Placed within academia, me, a common Long Island girl, a “normal” girl, as my first Lesbian, separatist art school roommate called me, I was tossed into the higher educational system without much preparation.. Without warning.
ACADEMIA!
This “normal” girl had a very high regard for her “animal” self – her instinctual self. The person that inhales, feels, expresses without thinking, emotes, shoots from the hip, simply LIVES without thinking about it too much, without stopping to think about whether or not what she is thinking is proper, acceptable, okay with the powers that be, socially acceptable. Who Cared? Who gave a flying fuck? Really. She didn’t feel all that normal, she simply FELT.
Academia demanded that she look deep inside herself. Question everything.
That trust in the inner animal began to erode as social etiquette created demands on the external behavior of their being. She began to question her confidence and on occasion she would put herself in check. Actually THINK before she ACTED.
This proved a rather difficult level of behavior to maintain.
THINKING BEFORE ACTING.
Does everyone do that?
How do they do that?
Each time she stopped to think before she acted, she simply stopped. And then she didn’t act at all. And then everything fell to shit. Fell apart. Disintegrated. And any confidence, witty comment, seed of genius and any idea for a painting, everything just fell apart.
Evaporated.
So to be alive, she basically decided, one day, that the inner animal wasn’t such a bad thing. So when she embraced her inner animal, her inner beast, she decided that it needed a name. Although, because she did not know if it was a girl or a boy,the inner animal would need to have a name that was not easily “Gender-fied”.
She thought, or rather.. FELT.. Long and hard. The name eluded her. Each time one came to her mind, it didn’t seem right. So putting aside the seemingly big black hole of the naming process, she returned to ponder the qualities of her beast.
She imagined that if a person is raised by really gentle, calm parents… Parents that thought long and hard before they said things they regretted or acted in ways that were utterly deplorable, the offspring of those parents might actually be more palatable, more intellectual… CALMER. The ever developing inner animal wouldn’t have a chance to take a foothold and would wither and die and dissolve and probably get sweated out in a really good game of 5th grade kickball.
RATIONAL! What a thought.
But if you are raised by emotion driven, frustrated people who fight a lot with each other, then probably the offspring – ME, in this case – would be quite ANIMAL … emotionally. Even lashing out at times. Which is so very unsavory in this PC world that we live in right now.
(Peter Lambdin… Where are your offspring?)
People who have taught you that the world is out to get you, a place to be feared and suspected, then maybe fear and suspicion will drive your reactions.
GET PAST THAT! JUST TRY!
If we are so blessed, we all grow up, you say, and I say that too, we all grow up. Become adults.
Become somewhat rational adults, if all goes well.
Then everything becomes so friggin’
BORING
RATIONAL
METERED
PREDICTABLE
HUM DRUM
WITHOUT CONVICTION
FRAUGHT WITH FEAR
UNINSPIRED…
Ugh…. Uninspired.. The worst possible thing I could think of.
SPIRE
I think my animal’s name is Spire.
Now we Eat… CHEERS!
Val Sivilli 