Kyra Offline

One inquiry that remains the object of my curiosity is how humans create meaning through the compounded repetition of images. No piece of work stimulates the mind’s faculties to demonstrate this phenomenon like Kamasi Washington’s 2017 music video for the song “Truth”. As the name suggests, the video harmoniously blends together ostensibly disparate scenes of the intimate quotidian. The scenes are connected by palpable motifs: hues of pink and cerulean, beautiful brown skin taking the foreground, depictions of spiritual and cultural knowledge being passed from one generation to the next, balance among the genders, and lastly, slowed and reciprocal movement.

The score itself begins with a saxophone taking the lead, its melody simmering as it folds in on itself like layers of caramel. We are greeted by the image of the galaxy in its complementary colors: blue and stardust pink. Too soon, we are shrunken back down to Earth, materializing in the living room of a boy who has his eyes closed and appears to be holding water in his hands. A prayer falls from his lips.

In college, we explored the idea of creating meaning – first through the performance of landscapes, and then through movement. Upon being given a concept, we would select three movements and three phrases respectively that were tangentially related to the concept. Then we could combine them in repetition in a performative dialectic. The onlookers would reflect on what the performance evoked in them and the performers would build on the meaning that was spontaneously created.

I think back on this exercise as I take in the messages communicated in “Truth”, but I hardly find these to be random images that culminate in some spurious conviction. Rather, they were lovingly curated by an intentional hand. The project’s success in imparting Washington’s “Truth” relies on this careful selection of images whose meanings become nested in each other as the video progresses – enmeshing themselves like fish caught in the roots of a mangrove.

Spurious meaning and curated meaning both rely on the power of association to provide context to the mind. The human brain has a knack for storytelling and seems to fill in gaps where information is lacking. The capacity to make inferences that align with the artist’s intent is often deemed ‘media literacy’ in discourses on Twitter. I contend that media literacy relies too deeply on external context. Surely one must study the masters to know when homage is being paid, but must one know the origin of a color and all its iterations to receive that very same wavelength of light that illuminates their pupils with that undeniable hue? Image is democratizing in a way philosophy is not.

“Truth” plunges an icy hand into the nexus of our desire for oneness, rattling the viewer awake, only to find themselves in their childhood bed with a cup of hot chocolate at their bedside. The beauty of this video is that is does not aspire to lofty heights of grand proclamations but grounds itself in the mundane, and in doing so, allows its subjects to speak for themselves. The umbilical cord between the celestial and miniscule emerges as very much intact, thus our subjects are engendered with gifts from the first mover: beauty, creative generativity, agency, the capacity for connection, and inalienable freedom. As the score crescendos, we are left with a sentiment on our tongue that we must quietly profess, perhaps to no one: that we have witnessed the origins of our human story, that we desire to engage these gifts freely given to us for our rightful fulfilment, and perhaps, most tragically, that we will not remember the truth beyond this moment amidst the cage built for ourselves here on Earth that every life is priceless in the multitudes it contains. This is why I believe that a child, lacking all context yet with their pores wide open, would come away deeply affected.

There is something about having just departed that infinitesimal space of nonexistence, of being born anew, that makes children all the more susceptible to powerful depictions of art. Perhaps, this is why we dull their senses with primary colors and songs rather than subject them to the complexities of film. Still, their emotional sensitivity persists, often to our dismay, yet we must remember our way back to their state: find a warm plot of Earth to ground ourselves in and cloy our way back to the center from which we came to remember who we are – to remember our truth.