Wonder Wears Many Masks

Does wonder have a definition? If we dig deeper, can we say whether wonder has a structure? We think it is simple because we have been taught that it is simple.

Wonder is difficult to discuss precisely because it is experienced in such individual ways, but also because of its complexity, and further, even though it remains personally worthy (we love to feel wonder), it has been obscured and devalued in our contemporary culture by belittlement, ignorance, or avoidance. Or, it can be surrounded with a false glow of mystery as a way of tossing off a too-vast subject thought to be impossible to address: The Wonder of Life.

To be contrary to common simplistic thinking then, let's take a broader view. We'll put all kinds of possibilities and observations about wonder in the mix without forcing it to occupy a smaller definition.

Wonder seems to desire newness compelling curiosity and learning. Wonder is ever related to the thinking, witnessing, curious mind, and the mysterious forces of the imagination.

Wonder, it seems, is an endless system of perpetual motion compelling us forward. We can perceive tension in wonder, a mysterious x-factor that keeps it moving.

Our understanding and use of wonder comes from the sublime, awe, horror, curiosity, and objects or places of wonder.

Wonder taps into internal sensation: a feeling of immediacy, attention, heightened awareness, change in experience of time or perception, impermanence, intense intimacy or grandness, and illusion.

Wonder is often synonymous to the marvelous: wonder cabinets, their history, purpose, ramifications, and relationship to reality or creating reality; to the fantastic: wonder beasts like dragons, gryphons, and hippogriffs. Related to the sublime are ecstasy, erotica, and psychology.

Wonder is used as a rhetorical device, a power in drama, and central to the illusion of magic. Wonder has association with the conditions of seeing and the unseen embodying extremes in seeing, super-microscopically and universally, until you know longer know what you are looking "at."

Wonder appears in conversations of time, space, infinity, vanishing points, story structures and "fractalizing" where the edges prove to have more expanse and information at each deeper look.

Topics like death, learning, and religion bring out wonder's affinity with the unknown, negative space, blackness, mystery, and fear.

There are examples of wonder's ability to animate, that is, to enliven or bring to life. Images of the living-dead abound in wonder's relation to terror and horror.

Wonder seems to be located "somewhere" yet experienced in terms of site or non-site; wonder has relevance to both alienation and familiarity. Where does wonder exist? Does something outside us "fill" us with wonder or evoke it, like igniting a latent fire?

In agreeing on a definition, we might inadvertently constrain wonder. Letting questions hover, we allow wonder's structure or form to unfold.

Nina Rolle in Zen Cabaret. Video still by RW. Copyright 2006 Nina Rolle. Used with permission.