User:Thijshijsijsjss/Human Parser/About It All Being Connected
Optional? Connected to several mentions of grocery shopping, to routines (song makes me thing), a call-and-response with experiencing it all, an account of dissociation, but with a positive lining. If I am to add about trusting your feelings, the candy could be fruit, but that might just be superficial and silly. Don't know if the McGuire example really adds to the section atm. I love it as an example, and think it might be possible to make a point about the form of the thesis here.
I am in the grocery store, holding a banana. A song is playing that I heard once while travelling. During this travel, I saw a banana farm.
Every morning I eat the exact same breakfast: 3 spoons of oats, 3 spoons of a yoghurt, a little Nutella and 1 banana. I eat the banana mindlessly. I enjoy the banana, don't get me wrong, but I am mindless of its existence. It blends away with the yoghurt and oats, it blends into a numb moment of me mindlessly chewing it. But now I am here, holding a banana. Maybe it is the song, but I think about the great distance this banana had to travel. I think about those who harvested it. I think about the decades spent breeding this banana so that it might appeal to my mindless palette, about the slavery that was involved in it, about the slavery that probably still is, about how glaringly ignorant I am of these important matters, about how this all is condensed into a mere 0,32 eurocents, about how this banana will be mindlessly chewed tomorrow at breakfast, a mindless mouth chewing a banana held by a mindless hand that at this point I can't recognize as my own anymore. Someone is holding a banana, thinking about travels to banana farms they heard about, and just like for the banana I can only speculate who they are and how they came to be.
The next song starts playing, and I put the banana in my basket.
Often I find myself numb, until suddenly, I am not. Then, life comes at me all at once. A brief glimpse of the unimagineable scope of interwoven threads that came to intertwine in this moment. Richard McGuire's Here is a 6-page comic showing snapshots of the same location over different moments in time. The fragments are not shown chronologially, but are instead shuffled and layered on top of each other. By not portraying these threads in order, a reader experiences it all at once. This is overwhelming, but faithfull to the experience of such awareness; you get caught up in the middle of it. It is a powerful experience. It is a story of being human, of culture and being infinitesimal. It is painful and scary and joyous and inspirational and all the things. The human condition is one of connectedness. This can be difficult to navigate, but one worth engaging with actively.
When I am in the grocery store holding a banana, I think of myself as a 6-page comic, as a series of unordered and barely coherent snapshots. It is painful and scary and difficult to navigate. It is also engaging and meaningful in a way part of me does not want to miss out on.
References
- Richard McGuire TBA