Diorama

Today I assisted a young boy in creating a diorama. And it had me thinking, our lives consist of miniature dioramas which we carry around and show strangers.

And their dioramas are also shown. Most are incomplete, most are in fact just artworks in progress, some never end up completed and some are completed but they to not fit the identity of the person holding it because they are built up of ideologies imposed upon that person, mainly by their parents or their peers or society or their culture or the media. Sometimes I wonder what my diorama looks like - is it original? Is it true to me or only semi-true? Of course, if it were semi-true then it would not be wholly true, which would mean that my identity is being imposed on by outer things that do not align with my personal beliefs. And I am afraid that that is the case. Is it interesting? Does it compel viewers to stay a little longer than the time it takes to ponder and wander?

Perhaps so. Perhaps mine is quite interesting. I have an array or artistic displays, I assume, a collection of ideas that are not ideal, per se, to whatever society or member of society I come across, because I do not think outside of the preordained box, in fact I think way beyond it, past the point of no return and those who have not passed that point do not comprehend the full complexity of that which is my diorama. It is mainly all a show, a show for others to applaud and accept, yet what is lurking behind those performance orientated cutouts is something deep, deep and sinister, sinister only to the preconceived notions of my culture, though, nothing breaking the law or nothing harming another human, which are two things that friendly dioramas cannot break otherwise they become a visual documentation of crime.

The entire concept is barbaric, I think. It truly is. How can someone bear to carry a burden along with them everywhere they go just to show others what they are capable of? And the frightening but mostly sad thing is that we all do. We all carry burdens tucked away in the deep dark corners of our dioramas. We carry sometimes burdens so heavy that our shoulders hunch, that our knees buckle and that our happiness seeps out through our chest and crawls down our legs, down and away from our bodies, not bearing the chance to return again. 

Yet some of us carry positive burdens, things they do not mind holding even if it weighed double their weight and even if they had to hike up a mountain carrying it all the while. In those cases, those people have been on the pursuit of happiness and they have found it, and they want to carry the knowledge of it on their shoulders and lift it high above their heads for everyone to see, everyone to see what it is that they worked hard for and achieved. This is my diorama! Look at how spectacular it is! How spectacular is my life! Follow me and live like this and feel glorious! Yet all the burdened still lay on dirty hay in their ragged old huts in the village below these tall mountains, and curl up even tighter than they have been curled up, and deny themselves the ability to reach beyond their visions.

We all carry dioramas and we all have something to display. What does yours show?