From: Time magazine (March 27, 2017), p. 24.
THIS IS THE WORLD young people live in today, through the eyes of an artist/cartoonist who perceives and creates images that depict often what is more in the "collective unconscious" (much like a good filmmaker), and yet we all know that we are living reality as something like this "dream" image that is depicted, as the arational space in which artists work. The image above can be interpreted in so many ways, and one of the reasons I liked it was it relates to my last blog on schooling and fear/anxiety (see below). How can educators, researchers, psychologists, pretend to make the study of "fear and learning" so clean cut and "scientific" and "statistical" when the lived reality of a child or adult going to school (in this cartoon by John Atkinson) a bit of a "nightmare" --even if an exaggerated one (dreams and nightmares exaggerate for a reason). Clearly, this is what it is like living in a post-traumatic culture and century, as several critical observers I have read speak about. I and others simply call it the everyday "culture of fear"... whatever the name, I like that we have pictures of this phenomenon, and that's why this art image is so important to reach the other-side of our rational brain and communicate what we often tend to deny and repress due to the predominance of the logical side of our brain that keeps busy and distracted in the everyday "conscious" world of affairs.
I see images like the above as not attempts to scare us most, but to wake us up to how scared we already are--and how we are living in a psychic numb state--which is definitely not healthy. We'd be much better to admit the fear(s) and work through them, as a good fear management/education would teach us how to do and not only teach us, would allow us to re-connect with our primal instincts of knowing how to manifest the spirit of Fearlessness in the face of Fear.
Comments