The Destroyed depiction follows Jonah’s thoughts towards change and stagnation, and his ability to surf the different paces of life.
Traveling is overrated. The true beauty of travel is that technology often fails, our attention to our surroundings increase, and we are thrusted outside of routine and into the wilderness of life. This opens us up towards opportunities for spontaneity. In these genuine moments we can grab glimpses of who we are in the extremities of our self. Over and over while traveling we run into our self and discover aspects of our being that we were previously unaware of. We either marvel in a healthy glow of pride (Self-adoration), or aim to mend those pieces of our character we find less desirable. Of course, this process doesn’t occur by necessity, and it doesn’t only occur in the realm of travel.
What do we do when we discover pieces of our character that we find unattractive? One thesis is that as soon as we discover parts of ourselves that we don’t like, we already begin the process of healing/deconstruction/reconstruction. If we don’t shriek back in pain, but allow the process of construction to play out, then some form of transformation occurs. This transformation has been alluded to by words such as awareness, ego-death, and other conceptual words in the same genus. At times it is monumental, and at other times this happens largely unawares.
This process of transformation is a mental-metamorphosis, as dramatic as the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly. We recognize remnants of our past self, but those aspects are eclipsed by a feeling of a "new being". Yet, just like the caterpillars journey, the process of transformation takes a lot of time and energy (as different religious gurus have aptly pointed out, it may cost you your life). Yet the transformation must be allowed to run it's full course. Fear, self doubt, or concern of other's opinions tear us from our natural processes of self-transformation. Nonetheless, these pitfalls are nothing to fear in themselves because overcoming these concerns is part of the transformational process, and failure is an aspect of that process.
The Destroyed depiction also highlights Jonah’s contemptuous understanding of himself as a character moving along in a narrative flow. He challenges his capability to change his own character, whether or not and how to define his own character, and his amount of freedom within the text and his presented choices.
Individually we are each privileged to a certain slice of reality unreserved for anyone else. We can forfeit our own understanding of our self and identity, thus ceasing to be imaginative and erotic towards life, and live like a background character. But, if we allow imagination into our narrative (a little bit of crazy, nonsense even) then we open ourselves to the Surrealist perspective. Surrealism infused imagination with stimuli, not relying on rationalism. When the brain makes imaginative leaps of connection, the surrealist uses it as a bridge into other perspectives of reality. This does not eclipse the initial mindset towards reality, but instead opens it to a wider area of experience. This wider area is the peripheral of meaning, a world that we are constantly constructing either intentionally or accidentally.