The Leap of Change
What if we could jump back a generation and recreate ourselves?
My dad circa 1969: “If you can keep your head when all about you
are losing theirs…”–Kipling
Indirections in Salience
Father’s day perennially provides a platform from which to leap naked into our future. Whether tacitly inherited from our parents, randomly scraped from culture’s roadside, or unwittingly rubbed off standing shoulder-deep with others, our uncritically gathered moss sheds like so much loose clothing whenever we fly forward after examining the life we wear. Salience, originally meaning ‘the quality of leaping or springing up’* and the root of active change words like transilience (leaping across), can be the perfect jumping-off point.
- Leaping Leopards!
Want to change your spots? Not until we see the past for the feral creature it is and, with trepidation, let it into our house, train it not to bite our guests, and give it its own dish under the stairs will we reduce the odds its jaws will one day spring back upon our necks. Put another way, if you wish to change, resilience (leaping backward) is not your friend. (click to read more)
- Restoration
When I dug into the recursive transformation of one of my dad’s revisionist paintings, it occurred to me that when we care for it the way a painter revisits an old canvas, the past is liberated to prosiliate (leap forward) into its own future. (click to read more)
- The Laughing Man Who Fell Off His Chair: Or How Orson Scott Card taught me properly to read Shakespeare without uttering a word. When we people-watch from a distance, then copy-paste to ourselves the best bits we spy in our betters, a kind of benevolent transilience jumps us across the change barrier. (click to read more)
Like all big cats, the salient change we hunt, faces not in any one direction, but in several indirections that to win over must each be deliberately pounced.
*Source: The Oxford English Dictionary