When Michelangelo
finished carving his marble statue of Moses, legend claims that the sculpture was
so real that he willed it to speak out. Legend also claims that he got so
frustrated that he threw a chisel at it and nicked the knee of the great man.
Well his knee has a nick, but it seems that vandals did the dirty on him.
That said, Michelangelo
did crush an earlier Pieta statue with a mallet and chisel, removing the arms
of Jesus and breaking arms. Someone repaired it later, but there is no doubt he
did it.
The great artist also
signed his work, once. The greatest Pieta, in the Vatican, bears his signature,
after he overhead someone suggesting that his rival, Salero, had sculpted it –
and Mr Buonotti wasn’t going to have anything to do with that.
I saw David in a
Florentian car park, well a cement copy anyway, but I resented having to pay
twice to see Venus in the Uffize and David in the Accademia.
My wife went to
see him whilst I enjoyed a delectable Café Vivoli ice-cream, but when she
prompted me to go and pay the Psalmist a visit, I did so with 5 minutes to
spare – so paid more anyway. Well I ran and ran until I stood in his portico
and wept. What Michelangelo had failed to achieve with Moses, he did with
David.
It reminds me of Princess
Fiona, who was originally animated to such a real quality that they had to pull
her back from reality. She did seem a little too lovely, but Cameron Diaz never
was my favorite, so Fiona was just a feisty sidekick to a no-nonsense Ogre and
his donkey, and nothing more.
What is it about our
need to give such life to what is not living at all? We have life all around us
and that is real enough, so why rely on a fantasy?
The problem with the mind
is that it very capable of reinterpreting reality. It is on a fine balance, but
God designed it to interpret contextually, not just literally. Optical
illusions work because the mind imposes past learnings to current
interpretations.
It is so powerful that
one well-meaning soul spent a season with inverted lenses, which projected an
upside down world to which the brain adapted so well that he had to unlearn
everything when he reverted to normal lenses.
The reason some saw the
dress as gold and black and others saw white and blue, is because the mind uses
mental filters to interpret new visual cues. The problem is that the mind learns
and adapts to “your world”, not just “the world”.
The seat of adaptive
learning and memories is in the core of the brain, in exotic structures like the
amygdala, thalamus and hippocampus. They collectively serve as interpretive sorting
houses that correlate current perceptions against preexisting memories. It is
complicated.
The big problem,
though, is that the brain relates to both your physical and imagined world. It
can reframe reality in the most subtle way, by way of denial, suppression,
deflection and numerous other defensive and survival mechanisms. Thus, a child
growing up in a harsh environment may well idealize the world to make it all
more bearable, resulting in fantasies and distortions.
The biggest problem of
all is that the mind is very capable of building significant walls around our
inner world to insulate us from the harsh realities out there. Some deflect to
intellectual redoubts, others shelter inside emotional frames, but many are
just driven into corners by what they experience, hear and believe about everything
that happens to them.
The result is a toxic
brain. As great souls of the past did, we hide in our cave amid a slew of
thoughts, attitudes and feelings that wear us down and stimulate adrenal
responses, not to real threats but to perceived threats, stress, fears, and so
on. That over-stimulates our system and literally wears us down. Any machine on constant standby will wear down
quicker than one on a regular rhythm.
Without any direct
physical exertion being applied, such emotional and mental energy will tap into
our resources and deplete our energy, immunity and vitality. That leads to
increasingly serious sicknesses. Indeed the AMA argues that 80-85% of all sickness,
especially the likes of heart disease, strokes and cancer, are rooted in mental
stress.
Okay, enough for now.
I will close by saying that maybe your health has a different root and if you
are treating symptoms instead of the toxic thoughts at the root of your health,
maybe you are also frustrated. There is a biblical way to redress all of that,
but more later.
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