I find graffiti beautiful. I studied linguistics in college for a spell and I find symbols to be beautiful...
Spray paint, paint on brick and concrete. Sharpie scrawls and pen on bathroom walls. I don't have to detail the crassness. We know the words and images used. The crassness. The For a Good Times and the numbers...
But clear out understanding of meaning and see them as alien markings for a moment. Not just random marks. Not claw scratches on a tree branch. They're patterns configured into meaning. Symbols.
Symbols.
And they're everywhere the human creature goes. Like an obsession.
Walls. Paper. We take our finger and trace meaning into cold frosted or steamed windows. Desks. Post-Its. "Wash Me" written on muddy windshields.
Find me a beach with soft sand and children and I'll show you a beach where sticks are used to draw symbols and pictures into the very sand of the earth from children old enough to wield an implement to make it so.
We carve symbols into trees. We carve them into benches. Like magic spells that embed our devotion somewhere. Have we ever not drawn our symbols with a compulsion? On caves in markings preserved for tens of thousands of years....in monuments of stone carved from the earth and propped up looking outward to the sea.
We are a symbolic species. We are animals compulsively drawn to create meaning from abstract actions or objects or stories.
We need symbols. We need them. Stories and meaning. We need them.
Need.
It's the fundamental basis of communication between one another as social animals. Maybe alone we can live without external symbols. But to bridge the gap of meaning from mind to mind, we need shared symbols. Shared stories. Shared narratives. Shared meaning.
Reference points.
I agree about what our President suggested is his biggest mistake.
"the mistake of my first term - couple of years - was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."
We need story. As a species. We need narrative. We need symbols. Especially in times of trouble when our story and our narrative seems to be changing and unraveling and losing its meaning all around us in ways we can't control.
Story and symbolism is a fundamental of humanity. Of civilization.