Anthropomorphism is the way we tend to look for human characteristics in things... our brains are hard-wired to look for enemies in the bushes - so we see demons and lions forming in the shrubbery, especially when we're tired, tripping, suffering from the flu or delirum tremens, etc. BUT is this merely the misfiring of synapses in an overheated brain or is it that our blinders are down so we see the world as it really is, rich with inter-dimensional life just waiting to manifest via nothing more than our 'seeing' it?
Then there's Stan Brakhage - underground cinema's answer to Jackson Pollock, his films are great touchstones for talking about nearly any aspect of film and art. In grasping the import of his abstract films maybe we can learn to appreciate blobsquatch videos as abstract art, recognize the anthropomorphic hallucinatory quality of cryptids as analogous to 'das ding' in Lacanian terms, the unrecovered aspect of the castrated self hiding in the products of our unconscious - either in art or in our own direct perceptions of nature.
For best meta-textual viewing of the below video, move your glasses down to the end of your nose and your face up close to the screen to see a reflection of your eyes -- if your screen allows it. You can also do this on your TV unless its a non-reflective LED. Use the first minute of darkness to line up your eyes, and try to check to see if your pupils are dilated. Keep the frame size as small as it is in this post, so that your eyes occupy a decent portion of the image:
Now you understand, do you not? Because when dealing with a crafty hominid like Bigfoot... and if you research all the available evidence there's no doubt he exists (and if you think the idea that a global conspiracy of hoaxes and false sightings and misidentified bears spanning centuries is somehow more believable, than may I suggest it is YOU who are unscientific? Apply the Occam's razor and the most likely probability is that these creatures are real) then you are dealing with a creature who is on some level more advanced than us. We have this problem where science thinks if it can't measure something, or examine it's eating patterns, then it does not exist. But paleontology has been wrong before (i.e. the coelacanth ) and will be again.
There's a theory that Sasquatch is able to sense humans a long way off, and he's big, and fast, and maybe immortal. We've never found the bones of a dead one, so they must know how to bury their dead, or they never die. At any rate, it's baffling.... and thank god there are some things we can't explain. Once science is able to explain and label everything the world will be frustratingly stale.
That is why we can use Brakhage to understand. We should endeavor to see Bigfoot evidence as art in and of itself, as pieces of a mystery we secretly hope to never solve (rest assured if the govt. found a Bigfoot family it would be curtains for them - endless medical tests and kept in cages ala Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Instead of searching for faces and anthropomorphic recognition in all those hazy Bigfoot films on youtube, we should endeavor to see them as abstract art, ala Brakhage above. Only when we can cultivate the love of abstraction, of letting our symbolic alphabet slip away, freeing us to exist if only for a moment in the clear light of the pure real, only when we finally capture Stan Brakhage and give Bigfoot a grant to make his own films, can we actually 'solve' the mystery. Not to be too Zen, but 'we' can't solve the mystery until our 'we' is dissolved, until 'we' in a sense are made as mysterious as Sasquatch is to us now. Only when our egos and self-centered blinders-on fear bases are dissolved, our hearts are open, our doors unlocked, our guns unloaded, will Bigfoot finally come.
For this to happen, science must relax its panicked grip on the throat of humanity and let the right side of the group brain - the intuitive, psychic, artistic, weird - take over. Science is like the crazy king who cuts open the artist looking for art, who would drink the blood of a magician to learn his secrets, who would crucify a butterfly to the bulletin board cross and feel not a twinge of compassion. Those scientists must be brought to trial! Trial by monkey!!! Trial by vagueness! Trial by faith and the ability to trust intuition and inner voices at least as applicable evidence. And in looking at these videos (above and below) aren't we in a sense doing just that? Gazing into hazy images, blurs, dim traces of ghostly movement we are traveling back in time to the world before 'names' reduced the mystery of life. Isn't this what abstract art is all about, resisting anthropomorphism so that our whole structural network of language is sidestepped? Shucker loose from signifier-bound perception and be free!
And don't worry, mystery is patient. It waits for us to join it, to become part of the mystery ourselves, to let Sasquatch come looking for us for a change, let Sasquatch vainly try to capture us on film and then we will remember that he exists outside linear time. He's already seeping into our reality down the road, in our distant future, and then roaring back down the highway in rubber band snaps, into our faces.... so best learn to love not knowing, relish your position of helplessness, trust in whatever higher power serves you, but never judge others, and never kill what you can't understand. 'Dwell in possibility' and let the hairy dude in the mirror approach without fear, and shave.
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