Flower of Life, Philip Glass
December 6, 2007
I saw this great YouTube clip posted on Boing Boing from back when Sesame Street was cool (pre-Elmo hegemony).
It’s wonderful introductory illustration of what is called the Flower of Life, a hermetic geometric construction that has inspired everything from Leonardo da Vinci to the Qabbalah.
In the video, there are also some serious geometric references to Metatron’s Cube, or the Platonic solids.
I haven’t watched Sesame Street for a long time, but I can say for certain that these types of inspiring and mysterious animations have been largely abandoned for the cuddly baby talk of a newer school of childhood educational television. I can only lament the loss of the powerful conduit of creative and metaphysical wealth that Jim Henson’s initial seed provided to the program before it catered to the ’safe’ and de-intellectualized content that it currently provides. Thank God for newer programs like Yo Gabba Gabba!
It’s equally shameful that the same content-laden episodes of Sesame Street that have forever implanted within my psyche a creative curiosity for mystery are those that are now being released for DVD with a caution that they are “not appropriate for children.”
I fear that the “Disney-channel-izing” of our children into a group of pro-consumption, shaggy-haired, Zack and Cody fashionistas is going to have dire effects on free thought in the US in the coming decades. Who will rescue the weirdos and misfits from their alienation from the affluent, tan and blonde Children of the Damned that insist on having three X-Box 360’s in the house (one for each child) and are perpetually sick from school so they can ingest more and more flickering screens of entertainment?
August 27, 2008 at 11:09 am
exccellent!, i love old sesame street. alien input, had a huge part in the cartoons.