Thursday, November 28, 2013

I'm circling around...


...and closing in on an odd way of seeing things. It's taken a while.

And it takes issue with those who find an unstoppable magnificence in the plethora (= too much) of human perspectives. Variety is okay up to a point. But for me, glorification of seven billion solipsisms creates a mass of metaphysical diffuseness, a slow-spreading and implicit abstract horror.

What's the alternative? What am I even talking about? I don't know.

But maybe Schopenhauer was onto something. A blind implacable force of whatever is moving everyone around like fast jive turkeys just for crazy-sake. Seven billion solipsisms jumping around as if jumping around is all there is to say and be about the matter.

Maybe that's why I like some rare poems. Beneath the words, there seems to be a something else: "Just a damn minute. Slow this train down. What and why is going the freak on?"

And in lieu of an answer, the poem (or painting or music) can at least create the inertia of a long and shared aesthetic pause in the traffic of too much unblinking human being.

The poet, the painter, the composer can sit Time down in a rocking chair, scold it for being crazy, and then turn it into a form of sustained metaphysical beauty.

But maybe this blathering of mine is an afterglow of early religious upbringing. I suppose I'm still infected with the sense there must be a Meaning. Not just seven billion little mental-emotional scamperings. If there's no great meaning, the least one can do, I suggest, is gaze around bemused at how so many are immunized against the Strange, how so few are instinctively non-choreographable into The Blithe Dance of Billions.


Yves Tanguy allowed the weird and slowed time down. 


Day of Inertia
Yves Tanguy, 1937 


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