Vision

Everybody needs a vision. This vision can take the shape of many things--it can be visual art, it can be music, cooking, crafts, photography, writing, skateboarding, whatever. The more the vision relies on things outside the self, the more restorative and nutritive it will be. This vision provides joy when there is no joy in the immediate day; it sustains when there is no sustenance to feed the physical body; it loves when there is no love left in a person. Without vision, we are just automatons, just getting through the stupid frustrating day, of getting the things that our money culture tells us we need, the stuff that is supposed to make us happy. We're supposed to have that 36" plasma TV--if we don't have it there's something wrong with us. If we don't even want it, then there's REALLY something wrong with us.

I know that while I write this I am being untrue to my vision, because it's a lie to say that my vision has always made me happy. That is one of the great untruths, I think, about vision--that it is always supposed to make you happy. No--sometimes, in fact your vision can make you stay for awhile in your unhappiness, really considering it, turning it over and over like a new-found stone, examining it for flaws, nicks, or even the hint of quartz shining through. That consideration of sorrow is one of the points of vision. It forces you to slow down. You can't just pass through the stages of life when you have to express every detail of it through your vision--every tear becomes a desolate note played in discord, every cry to whatever a god may be becomes a brush stroke on the canvas, every day spent waiting for change becomes another touch to your child's face or the loving embrace you give them every morning.

My vision has been writing for a long time, but hasn't always been--although it's always been part of my life, since I was old enough to write. I always painted, and sang, and played guitar, but by college writing for me had emerged as my preeminent form of expression, and I knew at that time that I would work my vision through words. Why? Some people develop that real mode of expression through the musical instrument, through their bodies in dance, through the fluidity of the paint, through the wood they hew and form together into the peaceful eaves. The mode doesn't matter--only that you have the vision.

Every little girl needs a vision encouraged in them early in life, and every little boy does too. Everyone needs something they love that is not a person--something not rooted in flesh, that cannot die or disappoint. The vision that causes an electric surge of energy to flow from the brain to the fingers to the external world. This is the conduit of the internal sea to the outside, to the material world. The outside world is where autonomous things exist and where they are perceived, categorized, and translated back into the heteronymous nature of the human mind. That the sky can be "blue" is relative to how each individual perceives "blue." That is the relationship between the internalized vision and the literal vision of sensory perception.

But back to the purpose of vision, which is to transport, to transfer the worry of the everyday into something that makes that worry bearable. The purpose of vision is to sustain. When pain becomes unbearable or the problems of life are a sea of darkness, your vision is what keeps you getting up every day. That's what people must mean by faith, although I've never been religious. But vision is the same thing. It keeps you getting up, loving the sun, thankful to be alive & allowed to even have a vision. Because if you can believe in your vision, everything else will become a part of that belief. The sustenance that your vision provides sees you through the longest day, the interminable night.

For we can connect to each to each other through the extension of language, through our fingertips, through our voices, our touch, our love. But without connection, we are still whole, because we have seen the light come after dark and are therefore autonomous. Both modes are we--heteronymous is what connects us to each other and the earth, and to things that are eternal. Your vision will lead you into worlds just being born, and to where worlds are erased. It's your reward for being human, and for being alive.