On Retaining Childhood Optimism

Apropos to the recent Redwood Fur release, this record sleeve is here deployed to allow your own view of childhood dreams to take on a more retro, fondue-stained format. Please revisit this post after Proposition 19 has been passed to gain a more serious, intellectually rigorous perception of the childhood dream with the imagery of Paul Hibbets presented here. You may find it easier to keep your composure.

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We must become adults before we can remember how to think like children. I am beginning to operate on the premise that trying to live out one's childhood dream(s) is something that very well may ruin the world. What's the point of obtaining your childhood dream if in all that time that it takes to develop and flesh out that dream, you are neglecting everything around you for the sake of remaining inside of your self-directed project? Meanwhile, the world crumbles around you, and when you finally do see the childhood dream to its actualization, it is at the same time that you realize that your king or queenship exists atop a great pile of rubble. This is the classic tale of tragedy, of a loneliness that lasts forever; it is a detachment from the collective "people."

Tony Judt's recent book, ILL FARES THE LAND, states that one of the reasons that man has something called "society" is that it allows him to take on projects that otherwise he would not be capable of achieving by himself or with a small group of people. These tasks include ones like curing diseases, stopping hunger, and exploring the intricacies of the planet and beyond. When we remember our childhoods with the guidance of our adult minds, we are enabled to think about childhood dreams as tools for understanding our adult imaginations, and how we are helping those around us to understand the importance of communal worth, environmental worth, and the worth that comes out of being together and agreeing upon which large projects to take on. In short, childhood dreams may be forgotten with age, but the ability to formulate dreams should be considered a project which can be engaged and/or abandoned. The concept of the childhood dream is like an empty vessel, which is reality-based human potential. It is built to hold worth, and is emptied out or filled up during any age, kept intact until the vessel's expiration. The true childhood dreamer is one that knows the vessel, but is never fully aware of its contents. The advanced dreamer is one that is not only aware of both components, but capable of how they may propagate positivity to the whole.

Imbalance invites decay. If people take on a large project like remedying societal ailments, the villain is always decay. This is not to say that societies should focus only on how to stop decay from taking place. Entropy is a natural occurrence that man will most likely never have a hand in stopping altogether. What we need to do is learn how to take on the role of the shape-shifter, someone or something (person, society) able to recognize being subjected to decay, and then shed its once inhabitable now uninhabitable body so that it may grow a new one. This is why the snake is a very dynamic figure in world mythologies; he is the ultimate shape-shifter, constantly transferring himself from old form to new form. He symbolizes prosperity (the Rod of Asclepius, or the snake symbol that you see on ambulances) but also evil (the snake in Genesis). To return to Judt's thinking, this decay, illustrated by the current United States' necessity to overhaul it's largest institutions, creates cracks produced by the emergence of the new. These cracks reveal both a prosperous future and fearful uncertainty.

This is change. It is a frightening thing. One way to witness change's influence is by looking at technology. Technology has exploded; we have proved our brilliance by developing machinery such as the smart phone, a device which provides all available information of past, present and speculative future for anyone at any given moment. What this has done is made cerebral capacity (memory, creativity, analytical ability) handicapped. Now our cerebral capacity has been limited by this device which has tapped into everything that has been, is, and will be; a point of great human brilliance has also become a point for cerebral lethargy.

To speak on this note of technology and humankind meeting at one point, we must begin to question ethics of business and get back to, rather than historical and cultural humanities, humanities in the very sense of the word: the human aspects and qualities that only humans know how to portray. This is well articulated by Sing for Hope, a humanities advocacy group founded in New York. I just saw a pilot for the group which features sick people in hospitals being sung to by other people. This is so different from putting on a stereo or iPod. It is people in an unfortunate situation being presented by, essentially, themselves: a person made out of the same stuff, inoculating the patient with great spirit and energy, providing hope that they might have a chance at survival, so that that spirit may be sustained.

Artwork by Gavin Bruce, (c)2006

People embody an energy that technology will never be able to spread between people. A smile, a frown, a cry: these kinds of emotions will never be invoked by technology. They may be synthetically invoked. You may read an inspiring email, or become enraged by an interactive website, but technology in and of itself will not match the components which make a human. These are the next steps to be taken by technology's advancement.

Might a machine mimic the childhood dream? Peter Thiel's fellowship is encouraging ambitious college students to drop out of college and pursue their entrepreneurial projects in technology. This says, "Let technology actualize your childhood dream of becoming a singular success." In my opinion, this brings us back to the origins of this reading, in which we ask: is realizing your own dreams really the answer to society's troubles? Here, within the "vessel and its contents" analogy, the vessel does not matter and its contents, without a sound vessel, are grabbed and slurped. What good is the order by which the rich man abides if that order is splintered by his own negligence? If someone can claim $100,000 to drop out and make more money, then they have bypassed their chance to make the vessel strong and vital. Before actualizing the realm of the marvelous, which is to say the realm of dreams, the environment, both social and natural, must be cultivated and catered to. The adult must be awake and the child must be active. If the adult is not activated and he blindly strives to live in his illusions, then we would do well to recall the king, sitting alone on his mound of garbage.