Who Just Had an Epiphany? (Part 1)

I have been thinking on and off over the last few weeks about the idea of epiphany. And what I like about how this idea has come along is that it's done that 'come out of nowhere' underdog move on me. I recall distinctly learning about 'epiphany' in high school and have always thrown that into that dim place where creative naivety has thrown a lot of received wisdom; and that's the point, or the turn, that I am referring to - it's when I find something truly amazing and revealing in that pile that I have what I now realise is the very purest form of epiphany.


The thing I like about learning is when it comes out of nowhere and does that strange Mama shaking her finger at you gesture, pointing to that pile I mentioned above where all the things she taught you go, dismissed as they were by your youthful flight.


'I told you so,' she said.


'I know,' you say and you see the heavenly light descend from that secret place about her figure. You see what all your vain strivings for sainthood have done. Or worse, what they have undone. The kind have been forgotten. The quiet unheard. What happened to that subtle eye and ear? Have you been so submerged by that fat, doting ego that you can't see the simple beauty shining in all the many neglected characters of your own epic rise?


This pull to frame what I'm saying into a story shows that epiphany has something to do with returning to a home, which is what 'nostalgia' means. I also seem to be drawing to the existential quality of epiphany as a type of enlightenment, which has something to do with Christian religious ectasy among those medieval saints. And then I'm sure there is some classical context having to do with Dionysius, if that cult really has anything to do with the rise of enlightenment thinking, as Nietszche suggested in The Birth of Tragedy.


But to return to that high school Me with a lot of unformed things on my mind being told by a middle-aged lady who once was young but then got married and pregnant and learned new things about life beyond what she knew as her teenage self that every story needs to have an 'epiphany' to really work, that if the character does not have this moment where they realise something important about themselves or their world, then the story doesn't work, I naturally thought it was all wrong and was drawn towards those stories that did exactly what she said they shouldn't do. This taught me what I would learn about a bike if I decided that it didn't need a seat; I'd learn exactly why seats were invented why they're there at all.

Education is often like this: a number of ideas and formulations that are each a long evolved species with their own histories are thrown into the hollow of our imagination spurting (or newly lusting) skulls. And as I write this, I hear some training teacher telling me, 'Education is like a garden. We have to sow the seeds that will grow tomorrow today.'