The story that Johnathon Flaum tells in this “manifesto” is of a red wolf bred in captivity and released into the wild. The wolf finds life in the wild to be dangerous and deadly. He and his fellow wolves never learned how to hunt or find shelter, or even howl in order to form social groups and choose leaders. The wolf realizes that when in captivity, he stopped being a wolf. In order to survive, he finds he has to rediscover how to be a wolf, how to be himself. The final step in this process is learning how to howl.
The point of these stories is that we’re all wolves in captivity, in a way. We all act the way that we are taught to act, behave the way we’re expected to behave. We never truly act like the people we really are. We are never really ourselves. And if we continue in this fashion, then we run the risk of one day forgetting how to be ourselves.
When the creative mind “howls” it releases creative energy that has built up inside for a long time. It’s the thing we’ve put away so that we can fit into our captive lives easier. The wolves hid their howls because they are fed by humans, and humans do not howl. We humans hide our howls from the other humans because they take care of us too. We cling to the hope that whatever comes out of our heads, the other humans will appreciate. We live in fear that they won’t like what comes out of our minds. But the strange thing is, humans are very good at knowing which things in this world are manufactured and which are natural, including ideas. Sometimes, when ideas come out of our heads, we think the other humans in this world won’t understand it, or they’ll be frightened by it, but we release it anyway because there’s just nowhere else for it to go. Often though, when other humans find these ideas, they respond differently than what we would expect. They appreciate it more than we would expect. It’s because they know that it’s something real, something natural, not a manufactured idea or behavior. They hear a howl in the woods and they go to it, because they know they’re being called by one of their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment