Reality Recognition

One of the big takeaways for me when I read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae was the notion, common throughout all time, that women are akin to nature/earth/chaos (cyclical and unpredictable) and men are akin to civilization/sky/culture (linear progression and stability). Understanding this most fundamental of distinctions has changed my understanding of nearly everything else. At the very least, I have come to see that my writing and artmaking processes are cyclical, and just one tiny aspect of that is my vacillation between striving for clarity and consciously cultivating ambiguity.

At what point in the cycle am I now? It might well be a transition point, and I can’t quite tell if I am going to tip forward into the realm of clarity or lean back to stay with ambiguity, but my guess is that I’ll become more thoroughly entrenched in ambiguity, and this might be a (semi?) conscious turning away from the clarity purportedly espoused by everyone in the world at large that turns out to be little more than obfuscation, manipulation, and outright lies. I’m beginning to think that no one would recognize reality if it jumped out, grabbed them, and threw them to the ground.