Searching Still
Dear Eugene,
"You live with your parents, you hang with your buddies, and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliché. You're nowhere, goin' no place!''
The "nice girl" tells the John Travolta character in "Saturday Night Fever," an almost angelic, "dream girl" that is anything but cliché in the eyes of the boy. And apparently that's also how she sees herself.
When we live according to the world's prescription we are a cliché. When we believe in the world telling us we are not a cliché we are a bigger a cliché. As we grow older the burning sensation of such tragic irony subsides and we make peace to live and die with the contradiction. There is no more need to single out who is what when the world is just the way it is and we'll forever be the way we are. It is called acceptance, compromise, maturity.
Learned helplessness.
To not want to a live like a cliché is a testimony to youth, I truly believe that. It is important to answer to the call to not live like everyone else, with or without deep philosophizing about where the call comes from. Mountains of book are devoted to the topic, yet the most heroic response remains one that wrestles with the call in the next breath we take. The call is simply there, and it takes a quiet desperation of gathering dishonesty big and small to shut the voice up.
When did I draw this? Must be between 10 to 15 years ago. I was bored at work, and MS Paint my only "fun app."
So how to not live like a cliché? This sounds like a good seminar topic. One that will cost a lot of money and mingling with like-minded people. Oops, buying into a cliché again.
Surely it would be about living life "to the fullest"--whatever that means. Sunbathing on the deck of a yacht it looks like. Maybe higher learning, not just for my own glory, but also to save the world while I am at it. One can have one's cake and eat others' too.
Work in a church maybe? That can't be wrong; holy stuff, holy people, everything I touch with God's stamp of approval on it. If I get smart enough I can start to talk louder, to do bigger things for God, get a degree or two, put my stuffs online, get invited to enlighten others in big lecture halls, high-level God work for a high-level guy like me.
How about a law degree? A justice-fighting lawyer, that sounds grand. Fight for people who can't afford a lawyer. But, of course, that'll only be after I have enough wealthy clients paying me big bucks to build me a name and lifestyle conducive to my justice-fighting aspiration. There is no Batman without Wayne Enterprises.
The truth is there are (too many) cliché pastors, cliché theologians, cliché justice-fighting lawyers, cliché Third World aid workers, cliché beat poets, cliché avant-garde composers, and (*cringe) cliché rock stars. We never planned to be one; we just grew up and grew into it and now we can't find our way back home. No one wakes up in the morning and declares, "Today I am going to be a bigger cliché than I was yesterday!"
How deep is your love,
How deep is your love?
I really mean to learn
'Cause we're living in a world of fools
Breaking us down when they all should let us be
We belong to you and me
The movie "Saturday Night Fever" is honest about its dishonesty. This Bee Gees song plays in the boy character's head, a soundtrack of his desire, his yearning to find a special place in the world, in the angelic girl's heart.
But the truth is there is no love between them, only a Madonna-Whore Complex they have for each other. If the world is indeed full of fools they are two of the biggest ones and they know that, giving their firm allegiance to the world's life-breaking ways. The world does not stop them from belonging to each other; it is them who cannot stop hurting and killing each other. Out of frustration, the boy finally brutalized the angel he couldn't shoot down and possess.
The movie must know the enormity of dishonesty it takes to speaks so honestly about being cliché.
We are called to never grow indifferent about how "fearfully and wonderfully made" we are.
"What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
Searching, still. Alex
"You live with your parents, you hang with your buddies, and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliché. You're nowhere, goin' no place!''
The "nice girl" tells the John Travolta character in "Saturday Night Fever," an almost angelic, "dream girl" that is anything but cliché in the eyes of the boy. And apparently that's also how she sees herself.
When we live according to the world's prescription we are a cliché. When we believe in the world telling us we are not a cliché we are a bigger a cliché. As we grow older the burning sensation of such tragic irony subsides and we make peace to live and die with the contradiction. There is no more need to single out who is what when the world is just the way it is and we'll forever be the way we are. It is called acceptance, compromise, maturity.
Learned helplessness.
To not want to a live like a cliché is a testimony to youth, I truly believe that. It is important to answer to the call to not live like everyone else, with or without deep philosophizing about where the call comes from. Mountains of book are devoted to the topic, yet the most heroic response remains one that wrestles with the call in the next breath we take. The call is simply there, and it takes a quiet desperation of gathering dishonesty big and small to shut the voice up.
When did I draw this? Must be between 10 to 15 years ago. I was bored at work, and MS Paint my only "fun app."
So how to not live like a cliché? This sounds like a good seminar topic. One that will cost a lot of money and mingling with like-minded people. Oops, buying into a cliché again.
Surely it would be about living life "to the fullest"--whatever that means. Sunbathing on the deck of a yacht it looks like. Maybe higher learning, not just for my own glory, but also to save the world while I am at it. One can have one's cake and eat others' too.
Work in a church maybe? That can't be wrong; holy stuff, holy people, everything I touch with God's stamp of approval on it. If I get smart enough I can start to talk louder, to do bigger things for God, get a degree or two, put my stuffs online, get invited to enlighten others in big lecture halls, high-level God work for a high-level guy like me.
How about a law degree? A justice-fighting lawyer, that sounds grand. Fight for people who can't afford a lawyer. But, of course, that'll only be after I have enough wealthy clients paying me big bucks to build me a name and lifestyle conducive to my justice-fighting aspiration. There is no Batman without Wayne Enterprises.
The truth is there are (too many) cliché pastors, cliché theologians, cliché justice-fighting lawyers, cliché Third World aid workers, cliché beat poets, cliché avant-garde composers, and (*cringe) cliché rock stars. We never planned to be one; we just grew up and grew into it and now we can't find our way back home. No one wakes up in the morning and declares, "Today I am going to be a bigger cliché than I was yesterday!"
How deep is your love,
How deep is your love?
I really mean to learn
'Cause we're living in a world of fools
Breaking us down when they all should let us be
We belong to you and me
The movie "Saturday Night Fever" is honest about its dishonesty. This Bee Gees song plays in the boy character's head, a soundtrack of his desire, his yearning to find a special place in the world, in the angelic girl's heart.
But the truth is there is no love between them, only a Madonna-Whore Complex they have for each other. If the world is indeed full of fools they are two of the biggest ones and they know that, giving their firm allegiance to the world's life-breaking ways. The world does not stop them from belonging to each other; it is them who cannot stop hurting and killing each other. Out of frustration, the boy finally brutalized the angel he couldn't shoot down and possess.
The movie must know the enormity of dishonesty it takes to speaks so honestly about being cliché.
We are called to never grow indifferent about how "fearfully and wonderfully made" we are.
"What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
Searching, still. Alex
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