…the Kindness of Strangers

…the Kindness of Strangers

For the life of me I don’t know why Vivien Leigh’s voice through Blanch Dubois’ lips speaking Tennessee Williams’ words in his play Streetcar Named Desire has stuck in my head all these years, but the title of this blog and it’s prequel, …It Must Be the Vapors, seemed appropriate metaphors for my state of mind at their outset.

“Vapors”  was intended to express what I think of as the wall of illusion forming the tautologically invisible prison created by the certainty of western civilization in its exceptional superiority from within which the quality of nature is seen to be a quantifiable resource, once its intrinsic spirit as part of the living universe is extracted and placed outside, somewhere in a heaven from which “stewardship” is granted back to the exploiters by its creator.

In “Kindness” I hope to express what I think of as the invisible observer, looking out at the life of the universe through the vast sentient evidence of existence, as through eyes on a great potato. The observer is invisible for the same reason the prison is; they’re inadmissible in a society that “knows” humans are superior to all other forms of life, including certain other non-believing humans because Jesus told them so!… or some other such hooey.

The kindness of strangers seems to be the observer’s gentle reminder to those involved that we’re all eyes on the same potato no matter how unique each life's circumstances may be. The self-perpetuating rage within society, from abusive parents to schoolyard bullies to international terrorism, comes of suppressing the more essential need to share the observer’s agapé with the world in order to obey a digital mythos that counts the worth of life to be the most profit taken from it for the least service rendered.