Something I find especially annoying about the pace at which we are hastening to destroy ourselves is that things are just beginning to get incredibly interesting. Take, for example, the tragic/comic disconnect between our rush to self-destruction and our simultaneous surging self-awareness. Noodling over this irony is grist for no end of overtime churning in the gray matter.
A thought that has come to mind along these lines is the notion that it might appear reasonable to characterize self-destruction as bad and self-awareness as good. But it seems to me that self-awareness is not entirely rosy, and may even be a phenomenon that is, on balance and as practiced by human beings, downright diabolical. Specifically, I think self-centeredness, the prodigious malformed offspring of self-awareness, is the powerhouse driving our head-long dash to annihilation.
There’s a robust array of world-ending options to ruminate over. Nuclear conflict, malicious use of artificial intelligence, the rise and acceptance of unchecked paranoid authoritarianism. And, of course, the environment, regarding which I contend that the primary cause of global warming is the burning of petro fuels like oil and natural gas. And global warming is the primary driver for the climate changes causing the devastation wrought by simultaneous monster hurricanes, rising seas, dying glaciers and rainforests, life threatening heatwaves and droughts, and unprecedented wild fires and flooding. At the same time global markets, politicians and gazillions of commuters enthusiastically await the resumption of the free passage of oil tankers through the Straight of Hormuz. (The US/Iran war is in its seventh month at the time of this writing.) I look at photos of the pre-hostilities armada of tankers transiting the Straight and think, “Are we out of our f***ing minds?” But then also I think, “Things ain’t so bad … and I really, really like the way I live … and my house isn’t on fire or being washed away.” Expanded development and gluttonous consumption of eco-poisoning petroleum is currently even official national policy.
I came across the tree included in the image above in the median of a San Francisco boulevard. I liked the way the tree looked a lot and took a pic of it on my phone. I then thought of the tree often over the following eight weeks, considering how I might include it in a graphic. The image of an ouroboros serpent entwined in a figure eight around the tree became vivid in my thoughts.
As I worked on the tree and serpent a haiku-like verse I’d composed in early 2002 often crossed my mind.
deep gnarled roots entwine
what slumbers long forgotten
timeless in the earth
But it seemed to me that picturing whatever was slumbering would diminish its beauty. Rooting the tree in a star field then occurred to me. At that point I found myself interpreting the image that had emerged so far … something I try not to do … preferring to let the next “feels right” idea direct the composition, and then mulling over what the whole thing might be about at length later when looking back on the “finished” work.
A blue sky with fluffy white clouds was the “feels right” background I visualized as all other elements of the composition neared completion, but the ironic “self-destruction and simultaneous surging self-awareness” thoughts presented above pestered me. I knew overtly conscious considerations were at play, but I could not get past the thought that a happy sky would be grotesquely Pollyanna-ish. A conscious decision to go with a foreboding sky won out and an interpretation (mea culpa, mea culpa) presented itself: “Life in the embrace of time, entering the twilight of eternal night.” Concerning this breach of personal protocol, an oblique association that comes to mind is thoughts I shared in a previous post about the concepts of persona and facade and the circumstances under which the distinction between those concepts fades.