Just a tidbit to share
today, but perhaps a pertinent tidbit harvested from Ron Howard’s award winning
movie “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russel Crowe (imo one of his very best roles,
I highly recommend the movie) portraying the life and experiences of the Nobel
laureate economist John Nash.
She was a beautiful little
girl, truly, and she never grew up. She
was always the same beautiful little girl every time she appeared, and this
across a span of time measured in decades.
Her perpetual youth and beauty were his proof she wasn’t real, at least
in a conventional corporeal sense. Nor
was she the only character who refused to age, there were two others who
equally endured the years unchanged. In
the end they were John’s proof that his mind was projecting active and dynamic characters
into his world that others quite simply did not perceive. In the movie these characters were set as symptoms
of the schizophrenia John Nash endures, his understanding of them leading to
his classic counter to the problem, the elegantly simple question “do you see
him?”
Symptoms perhaps, and yet
in light of the extreme fidelity of their endurance perhaps a bit more than
simply symptoms allowing for the power and precision of the mind wherein they
made their abode. You see, what dawned
on me is that the three characters do a fine, fine job of personifying the
social forces involved in John’s primary work of defining in mathematical terms
the social dynamics of the modern world.
In my little insanity the
three characters become a personalized
perception-as-projection of low order
collective entities within the social dynamic: the government man reflecting
the fear and desperation driven world of the aggressive and/or parasitic forms
of collective entities; the roommate those collective entities whose presence reflects
the nurturing and positive influences of society, perhaps a bit aloof and
abrasive at times and yet still benign in essence; and, of course, the little
girl who must remain a beautiful little girl in order to
personify the attribute of the human condition she represents. You see, I think the little girl represents
hope, and hope as such simply cannot mature and still remain hope. Matured into womanhood she can become many
things… mother, lover, wife or mistress… but she can’t remain hope for she has
transitioned from a dream into a reality.
There is far more in this
understanding than I’ve touched on here, for it opens to consideration not
simply the collective entities as such, but the impact each of our unique level
of perception and/or projection of those collective entities might have on the
dynamics found within our individual spheres of empathy, their personal impact
on our conscious lives. More to come as
the thought matures. For now though I
simply wish to say “Thank You!” to John Nash and all those who cooperated in
bringing his story to me. Thanks guys.
Oh, and concerning the
title of this post? You guessed it… the
thought dawned on me in the middle of rinsing out the shampoo. Please don’t ask me why there, because I don’t
have a clue.
In Biblical times and even until relatively recently in human history, Mr. Nash would most likely have been called a prophet or seer, and it would have been recognized that the people he saw were avatars, angels, or symbols in the "language" of vision. The Roman Catholic church might have called him a saint. But our modern literal-mindedness is antipathetic towards minds such as his--creating a need for the movie about his life.
ReplyDeleteAs for the time and place of your sudden insight, bathing/washing is for many of us a symbolic ritual for clearing our minds from preconceptions that hinder our perceptions...
*chuckle* hmmm... lemme see here, what was getting scrubbed off? Oh yea, road grime, rust and dead paint, the sort of stuff that floats around when you're working grinder brush on old metal, soooo... yea, that might have been a factor. Not gonna swear it was removing the proof of the hours that opened the vista, it might have been simply the hours that demanded (to keep me hide intact) that I pay total attention to a physical task at hand, but still, one the direct result of the other so it would play out about the same.
DeleteThe world is packed with multiple meanings, friend Cyranos. My Lord Jesus was a great master at such, and at calling our attention to them; that's the real reason He taught by telling stories. Religious rituals are mostly symbolic, but the symbols themselves have power, and were developed to remind us of the greater realities to which they point. So our daily washing, while prosaic enough in our prosaic minds, still carries some of the old power of ritual cleansing and baptism.
DeleteYou speak a truth my friend... a ritual, like a name, carries the meaning and the depth we're willing to attach, and maintain...
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