2018: A Personae Odyssey
“When people start thinking of you more as a persona, they are less inclined to allow you to move into different areas. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re just very stereotypical or restricted in their own thinking of what they’ll allow you to do.”-Robert Redford
An artist has to think a lot about how they present themselves to the world. There’s so many facets to your personality. Some are ok to present in public, some are not ok. But you want to be as honest as you can be in your artistry. Whether it’s about love, violence, community, bodily functions (?) you want to be as close to truth as you can get.
But, as a human, you’re trained to be socially civilized. Well, most of us anyway.
I had an idea as I created this universe of The Destiny Saga to use my creativity on two levels: to create a rich, textured fictional universe AND to create personas to comment not only on my art, but me and how I feel about the world around me.
I’ve studied the relationship between how artists present themselves as prepackaged personalities while trying to be truthful in their art. Madonna & Michael Jackson were masters at media manipulation.
But there were certain artists who used alter egos to express themselves that I thought were more fun to model after…
You had Eminem with his trilogy of personas (Eminem, Slim Shady, and “Marshall Mathers”). You had Bono of U2 with his characters during the Achtung Baby/Zooropa era (The Fly, Mirror Ball Man, and MacPhisto).
And, of course, David Bowie (Davy Jones, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke, Halloween Jack, Elepahnt Man, etc).
A lot of The Destiny Saga is about how we have both good and evil in us and how that makes us more gray than we should be. It’s also about how you have to be honest with yourself about how much of you makes up both sides. It”s that duality that always fascinated me and I thought to myself, “Why not use that as the face of ‘marketing’ The Destiny Saga?”
Enter “The Boy” and “The Lost Child.”
“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”-William Golding
The idea that “black” & “white” makes “gray” is a favorite idea to me. Awareness of those three colors are needed for a person to evolve. And that struggle between all three colors is something I like to have fun exploring.
“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.” -Wassily Kandinsky
But since blue is my favorite color, I replace grey with it. Blue can represent hope or it can represent sadness. So, in my universe, blue is the new grey.
Rochard= Blue (“Gray”)
The Boy= Black (Good)
The Lost Child= White (Bad)
I like flipping the colors because, in a way, it’s not the colors that matter but the actions of each of the personas. So “Rochard” is the real me, The Boy is my/the world’s good side, and The Lost Child is my/the’s world’s bad side.
“Love is higher than the Highest. Love is greater than the Greatest. Yea, it is in a certain sense greater than God; while yet, in the highest sense of all, God is Love, and Love is God. Love being the highest principle is the virtue of all virtues; from whence they flow forth.” -Jakob Bohme
The Boy has the spirit of a teenager who wants nothing more to help everyone build the perfect compassionate community. He also wants to reform The Lost Child to see how important love is. The Boy is the more defensive of the two. He wants to “save” The Lost Child but will defend himself if necessary. He is the ultimate version of good in The Destiny Saga. He & The Lost Child are like the fates from Greek mythology. Except for a selected few, most of the characters have no idea they exist.
“Vice cannot be removed completely, nor is it right that it should be removed.” -Chrysippus
The Lost Child hates humanity more than anything in the universe and wants nothing more than to cause it pain. He/She/It is a shapeshifter due to its duplicitous nature. His twin, The Boy, makes him/her/it sick to its stomach. He loves showing his enemy the weak nature of man. The Lost Child is the more offensive of the two fates. It is always on the attack.
The entirety of THE DESTINY SAGA is contained in a mythical tome called “The Book of Events” in which The Boy & The Lost Child are co-authors. And since they represent both my light side and my dark side, you can see where this is going.
So hopefully that clears a few things up about my “onstage personas.” If you have any questions, please feel free to leave comments below. Thanks.
-Rochard Scott, January 2018
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