I was driving home the other day with a friend when the car jolted to a halt. Sitting in the middle of the road was a blackbird. Or maybe a raven. I don't really know birds. It was black.
"What did that mean?" he wondered, once the bird hopped out of the way.
"What do you mean what did that mean?" I asked reluctantly, when the car didn't move. They symbolize death, right? But why? Apparently this was an important question.
And then it hit me:
All of our everyday experience is metaphorical of a deeper, unknown substance; it points at what we really are. The dark - that is, invisible - side of our persona.
A white car passed us on the road.
What does that mean?
I decided to categorize my all my responses and observations. To make a library of metaphors. I thought about the white car, and about the emotional undertone - subtle but present - that was connected to that moment. I thought about my naive presupposition that there is an object made of synthetically re-configured materials that is a white car. White is the color that it is not, everything that the object rejects as repugnant.
We live in a world of imagined constructs, never thinking about how this perceived world affects, reflects them; never seeing the intangible level the object points at; as symbols (like the word "car" points at what hides behind "car," it points towards it but neither contains nor describes it.)
There is no higher validity in this metaphor and metaphysical perspective (which an artist calls upon to inform their work.) There is no Jewish father figure hiding behind the world of appearance, ready to chastise his unruly children. There is only You.
Read piece on The Nervous Breakdown.
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