The fun thing about myths is that they’re great for visual thinkers. You aren’t to narrow them down and flatten them into any lesson or actionable takeaway. In their dreamlike narratives, the images are the thing.
In this story, I find myself sitting with the last few scenes the most. It seems we have a tendency to personalize iron string music these days. It’s often all we listen to. We watch overseas tragedies, domestic troubles and political outrage and take everything very seriously. Fair enough, because we live among serious circumstances. But we don’t do that when it comes to laughter, levity and comedy, do we? Stand-up specials and comedies are never taken as personally or internalized like the news.
As for that silver string, we don’t even recognize the music anymore. I often wonder to what extent that can even be rectified.
I’ve heard it said that there’s a reason we find ourselves in such a reductive, quantified and abstract reality: those are tools that facilitate commodifying and using the world to serve our purposes. Resource exploitation is far more efficient when slinging numbers, not sitting with more empathy. Well, fie on that.
As is often the case, I’m with Fionn on this one. I’m not going to ignore today’s iron-string lamentations, but I’m also not going to forget the other two. I’m going to try to remember that all kinds of shadows walk.
