Some mood lighting

So here is a little bit of what I have been throwing together.
It is the messiest of messes right now, but that's how these things start, or that's how this thing has started, or something.
I kind of got carried away a little, more than once, and I am fairly certain that a lot of the wrestling with this project will be in getting high flying ideas to come down to earth in one way or another.

This is nowhere on the outline, btw. This is a sort of introduction to an introduction. A prelude to an explanation of purpose. A prologue of sorts.


mmmhmm
(What is calling itself to be here?)



So: a funny thing happened to me on my way into the 21st century. A maxim was echoed, time and again, from every corner, from the newspapers and newscasts, from movies and magazines, from saturday morning cartoons and road-trip radio broadcasts, from novels and picture books and classrooms and pulpits and thousands and thousands of commercials, it resounded in the air and it colored the walls. Be Yourself. It was a message the world seemed desperate to convey. It was impossible to avoid, ubiquitous, omnipresent, but also inescapable in form. One wanted to scream: I am being myself. It was all one could do. With all the repetition though, one could come to have some doubts. Are you being yourself? Have you even found out who you are? How can you know if you are being yourself if you don't know who you are? Who are you anyway? And how can you be yourself, or fail to be yourself for that matter? What the hell was going on?
It's that last question that's most nagging. What the hell was going on? "Be Yourself" was being called, but from whence? by who? Was this some tug of conscience?
To confront this call is utterly destabilizing, everything starts to shift and tilt as the words come into focus. Be,Yourself. We no longer know anymore what it is to be, what form our self might take. We no longer have any idea how to follow the command, or what is even being commanded, we have only a raw force. What at first seemed simple and friendly takes on a bizarre, if not unplayful appearance. And it is not unplayful. In its mysteriousness the call to be yourself can invite us to explore and experiment, to find out how to find out, if we are the sort attracted by the mysterious rather than repelled.
But I've wandered a bit afield already. Be yourself. As a call so many of us have heard, it stands as a prime example of a kind of weirdness that has yet to be unpacked in any full way, and this particular instance hinges on the Self. Selves, it seems, abound. They are the most everyday of things. And yet it is nigh impossible to get a good explanation of just what a self is. The simple reasoning seems to be that since you have a self, and you'd be crazy to deny that you do, you must know what it is. Just look at it if you don't. You're the best judge of your own self. And quit with this philosophical nonsense, I was only trying to be helpful.
But sometimes philosophical nonsense can take on a life of its own, and an investigation of just what a self is is exactly the sort of thing that feeds off of itself. It is no simple task however, it has in one way or another been taken on in a myriad of ways, and every last attempt has fallen short of the mark. Many claim to have been to the peak, to have conquered once and for all the self, but every flag that flies on that mountain only serves to suggest more to climb. Some time ago it came into vogue to attempt to map out the self, but to leave room about the edges for shadow and mystery. 'Here there be dragons'. This was announced with the same sort of finality as every previous trek up the mountain, as a flag at the peak, with a dire warning not to traverse any farther. More recently there have been those that want to deny anything hidden beyond such impenetrable fog. Only what can be seen, they maintain, exists, and where there is no sight there is no mountain to climb. There are marks along the trail though, of some who wandered far out into the fog long ago, and their accounts have been slowly spreading through the west, mingling with our own tales of intrepid explorers of the self, tempting some to wander off into that mist, perhaps never to bee seen again.
I do not wish to make any claim of finality. I do not wish to put up flags. Many of the roads I have traversed have been well marked by those that came before me, and I believe it is clear that whatever else might be true, there is a lot more exploring to be done.