Somewhere in Newtown there’s a heavily graffitied wall (no kidding!). Something on it jumped out at me.
That’s cool, I thought. It’s a really neat perspective on non-dualism, kind of like where the Matrix trilogy ended up, or a lot of Yoga philosophy, or William Blake’s insights into the multiple worlds of liberated and expanded perceptions. Is the world as we know it all a dream? Perhaps. Everything we perceive may be illusion — why not. But in acknowledging the existence of illusion, we also acknowledge it to be a fact, a reality, and a truth of experience.
Instead of saying “this wall is a dream”, which would imply it isn’t really what it seems to be and is not the truth and may even be a harmful deception, this wall speaks a very different angle: it says “this dream is a wall”. In other words it may be a dream, but even so, it still is a wall. If a wall is a dream there must be some higher and more “real” level of existence that contains the dream. But here both kinds of existence are equal. It’s a wall — no mystification of worlds we can’t see and only guess at, because the wall is there and it’s still a dream, but it’s also really a wall.
The main difference, if we believe the slogan, is that our appreciation of the wall has now a quality of impermanence. And that’s what graffiti art’s all about, after all. Take Mr Bird hat, for example.
There’s so much poise and calm assuredness in that figure; and his poetic phrase stayed in my mind for days. It sounds like some of the early 20C French Surrealists, like the best of Breton or a line from an Appollinaire calligram: “and these rearing clouds go whinnying by a whole universe of auricular towns…” (“It’s Raining”, translated by Edward Lucie-Smith)
And this one I just don’t understand in any way. Is there a story there?
