When I was a kid I found that the most wonderful thing about cartoons were the backdrops. When I saw the stars and floating towers in the Jetsons, the urban skyline in Spiderman, or the coral reefs and underwater mountains in Aquaman, I felt a melancholy longing for that inaccessible distance that these timeless, suspended figments of the imagination seemed to represent. They were simple, unimportant things that were probably mere afterthoughts in the composition of the cartoons, little more than fillers; but to me they were the manifestations of whole other worlds. Every star, every undersea mountain, every building in the passing skyline represented a new and undiscovered universe of possibility and adventure, noble and removed from the mundane world of phenomena that was acted out before it.
Among all those animated images, I remember one in particular that was especially captivating: that of a tree in the background of an episode of The Flintstones. When I say remember I mean rather that I blurrily recollect the image, as it's long since been jumbled in amid a nebulous pre-adolescent mnemonic tangle of impressions that were once so familiar and dear to me. Today these seem like the memories of another person. And I guess you could argue that they did belong to a different person; but at least a part of that person has lived on in some umbral corner of my mind, and the tree - or at least the meaning of the tree - has too, in that same residual little corner.
I can't remember the exact episode now, of course, nor what happens or what dialogue takes place around, in front, before or after the tree. Was Fred Flintstone driving his caveman car all alone or was Barnie Rubble by his side? Were Wilma and Betty riding in the back? I don't know exactly. But I remember the tree - actually there were a few trees... and the mountains, the clouds... and of course Fred Flintstone riding by in the foreground. But I didn't really care for the foreground. That's where people talked and things happened - minor, unimportant, quotidian things. Fred tries to get Barnie a meeting with the Grand Poobah; Betty gets a new pet dinosaur that doubles as a vacuum cleaner; Wilma wants to give Fred a birthday gift of a month's supply of brontosaurus burgers... the usual everyday stuff. But why did that insignificant little tree frozen and still far away in the background hold such an allure while those animated fictitious lives were lived out before it?
Maybe it's best to first ask a completely different question: Where do imagination and reality overlap? When and how does a figment of one's mind become real? Is it when it's shared by other minds? Is it, in this case, when an image becomes a shared impression and experience that is reproduced and replicated in the mind of each and every beholder through a mass medium that penetrates and shapes a collective conscious? So what then is that tree and what does it become?
First of all, it's not a tree but a representation. The representation itself is a molecular agglomeration of ink, paint, lead, paper, chemicals, celluloid and light applied and manipulated by various agents and further modified through machines before being reproduced onto film and projected out into the world of phenomena. They all come together in a way that creates the form and outline of a tree, and then that too merges with other forms which, through the application of electricity and mechanical technology, eventually comprise a steady stream of photons that convey the form of a consistent sequence of images I see on the screen and which I recognize as The Flintstones. And so you have the fruits produced from the sense impressions in the creator's mind transformed into a solid thing; tenuous pieces of imagination transformed into tangible reality.
But all of that has only to do with the creation of the image. What makes the imaginary real - what makes it come alive - is the moment when a personal and emotional connection arises between the image and the beholder, regardless of the will or intentions of the creator. In my case, that moment was the instant in which I saw that tree in the backdrop and felt something that suddenly - instantly - transformed it into a real and necessary part of my lived sensory experience. It seemed to both stimulate and satisfy an emotional need. The two-dimensional representation came alive, and with its inception into the realm of (my) consciousness, it became internalized. The molecular hodgepodge of chemistry, mechanics and light was now something else, as if it had transcended itself and assumed a second nature. It seemed to have gained a soul. No longer was a tree merely represented, but the tree itself became a representation. In other words, the tree had transformed into a symbol. In my case it was a symbol of distance, separation, potentiality, possibility, removal, perhaps even distinction. It had become a symbol every bit as real as a word or a thing because it represented a relationship now between me and my world and it modified and shaped in its own small way the manner in which I understood and interacted with the world around me. You could say the symbol became an emotional conduit.
But what was the origin of that feeling? How could this representation be transformed into a symbol that could cause a powerful and moving reaction in me? How did a mere representational image assume a soul. This deserves an attempt at an explanation.
It seems to me that that which enchants us and is important to us often has its origins in a fundamental paradoxical feeling or urge within us: namely, that of a need for danger (change) and a need for security (inertia) at one and the same time. It's a binary feeling that causes us to experience attraction and repulsion, desire and horror, happiness and hopelessness, simultaneously. That feeling continues later on in life, when we're caught between the need for having a secure job and the desire to break away and rebel, between the need to have a steady life companion and the desire for amorous promiscuity... basically, between the need for comfort and the drive for adventure. But in the child's life this binary paradox - something I'll tentatively refer to as "motive angst" - is too powerful to be dealt with or suppressed. It overwhelms the young mind with the promise of great, beautiful, incredible things that life holds in store for us, but it also leaves the child suffused with the fear and terror of knowing that the satisfaction of that desire for being a part of the world out there would necessitate one's leaving the warm tender bosom of security, comfort and protection that envelops a young life and that is (at least in my case) all that one has known until then. The tree was like the manifestation of that motive angst as it became the symbolic representation of that clash of desires within me. It was out there in the large imaginational universe, yet it was safe somehow.
But why was I drawn to the tree - the backdrop - and not to the foreground, not to the world of life and the living? Why was I drawn to the frozen, still, and distant, and not to the world of action, interaction and proximity? For me the tree was not just distant, it was removed, and it was perfectly unreachable. Whatever happened in the foreground, whatever happened in the world in which things happen, the world of phenomena, the tree was not a part of it. It was solid, distant, apart, estranged, and it seemed secure in all those qualities. I wanted to be all those things. I wanted to escape. I identified with the tree. It touched me, it affected me, it made me feel something strongly, and it seduced me, because the tree was still out there, it was out there in the enormous expanse of that strange universe beyond me, but at the same time it was certain in its individuality, solid in its removal, peaceful in its separateness. It was in the world without being in the world.
It's only much later in life that the significance of the tree is realized in retrospect. You look back and weigh your life and wonder about how things turned out. You confront your mistakes and your regrets, the things that made you proud and the things that brought you shame and dread. And you see that there is a strange balance between these things and how they were acted out in your particular timeline. You realize that that binary urge to do and not-do was adjusted early at a particular setting, along a particular frequency, and that all your subsequent actions and inactions were formed according to that archetypal scheme that became solidified in those formative years when your tender unconscious mind was prone to the simplest representations and impressions - all seemingly so innocuous, but at the same time so intense, so passionate, so powerful that it set its own backdrop to an entire life. It wasn't until I thought about how much I had thought about that tree, about how that tree had somehow playfully assumed a place in a corner of my unconscious mind, that I realized how far back my own removal had begun.
I yearned for the tree. There's something within all of us that wants the tree. There are so many representations that motive angst has inspired: fantasy worlds where danger and adventure lurk around every corner, yet in which there seems to be a kind of manifest security implicit in a narrative guarantee that needs to tell and finish a story and which ultimately lends the characters a false blanket of invulnerability. It all seems pleasurable, but I realize now that it's only pleasurable in the way that satisfying a need is pleasurable. It's a negative pleasure, like scratching an itch. The tree was also pleasurable, but it was false. We all want to be apart, we sometimes fantasize about it, and it's pleasant. We become addicted to the images and phenomena that seem to represent and symbolize this. But eventually you realize that that which is represented can never be achieved or realized. It's real as an eminence, but it's hollow as substance. The tree was not noble or beautiful; it was craven, alienated and estranged.
You do not become the tree. You do not see those mountains, nor do you you ever go to those stars. You do not find the magic door that leads you to a fantasy world. You live in the world, you live among people, you share their lives, you sometimes do well, you sometimes do badly, you are sometimes loved and you are sometimes not.
The tree stands in the backdrop, silent, still, and alone. We must learn to leave it be.
