Yearning Disruption of Axis Mundi

Katy Pelchy

Yearning Disruption of Axis Mundi

Choice

In class we watched a film about a Spaniard who became lost in the old world of America. As he was captured and abused by natives, his sense of Axis Mundi completely broke. The movie captures him as he reasserts his center and expands it to incorporate the new land and people. As I watched the film, I was struck by the ironic nature of humanity. The Spaniard had set out to discover unfamiliar things. In essence, he had set out to GO into the chaos outside of his fabricated world of ordered cosmos. The ironic part is that he was able to fully accomplish his goal; however, once he accomplished it he was tortured by it.

The balance between comfort and discovery, the familiar and unknown, seems to me to be an indefinable one. Every person’s comfort zone is different, along with every person’s yearning for the unfamiliar and discovery. As I watched the movie, it surprised me that the thought of being put in his situation thrilled me. I long to experience an alien environment, and I yearn to be able to rearrange my order of the cosmos. But my yearning for the disruption of Axis Mundi confused me, for are we not supposed to yearn for a stable and unchanging center in order to cope with life? I guess, when it comes down to it, it is the reordering of my Axis Mundi that I long for. This fact fails to explain, however, why it thrills me to think of my Axis Mundi being completely destroyed. I wonder…do others love this feeling of being lost and uprooted as well? Or is my affinity for this thought original?