The Fault In The Framework
Author: Patti Cobian Issue: 2024-02-21
The Fault In The Framework
by Patti Cobian
For some time, lining the periphery of conversations about progress and innovation, something seemed apparent, but continued to remain just outside of the reach of language. It would grab my ankles and trip me when I picked up my pace, a familiar ghost; I’ve struggled to clear the tangle of its invisible web, or to free my suspicions of its nature back into the ether.
And then, a few days ago, a possibility fluttered down to me as I was driving, consenting to fit into a box of understanding that was just the right size, its edges defined enough for me to hold. As I beheld this fragile box of idea, I was able to understand:
The exotic birds of our vision and innovation, the most cherished of our shining ideas and speculations, all come from a world not of our making — so why on earth would they play by our rules?
We pin them down the moment they come close enough; we groom them, we train them, and we survey them with satisfaction; another treasure in our collection. If they survive our preening, we may try to stuff them into models and diagrams, championing them as the prize that *we *created, that *we *own, parading around these wild-caught moments of raw nature, each a precious moment of evolution itself.
But as I survey the vast landscape of idea and notion, the bleeding edges, I feel a sadness and I wonder:
What if ideas are Life itself emerging through us, living cogs of evolution, unfolding and driving itself forward? This fundamental design, this shared blueprint of all living things inherently skews along a singular vein of emergence, the pulse of Life undulating in its beauty and perfection and breathtaking complexity — if only we, the vessels, maintain a loose enough grip.
I have seen what happens to the humans who lock up an idea for too long, falling asleep night after night to the sound of wings beating against a metal cage.
I’ve watched what happens to my own body when I swallow the brilliance of a thousand ideas that have tried to come through me, only to be shut away in the dark, unseen.
Others have died in the cages of my perfectionism, only to reincarnate onto the shoulder of another artist, months or years later.
I’ve seen fabulous, robust ideas whither and shrink when they are stuffed into old, rusty cages that were made too many years ago.
And time after time, I’ve watched the untamed spirit of an idea be broken as a human boldly claims “ownership” of it, “protecting” it with copyrights and penalties, its wild potential sequestered safely away in one single bank account.
Do we make the cages, do we claim the ownership, for the same reasons that we once claimed land and religion?
What if ideas, in their dynamic magnificence, were never meant to be pinned down as static creatures, a moment in time? I fear that our endless contortions, our wrestling of the beautiful and the natural, may not be in service to the idea as we may have believed, but in service to ourselves.
Are we merely building endless frameworks under which we might find shelter from the terror that we hold, pacifying our persistent fear of the unknown, of the immeasurable and the immutable, the inbreath and outbreath of our dread of dying? Or worse, that we never mattered at all?
Can we outrun our existential terror on the backs of clever, cutting wordplay, or else the most well-laid of plans? Can we buy ourselves more time to delay the inevitable: our sinking into the knowing that we control so little – or perhaps that we control nothing at all?
I stand alone in a silent room, empty but for the cages holding the lifeless and the dead, and I can’t help but fear that I’ve had it all wrong, for too long.
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- Patti Cobian (author)
- 2024 (year)
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