Little Black Book Index
Palingenesis (/ˌpælɪnˈdʒɛnəsɪs/) From the Greek palin, meaning ‘again’, and genesis, meaning ‘birth’. It represents the concept of rebirth or re-creation; a new beginning; to begin again.
“Is it over yet?”
“How about now?”
“Has it been satiated?”
The absurd quality of hope is still cast across the landscape of my mind, ever active, ceaselessly in search of that thing which it has yet to find. It continues to ripen in silence, leaving a modest impermanence which prompts my gaze. As Bono would say, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Perhaps I am a bit closer though. I suppose I am always getting closer.
COVID is now savagely embedded in the popular mind, hastily upon its path to becoming mythic. This virus lies across the equinox of two realms: biological and psychological. COVID-19 is a multi-faceted harbinger of illness, death, grief, accentuated fears, power-complexes, controls, wealth, and opportunity. It will likely always introduce divisions wherever it is discussed. Is COVID particularly special in itself, or is it rather a reflection of the current polis’ caste of mind? History may offer a more poignant perspective with distance.
For those of us who remain, we are fatigued with the discussion; its urgency has atrophied and we are left with an ambivalent grief that seems too elusive to be wholly defined.
Collectively we have lost much with this pandemic, and the turmoil has, in no small way, impacted us at Firefly Horizons. Though The Creative is gratefully alive and well, we lost the precious space we called our Atelier, our studio, our office.
Our collaborative creation was inhibited and our guiding daimon, our muse, remained pregnant with halted promise. Firefly Horizons is currently cornering palingenesis
The pandemic, like any unfamiliar siege, forges a special awareness. That awareness may still feel foreign to us, a paradoxicality of experience. At a glance we see in the margin of our collective initiation what appears to be our lost potential; all our longings in stasis. How easy the temptation is to perseverate our fears and regrets until the wheels of anxiety grind us up. This ordeal was an unanticipated grief, and where it remains unfiltered by deeper reflection, numbed by weary astonishment, it devolves to an ambivalent grief.
It seems now that many of us are living in this ambivalent grief, undecided as to whether there is still a threat or not; unable to fully calculate the impact this phenomenon has had on us individually and collectively. Our collective anxiety is hypersensitive to the voice of new variants, hurling us again, tiny, vulnerable, still fragile, into an utterly tragic disposition. Our culture has been traditionally focused on self-reliance and rugged individualism, yet this collective event has shaken the moorings of such American myths. It has revealed our deficit in dialogue and civil connection.
As of this writing, I have chosen to apportion my sympathies so as not to let my imagination fall into desuetude. I hold no faith in salvationist tendencies which are easy temptations for the mind. If perception is applied uncertainty, than I find potential in the unknown. To reimagine what is familiar is to keep eros alive. The scylla of this traumatogenic pandemic passage is the thing that continues to change me while teaching me nothing. It prompted me to struggle over my language when there was nothing to say. It was a perfect displacement of those superfluously important things.
Here for your review is my proof of life. I remain the destined denizen of Copper Ridge. If I doubt the worth of my experience, I conspire against myself; and how can one abide such a thing? My personal myth is educated from these experiences and each movement inward retains something sacred for me in the spatialization of time. If I were to culture a solution to my present circumstances, it would be to temper my experience with a revelry of acceptance, acknowledging that my perspective of reality is a system of ordering and relating to things; even chaos.
I have been surprised by my journey that I once thought was ending but now realize is only beginning. I am living in the renaissance of my life. An unanticipated abundance of heart, soul, and mind in a life desperately deprecated by a former malefic mate, a pandemic, and a consciousness that once held too tightly to a hero archetype with its unmitigated instinctual and irrational shadow. I am grateful for the dark age that has launched my renaissance.
Borrowing the words of Albert Camus, “In the midst of winter, I found within me an invincible summer.” I have entered my “invincible summer.” This is my palingenesis, my road to begin again. I look forward with anticipation to this evidence of revival; our collective palingenesis.
Steve
The passionate Phoenix of Firefly Horizons and conceptual prognosticator of Mutatis Mutandis reborn through the scorching forge of his annihilation into creative sanctuary. Steve translates the fury of his Phoenix experience into experiential exegesis in search of perspectives not yet in view. Read more about Steve • Articles by Steve
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