erasure - a poem (and registering for art school!)

a thousand stories
are left in the dust
as we scavenge
for the scraps
of popular myth
how can we become
without recognizing
the beauty of lost faces
in the mirror?

-*-

Good morning folks!

Today is an awesome day for me. It's my initial registration date for classes for university in the fall. Because I'm doing a Fine Arts degree, everyone's first year is pretty much the same in terms of classes. We have a bunch of art history and drawing classes to bring us up to the same level artistically. From there, it's the second year where we really get to branch out and choose more specialized studio courses. My school has a nice selection of practices you can study and it's been exciting to look ahead to the next four years. >^_^< What an exciting time! I'm going to go register right after this post!

So today's poem was written one day when I was feeling a bit bored with the kinds of stories I was seeing. I felt like a lot of the movies and games I was seeing were really similar in feel and plot. It was starting to feel kind of stale to me. I was missing the quirkier movies from the 80's and 90's that had strange scenes or weird gorgeous settings.

But I'm not so sure that it's an isolated thing - this idea of repetition in narratives. I mean, if you look at mythology there are very clear patterns that emerge across various cultures that may or may not have anything to do with each other. Similar gods and goddesses pop up, reflecting our interactions and ideas about Nature. Do these things also represent elemental truths in our minds?

How much of how we frame our own stories and narratives is inherent versus moulded by the stories we learn?

I think it's easy to fall into the same patterns that we identify with emotionally. And there's a sense of "rightness" that can form when we can fit a narrative into a pattern we've seen before. Our brain is naturally comforted by patterns. But to keep expanding and growing, we must introduce our brains to new things. Because that sense of "rightness" doesn't necessarily mean that something is right - just familiar.

Through brain rehabilitation I've seen some strange things about how the brain processes. Not everything we think or feel is real and we naturally forget narratives or memories that contradict the story we hold in our brain.

So what does that have to do with this poem? I think in the end, you could be a greater person than you know. You could be wiser, more beautiful, more inspiring than you realize if the only stories you've seen associates those qualities with figures that don't resemble you. Exposing ourselves to more varied stories with different perspectives brings nuance to our way of seeing the world.

I hope you have a lovely day! I'm heading off to register for school!

xo
Ciel