The Medium Is The Message: I See Signs.

There was a homeless man at the station today — a sight that occurs with the kind of depressing regularity that implies so much else: that…

There was a homeless man at the station today — a sight that occurs with the kind of depressing regularity that implies so much else: that it doesn’t warrant attention; that it lacks meaning; that it has become so “mundane” that it has ceased to matter at all.

This is wrong.

This is wrong, but so are many things. Suspend your judgement — and your disbelief.

Please.

Just for a moment.

This matters, I promise.

He was sitting by the ramp down to the station, in the cold, holding a sign. And in some ways, it was as if it were a sign; and a part of me wishes that I had taken a picture, but that would’ve somehow objectified — and therefore glorified — what I had seen, what he had created, who he was and what he had made himself into, and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to turn him — his art, his pain, his glory — into a spectacle of my own; something for my own amusement, mutated to fit the interests of a pathetic little blogpost, and thus demeaned in its own right as a medium for the message.

How trite; how hollow; how lost. Aren’t we all?

The medium is the message.

This is not the medium. This is just a message.

It was a sign.

It was also on a sign.

Apt, said sign read: ‘Not on benefits, drink or drugs — just want to survive.’

I may be paraphrasing, but that’s besides the point: the gist is there.

The gist is not only “there”, but legible, lucid, bleeding, in-your-face and FEELING — I couldn’t, can’t, look away. I wonder if you’d have been the same.

I wonder how many other people walked on by, silently, going about their day; how many people saw, read, listened; how many cared; how many felt powerless to help or “do anything”; and how many didn’t know what to do, and so did nothing.

I wish you could quantify humanity, but maybe I just want to believe in it.

I want to touch you and I want to understand you and I want to know you because I care — plain and simple.

Plain, bold, etched in ink and veins and shame and this desperate, resolute integrity, and fuck-I-admire-you-despite-everything, having read and almost-wept and definitely-felt and fuck-wow-you-touched-me-beyond-words. Know that you are, were, heard.

It begs the question: how dare we, I, judge when we do not know? And how dare we, I, judge what we cannot understand?

We are ignorant, arrogant, foolish. We think we know better, because we know best; we refuse to accept that we may in fact know nothing.

“Context is all”: everybody hurts.

Such despair is alien. Such drive is bravery.

I am blessed. I have so much; I am so free; I am so lucky — despite, and because of, everything. I am who I am because of what I have experienced — as are you, emanating.

We make art, poetry, beauty out of pain, shame, brokenness; yet in doing so, reframe it. It becomes something else, something Other to ourselves, something Other to what it was, and then it becomes something else in its own right.

It stops being an act of defiance when there is nothing to fight.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

He could’ve been broken. God knows, he has every “right” to be.

But he still had hope.

Today, he inspired me.