We live in a Rightest Society.
I speak as one of the Sinister, the Un-dextrous, the left aside, Left handed.
A rightness that even extends into the shape of things: the Right Angle.
The Square that dominates our living spaces.
The Rect-Angle, the Reich,
Full Square it sits in front of me as I type.
The machine age has been it's glory days though. Its clean-cut, mass-produced standard lengths and panels do not fit anything but clean-cut, mass-produced items.
I heard, in one of those magpie radio moments once, of a company who, knowing that they would be making different things as time went on, simply called themselves Straight Lines.
Straight implied honesty and openness. Lines are the fruits of a conveyor belt production system...
In a patriarchal era, a straight back expressed dignity and self worth.
In these New Age times, it is seen as the essential posture to connect Earth to the Cosmos through our bodies. They share the same root, in understanding that we thrive by valuing our own paths.
The major disillusion with the cold logic and aggressiveness of the machine age that flowered in the 1960's expressed itself in adoration of tribal, and circular structures. The tipi, the Round Table, the dome.
They symbolised flow and completion, a consciousness that embraced all, after a century of driven tunnel-vision.
(I sometimes wonder if this was partly due to marijuana replacing alcohol as the drug of choice.
Ethnic shelters and clothes captured imagination, as their use of local, natural materials implied an intimacy with the Earth that urban life had chosen to shun.
This was more than a moment of dilettante world weariness.
Practically, it has effected the basic values of global trade.
Personal identity now factors in a sense of tribe: Often threatened or lost.
This is expressed in rites, diet, clothes, domestic space, and aspiration.
This challenges the Box. That suburban packet we come from.
The right-angle has lost its certainty, its righteousness.
right?
No comments:
Post a Comment