhere in here that is truly original/orginally created by me. A long-ago admonition echoes from memory banks: even the Rebel is conforming to the Rebellion. Then this funny story that dropped into the inbox a couple of days ago:
There is an old story about the U.S.S. Enterprise that was travelling along the Eastern seaboard. It saw a light in front and thought that the ship was going to collide with the other ship. So the Enterprise sent a signal for the other ship to travel in a different direction. "We are the U.S.S. Enterprise and you are on our course. Please go south."
A message came back, "We cannot move."
A second message was sent. "We are the U.S.S. Enterprise. If you do not move, we will collide."
Another message came back. "Sorry, we will and cannot move."
A last message was sent. "We are the mighty U.S.S. Enterprise. If you do not change course, we will destroy you--guaranteed."
The message came back: "We are the lighthouse. Your choice."
----
Too often we want others to change when it is up to us to change OUR course.**
There is wisdom in this, of course. A fairly conventional wisdom that depresses pretentiousness towards change in general. But who, really, amongst all of us, is really able to believe and indeed follow such wisdom. For, if we did, none of us would ever set out to "change the world". But even as we do set out to try to do that, what are we trying to achieve? Why is my world view better than that of anyone else's? Is it really less harmful for the future of the world, or is that only MY PERCEPTION of the situation? What led, actually, to uprisings all over Western Asia - to throw off shackles, of corruption, dysfunctional systems...? Or pure self-interest to bring in better prospects for oneself - the narrow confines of improving one's lot in life in the garb of a larger goal more acceptable perhaps due to its objective largesse?
Now it dawns on me that perhaps if I shared this with anyone, they would believe I was sinking into some form of insanity - a disconnection from reality, from the materialistic, to a realization shakily peeping over the horizon that here and now, the whole idea of illusions, maya, is far more appealing than the real and the concrete. Because the concrete choices are limited to either being a puppet of some unknown, dispassionately objective puppeteer only interested in maintaining the status quo, or being the puppet of some unknown, dispassionately objective puppeteer only interested in anarchically changing the world order.
That these are all illusions is the third and only choice to maintain a sort of insane sanity. For it appears to be an impossibility, another illusion, or perhaps a self-delusionary tactic, to believe that one can be one's own puppeteer.
I do not wonder that the only person I shared some of these thoughts with maintained a stoic silence through cyberspace.
**Source:
Volume 11 Number 3, March 2011
watching 'don't panic'the movie based on 'Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy' helped, we take ourselves and our lives way too seriously when we shouldn't and not seriously enough when we can and should. Everything that you wrote is true for all of us except that most of the times we are running away from everything...
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