They say that the best artists are usually unbalanced. Faulkner was an alcoholic; Van Gogh was chronically depressed; Sylvia Plath was suicidal. But what these people produced, what they poured their passion and heart into creating, was on a legendary scale.
I don't really know what I want this post to be about, and usually I would just save it as a draft or copy it into a word document and leave it until such a time when I could actually incorporate it into a coherent thought, but tonight it just feels like it needs to be written, and I'm sure it will find its way eventually.
Last night I dreamed about destruction. I had just read the chapters in A Tale of Two Cities where the revolutionaries murdered people by the carriage-load, dragging prisoners through the streets to the guillotine for days and nights in a row. In my dream, there were school buses that carried death.
They would drive into a town, running over anyone they could, and when they stopped you had better hope that you had made it inside, because if you were still out in the open you were going to get shot. It wasn't adults doing the shooting, though, it was kids. The kinds of kids you would expect to find in a gang or a home, but also the nice kids who were persuaded to join their cause and weren't nice any more.
Anyway, they shot everyone, regardless of who they were or whether they deserved it. I don't know what they were fighting for; I don't know why they thought it was necessary to shoot the people that they did. But I do know that they did it with a sense of righteousness, and that it was one of the most disturbing dreams I've ever had.
I usually don't even remember my dreams. But I remembered that one, and then I also remembered the one I had next, though I don't remember it any more.
I heard once that dreams are an old psychological training program, essentially a way for our brain to prepare us for things that we may need to be ready for in order to survive.
There has been so much destruction lately, and so many people shooting others that they don't even know for reasons that are purely selfish. It's as if the country was in relative peace for too long, and there had to be an inflated amount of turmoil to account for the fact that no tragedies had occurred in recent years. Humanity has a way of reminding us of its true nature whenever we start to forget and think that people may actually be good, for a change.
Or maybe that's just the earth's way of keeping beauty alive. When everything is falling to pieces, the littlest things can seem extraordinary. If you numb a nature like ours to the beautiful things in the world, we no longer care to indulge in the creativity and the love and the passion that make our world worth inhabiting. So instead, why not shoot it all to shit and, while we watch the world we have forgotten how to love, burn, maybe we can take a moment and create beauty where it never would have existed before.
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