Famous Monsters Part 2:
Breaking the Wings of the Butterfly
The butterfly flapping its wings may cause tsunamis but not necessarily
overnight. While some groups are opposed to compound interest, they're still
subject to the effects and guilty of the cause. Can the queen bee tell the
earthquake from the rumbling dump truck passing inches from the hive? The
universe doesn't care if you don't like the rules.
Innocence's conformity is more impressionable than guilt's rebellion.
What we hide from ourselves, yet fixate on, become our most-hated
monsters. Anti-human terror undermines us with loss: of self, of
space, of sense, of the illusion of safety.
The ultimate monster is human -- the anti-god who creates and
inspires. But why inspire consumers to be producers? Does creation
and our constant reach for knowledge unbalance us from simply being?
"Social security" is the greatest of our oxymorons. Our eyelid movies
(where we're the star) provide the perfect montage of the soul. But there
is no screenwriter to control the plot. Accountability begins inside. The
world is ours for the making or unmaking and this is unforgiving truth.
We each create our own personal reality by editing our experience,
filtering it through beliefs. We build our own myths of self and
world, of devils and heroes. We have the option to tell the story or
to remain silent, but the songs are all of self. This is what we learn when
we stare at messages in caves.
Graffiti becomes the climax of analogy, symbolic of life and humanity. And
it is the messages in the caves that confirm and aspire to graffiti's
mythological and cinematic ends.
Graffiti enters discourse as a projection or objectification of warring
systems of representation. Graffiti's surface signifies an arena of negotiation in which power
manifests itself through privileged consumers.
We have the right to claim graffiti is a thing in itself, rather than a form of social commentary only, in the same way we can treat anonymous screeds as suspect information, as the lies or false truths of anonymous authors.
The careless mistake, the forgery, both point out the need to replace wrong with Right, just as the most common and thoughtless graffiti attests to its creator's depth of understanding or blatancy of theft.
Perhaps the tsunami washes us clean. Soft wings bent on destruction may also
lead to healing. For every tsunami eventually turns into a calm pool and a
peaceful caress.
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