I wanted to share a few odds and ends today with you.
First is the incredible surreal trippy vision of Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux. This is a depiction of his vision as described to John Neihardt late in life. It’s a look into the mind of a different culture, a different time, a different place. Black Elk felt haunted by this vision late in life, as he felt that he failed to realize its power in his own lifetime. I hope by representing it in this way that the power of his vision continues on in this life. From all my study of the Euro Native American history, and as I’ve written before, there are so many parallels to today’s modern culture rooted in that past, although it has been completely whitewashed from our history. And even now today, the injustices of the past stand unredressed. People today say, well, no, they sold their land. No, they sold it at the point of a gun, with the military force compelling them. And if you look at the history of injustice of America, it has largely broken along racial lines, and much of that past, those wounds remain open scars.
A second piece I wanted to share was a depiction of Musashi’s great duel with his greatest rival, Sasaki Kojiro AKA Ganryu. Musashi defeats his greatest rival with a wooden sword carved out of a boat oar on the way to the battle. Musashi surprising choice of weapon throws his opponent off balance, who is prepared for Musashi to be late, but not the weapon he brings. For Musashi, it may have been as simple as a bolt of inspiration on the boat ride when he noticed a broken oar in the bottom of the boat and seized upon it as a weapon. And you see his opponent, his great weapon was the sword that he called the drying pole, which was a really long sword. Musashi fought fire with fire. He carved an even bigger, heavier weapon out of a broken boat oar. Its brilliant. Rather than try to fight with his signature two-sword style, he picked an even greater sword, defeated his opponent in his own game.
That’s all I have today. Maybe that’s all I have. I can’t think of many other stories that I really want to tell. I have a limited corpus in me for this medium. I keep thinking I’m done and then out pops another idea. But this time maybe. I hope what I’m doing is creating an accessible bridge to the stories, the myths, the histories of the past in a modern format. I think we stand at an interesting crossroads - a Renaissance of culture and expression or a dystopia of commodification. The tools are in our hands. The choices ours to make.
