Where the End Begins

The shattered destiny of an illusion brings to mind ancient philosophical texts rebirth in the early modernist work of Descartes. In a newly invented way of expressing thought, without the Hellenistic language or contemporary symbolism of Michael McClure; the “wall of flowers” is being torn down.

It was not until 1989 when the wall fell in Berlin. I walk past a piece of that wall M-Th and I suffer because of the overwhelming sense of freedom that washes over me. What is liberty? I admire the victims of Fascism that gave their lives to that light, that symbol that was embodied only by hope. Hope needs a home. The eyes of a child in East Berlin gazing at the wall, and imagining what is on the other side. Is it not everything? If we do not know what is on the other side of something the wonder that Socrates says is the beginning of thought, the beginning of understanding cannot exist.

We lay ignorant to the imagination. It is an untapped source unexploited (except by television) and open to possibility. Picture that same child, with a glimmer of hope in his eyes, staring at the clouds in the sky; forming shapes of what freedom looks like. It is an image untarnished by the war, by the imprisonment of ideas, imagination lays unharnessed by possibility. Einstein said that, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” It was th artist in Einstein that allowed him to reach beyond the commonality of thought and attain universality.

This is the goal of the true artist that sees the end as only the beginning, draws upon their fears and travels back in time to express them in a medium people can view. If we look at the mind as the epicenter of thought that allows travel in time, imaginationation may be the ‘key’ to unlocking a dimension that only the liberty of thought could produce. To refrain from too many cliche references, I will say only this… the greatest minds believed the end did not exist, because imagination lead to transport into a blackhole with a light at the end.