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On Shadow
Perhaps it was a natural progression from thinking about fire, perhaps it came from a recent self portrait of myself in shadow holding an iphone with a jet in the sky that was both modern and ancient, or perhaps it was from seeing myself and my shadow on the walk and allowing my mind to swim in thoughts about shadow.
Self-portrait
On Shadow 2
I have not read a lot of philosophy but always liked Plato’s parable of the cave. The thing and the shadow of the thing. Summed up nicely by T.S. Eliot. “Between the idea and reality falls the shadow” I was thinking of shamanistic ceremonies and all of a sudden it hit me. Plato and the parable of the cave was an obvious connection between ancient shamanistic practices and modern western thought. He intentionally references and in fact co-ops shamanistic tradition. Plato takes us from this spirit world from this shadow world and leads us into light into rational knowledge and thinking.
While thinking about Plato, I realize that shadow was also a way to explain the unexplainable. I had never thought of shadow before and all of a sudden I started thinking of shadow in a much different way.
“What our message now signifies is that the ability and means of learning is already present in the soul. As the eye could not turn from darkness to light unless the whole body moved, so it is that the mind can only turn around from the world of becoming to that of being by a movement of the whole soul. The soul must learn, by degrees, to endure the contemplation of being and the luminous realms. This is the Good, agreed?” --Socrates
On Shadow 3
On a day trip to Teotihuacan a Pre-Columbian city outside of current Mexico City, I asked the guide what the civilization’s origin story was. He said they believed the world was created when a meteor landed with living spores on earth and that all life on earth came from the spores on this crashed meteor. I remember thinking there is no possible bridge between this culture’s beliefs of how the world was created and Judeo Christian beliefs of how the world came into being. I also remember thinking that there had to be a bridge as even if our beliefs were different our humanness was the same. Years later I figured out you could build a bridge by looking at both origin stories through a psychedelic lens. Our journey of leaving paradise in the old testament does start with an entheogenic act of eating a forbidden plant. On my walk I started thinking of the biblical story of Moses turning a staff into a serpent and then a serpent back into a staff in front of Pharaoh. I thought who needs psychedelics, this can easily be done in Shadow.
On Shadow 4
Although individually recognizable features disappear a human form is instantly recognizable in shadow.
On Shadow 5
When I was a kid growing up in NYC. There was a shadow based public art project on the sides of buildings in lower Manhattan. These were captivating to me, powerful and beautiful, modern and ancient. A professor told me that this was an anti-nuclear war project. During the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the heat was so high that people would be incinerated and literally evaporate. All that remained was their shadow near where they stood. This was a great story about an art project but it turned out not to be true. Curiosity about this conceptual art project never left me and decades later I found out the artist Richard Hambleton was responsible for these hauntingly beautiful emotional and visually stunning works. He was known as Shadowman and was responsible for these gestures and forms that were ubiquitous on NYC building facades for a certain period of time.
My mom after reading this, suggested that I mention the stencil project that I started in NYC to bring awareness to pedestrian endangerment which started the modern pedestrian rights movement by painting outlines (shadows) of a figure where a pedestrian was struck and killed by a motorist. So I guess you can say that NYC policy about pedestrian safety called Vision Zero, which came from this project, also came from shadow.
On Shadow 7
I imagine an early human would wonder where humans went when they died. The shadow must have been a part of whatever they could imagine when they wondered where life went to in death.
On Shadow 6
Shamanism, shamanistic ceremonies altering consciousness as ritual practice. Talking to spirits and contacting spirit world. Individual memory becoming collective memory. Experience becoming mythology. Entheogenitcs becoming ethnogenesis. All happened with shadow.
On Shadow 7
Early human cave paintings cannot be understood in terms of line weight, composition, or form. The language that we have developed to discuss art and drawings are not applicable. However, they can be understood in terms of shadow. Things could come out of the shadow and they did. Beliefs could come out of shadow. Dreams could be shared in shadow. Stories could be told with shadow. Ideas could come out of shadow. Shadow was a way for humans to manipulate their environment and reality.
On Shadow 8
Now I get Native American headdress. Humans can combine with the image or spirit of others animals in shadow. Birds don’t just leave land and enter the sky, the world above us, some of them hunt by diving into the water entering the world below us as well. As birds move between worlds they are natural conduit to spirits between worlds. Thus the connection with birds as a way to connect with spirits through headdress and shadow makes sense to me now in a way that I hadn’t thought about before.
Photo: Edward Curtis
On Shadow 9
Humans spent a lot of time living in camps. The estimate is about a million years. There was no TV, no movies, no internet, no books, no telephone. But there was shadow and there was time. Shadow came before writing. Shadow is how we told stories.
On Shadow 10
In addition to fire, another early technology was illusionism based on an understanding of how we see as what we see and the reality of what we are seeing are often different. Understanding how the mind sees or how things could be represented to be seen versus say what we see was a powerful technology that that could be used as a form of control. Optics, magnification, representation, illusions, magic, cinema, comes out of shadow.
On Shadow 11
In Judaism during the temple era, ongoing animal sacrifices were constant sources of smoke and thus shadow. God appears to moses through smoke which can also be understood as shadow. The descriptions of the Kodesh-hakodashim, involve smoke and shadow.
On Shadow 12
Religion comes out of shadow
On Shadow 13
Other worlds come out of shadow.
On Shadow 14
Why hadn’t I ever thought about shadow before?
Video (link)
On Reflection
An observation. I live near the ocean and walk on the beach at the end of a day. On my walks I usually see a woman dressed to highlight her looks being photographed. This image of the image being taken is so common that it's common to see multiple women being photographed during a walk. All of this is in service to the reflection, the image of self presented to others. These images are published on social media sites, presenting an image of self that is removed from reality of self. The image is what’s important. All that matters is the image, the reflection. We have gone from a communal culture of shadow to a culture of narcissistic reflection.