An Odyssey of Letters
From a young age, I was fascinated by ideas. I would jot them down on my school notebooks, on a scrap of paper, a sheet of looseleaf. They could come from any source: a conversation, a song, something someone said in class, a book, a speech, a movie, a story, a TV show — anywhere ideas could be found. When I got older, I wrote them on the stickies app on my computer. I still collect ideas. Maybe these ideas have become who or what I am? That’s a complex question though.
After many years, there are a lot of ideas swirling around in my head. I am shuffling back and forth in the maze of consciousness. The ideas want to come out.
The original title I had in mind for this work, or whatever you call it, was An Odyssey of Letters. It was to be an exploration of ideas that I have collected, compared, rearranged, polished, corrupted, appropriated, manipulated, re-contextualized, test drove, hypothesized about. Mine is an existence obsessed with ideas. I liken reading any of this to spending some time inside my mind, whatever that is. Trying to understand someone else’s mind is a true act of empathy, at least someone told me that once.
An Odyssey of Letters was an OK title, but it was lacking the urgency that the current one has. We (all living things) are facing some unprecedented, self-inflicted (read as “human-inflicted") challenges. The optimist in me hopes that ideas can save us. Well, some ideas can save us. There are obviously some ideas that have gotten us into this trouble.
I generally think that we need more empathy for each other, for other forms of life, for the physical systems that sustain us, for all that we don’t understand. So, maybe this is a social experiment to see how far we can go to empathize, to connect, to see if we can solve the problems we are simultaneously creating and experiencing. At best, that is what it might be. At worst, maybe it is nothing but a bunch of letters.