I think a lot of thoroughly thoughtful thuggish thoughts that build and build and build up an idea, and then turn around and knock it all down. Let me demonstrate by knocking down that title right off the bat. Rene DesCartes in the early 1600’s said, “Cogito Ergo Sum”, and he thereby totally disrupted the world as we knew it. Didn’t get that? Let me translate. He said, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Still didn’t help? Okay, here’s the English, “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the one thing that I know for sure is that I am thinking this particular thought at this particular time. If I am thinking, and I know I am, I must be here and I must be real. So there is one thing I know for certain. But do I know anything else for certain? Uh-oh. How do I know anything? I have to rely on my senses. And my senses lie to me all the time. I am partially color blind, so I don’t see the world the same way you do. I don’t see things in black and white, like Great Grandma Hinckley did in her 90’s, but the colors look different to my eyes than they do to yours and I will never know what things look like to you. Forget politicians and all other people who tell lies, my own eyes lie to me constantly. So can I know anything for sure? Of course not. All I have are firm beliefs based on imperfect senses and best guesses at what is true. So what I am actually talking about is a list of potential essay ideas that I am merely asserting as true based on my imperfect goofy thinking of thoughtful thuggish thoughts.
Idea #1 that I think is certainly possibly maybe true; My brain was taught and I was raised to adulthood by the movies I saw when I was young. I want to talk about this at length in another post. The video is by a guy who was a kid in the 80’s, and he has some really awesome movies to offer as a way to delineate his rise to adulthood.
My list includes the movies of my boyhood seen in the Belmond Theater and on our old black and white Motorola TV. My list of movies that raised me includes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz.
Idea #2; Animals are people too.
I mean, as a writer for young adults, I know for a fact that animals are relevant as characters. They have a point of view, feelings, reactions, and complex lives that people rarely pay attention to. I have to write about this some time in the future too.
Idea #3; The worst things that happen to us in our lives, are also the best things that happen. Wow! What a difficult essay topic. But I not only think it, I can prove it… at least to myself. But can I write about it? Time will tell.
Idea #4; Silly thoughts and serious thoughts are two sides of the same coin. And this will be particularly difficult to think about if thoughts are literally coins. That would mean that my head is full of metal, and I know several people who would read that sentence and shout, “I knew it all along!” Fortunately they are all too sensible to read this far in one of my blog posts.
So, at 600 words I still have lots more to say. But people with metal in their heads often talk way too much, so my concluding sentence will be simply; “I promise to shut up for now.”
Fauns
Fauns originate in Greek mythology as forest spirits, sensual, playful, and infused with the energies of the natural world. They are followers of Pan, the god of the forest. They are hedonistic, seeking sexual gratification from nymphs and human girls, loving wine and feasting. They are not the same things as satyrs, though Roman mythology would come along and squeeze them both into the same mold.
So, why am I, a boy from Iowa of distinctly German ancestry, so fascinated and obsessed by fauns in art and literature?
The answer is both goofy and creepy. I have a faun of my own. He lives with me as an invisible friend. His name is Radasha. He is Harvey to my Elwood. (That’s a Jimmy Stewart movie reference if the twists and turns of my mind confuse you.) Just like the fauns of mythology when confronted with travelers and wanderers, he sometimes helps with guidance and advice, and he sometimes does me mischief with ridicule and wicked tricks.
My theory for why my convoluted psyche has need of invisible companions goes back to the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. That is why Ra is basically a ten-year-old boy with the legs, tail, and horns of a goat. He is the sexual/sensual part of me that got split off from my inner self by that traumatizing event.
Being a child-victim can do terrible things to a boy. It seriously interfered with my blossoming interest in girls. It turned me from an inventive, out-going leader of the gang into a quiet and somewhat timid introvert. I repressed the memory of the actual event, more of a torture-situation than seduction, so that the real psychological damage of it occurred at the subconscious level. I began to worry that I might be gay. I began to seriously loathe myself and my own body. I went so far as to burn myself on my lower back by lying against the furnace grate in order to repress desires I felt were evil.’
Radasha showed up at my bedroom window late one snowy night when I was about seventeen years old. He began talking at me, making fun of me for being terrified of girls, and encouraging me to risk being naked more. He wanted me to enjoy the idea of sex more and shy away from it less. In some ways, he kept that part of me alive.
Of course, I made myself familiar with the mythological creature Radasha obviously was. I read everything I could about it. I even acquired a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and read it with great fascination even though the prose was dense and archaic. I realized that I wasn’t alone in using fauns as an artistic expression of the repressed sensuality that constantly consumed me. Ra was there to needle me and encourage me, to lead me to learn how to better like myself.
I know by now most readers will have given up on this post already, put off by bizarre self-analysis of my rather atypical case of abnormal psychology. But being naked more is apparently part of faun-therapy. At Ra’s insistence, I am making myself more psychologically and metaphorically naked by revealing these things here in a blog that mostly nobody reads anyway. And naked fauns in my artwork are a definite thing that merits exploration. So if you have actually read this far through this mythological mold spore of an essay, you now know about as much about me as I know about myself. And you will probably do just as I do. You will shake your head and continue to wonder how any one old guy can be quite so weird.
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