Knowledge is not safe, and I want to know
Knowledge is not safe, and I want to know
a clear 2024
Sometimes I look at myself like a piece of glass trying not to break — yet actively making decisions to break myself. A tug of war of forms. When I look at someone in a movie, I want the glass to break. To examine the powdery substance the glass turns into. The subtle glitter. The snow. The spectacle of breaking.
There are times I believe all I desire is to break. Making decisions I know will hurt me in some irredeemable way — yet I bounce back. Data is given. New knowledge is formed. The data of living requires moments of trust, hurt, and frustration. My mind watches my mind make decisions and wonders why it wants to hurt me. Why can’t you just be safe? Because knowledge is not safe and I want to know.
I saw Poor Things the other day in one of my favorite theaters in LA, the Los Feliz 3. It’s not because the screens are large or the sound is the best, but because it feels like home there.
The movie chronicles Bella Baxter, a woman-frankenstein hybrid on a journey of learning how to be a human being at the ripe age of — I actually don’t know. Just imagine a full adult woman with the mind of a baby, rapidly, learning how to live.
It is about the things inside of us — those pure wretched feelings and wild desires we teach ourselves to stop letting out, in order to be a more palatable, social human being. But Bella doesn’t do those things. She feels everything and she tells the truth in each moment. She’s vulnerable in a way that is fully powerful, because she doesn’t know how to be ashamed of herself (yet). She lives, fiercely, and she feels hurt, too. She lets the hurt hit her without making herself the villain for experiencing it.
Watching her reminded me of the cruelty of knowing. Of the things we will do to ourselves just to know. But how beautiful it is to watch someone experience that process. How beautiful it is to watch a woman live, and crack, and burst, and split at the seams, and take that charge, that voltage of living, and ring it through everything.
I try to save myself from the pain of knowing, but the pain is within the process. A hymn, if you will. a set chorus. The gradation of voices. Something would be missing without it.
Watching someone on screen makes me more forgiving to the self watching myself. Less in terror. Watching a sprawling life forgives me for my own sprawling life, my at times prickly life — even this gives me joy.
Is this revolutionary? That witnessing art makes me more human? It’s just that, to watch a character living, even when they are in pain, even when they are making terrible mistakes, even when they believe they are ugly or pathetic or irredeemable, that is when I think I love watching them the most. It gives me a kind of clarity on myself. In those tumultuous, emotional times when I judge myself so harshly, in those darker moments, I’d like to not be so unforgiving. I’d like to remind myself that what I’m doing in this moment is also living. And if I were to have watched this scene in a movie, this is where I would have loved the character the most.
I wonder if those things can live together — the feeling of pain, or discomfort, or unknowingness, but also this wider acceptance of it.
You can only hide from the truth for so long. The truth, unlike you, is unchanging. It is you who changes around the truth and thus are able to witness different facets of it. Not all of our truths will be revealed at once. Perhaps on our deathbeds these truths will march out and present themselves, each by name, each in their own selected garb. A parade of truths walking to reveal themselves to you.
But that is a figment of the imagination,
And the real truth, the one you have access to, is not split up into parts and characters. Though depending on your proximity to it, might seem so. The truth is a large, gargantuan thing, light as air, and if you pay close enough attention to your body you will feel its very essence.
Sometimes the truth comes to you and it makes you sad. Because you believed in a not-truth which made you resistant. You tried to dress something else up as the truth. But the truth requires no dressing, it comes undressed. Anything you need to dress up to believe in is not the truth.
However, it might be guiding you to it. Not-truths are a one way ticket to be flung into the real truth. See, the truth wants to be recognized. So when it sees you calling something else by its name, at first it’s patient and doesn’t correct you — but over time it will assert itself. It will fill itself in your environment and change the way you react to things. It will get in your way. In its own special, detrimental way the truth will make itself known.
(The truth wants you to win.)
It is one thing to tell yourself there is time, it is another to believe you already have it. Things are tried before they are true. That is why true things become true when they are tested.
Let us test you life says, because we want you to become true.
All I want in 2024 is a clear, clear channel — since clarity is not the enemy of truth.
What are you walking towards this year?