Sunday, August 23, 2009

Life as a Search

You need different things. And not all of them can be found as one person.

Eventually, you have to change your mind. You can either change your own mind, or wait for time to do it for you.

By "change" I don't mean you decide that one option is, in fact, better than the other. By "change" I mean effect a revamping of the mental processes in toto. As I said, this can be done by you. I suspect that to truly change your mind you must first change your body. You might have to change your surroundings, change your posture, change your chemical balance, change your breathing. The body is now stimulated, changed into something new, and the mind follows.

When you look around, after having changed your mind, you might discover that the previous tenant of your mental map has acquired a lot of stuff, both physical and not, that the new mind isn't crazy about. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of acquired stuff can often overpower the fragile glow of the changed mind. The new mind looks around, decides it isn't worth it, and sinks back into the morass.

This is why we have symbols as ancient as the Phoenix, and as contemporary as Dr. Who. Both of these creatures act, die, change, and move on.

Many little cells on our bodies are dying, constantly. Maybe we are aware of this on some level. Maybe these little speckled dots, falling away, soak us lightly with the impressions of mortality. The human-being-as-comet conceit, it occurs to me, was noted by Sylvia Plath in her poem "Night Dances":

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off--

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

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