The enemy of the sublime, it turns out, is “the rush that is modernity.” There’s no time to sit and stare. “Blue Arabesque” bemoans our mortal need for industry, the demands made by flesh for food and shelter, the mind’s need of occupation. Eternally dissatisfied, caught in the relentless march of time, humankind is always becoming and never being, and to see requires cessation of movement. Bit by bit, our hungers have led us to make our world ever more ugly and frantic. So what’s an aesthete to do?
Kathryn Harrison, reviewing Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl
What are we really hungry for? I understand the seduction of efficiency, the addiction to multi-tasking, the intoxication with the illusion that we control our lives, our tasks, our relationships. Those are appetitive urges, but there is a deeper longing that has something to do with just being still. Sitting. Looking. Listening.
There are impulses in us that speak with a timbre so soft they cannot be heard above the ambient noise of the quotidian. Those impulses are running in undertone throughout the day. I pay more attention to them in the studio, but the fragility of that melodic line is daunting. Part of me longs for that haunting and mysterious leitmotif, but that search is so easily upstaged by the high drama gnawings of the practical.
There’s something strange in what Harrison writes about Hampl: is not looking at art part of a hunger, I mean is not being an aesthete a bit like being a gourmand? I understand that there is fast consumption of for example images, and slow consumption (as in staring, sitting and truly seeing), or is consumption the wrong word? It came to me as a result of using the word hunger. What is the difference between appetitive urges and deeper longing?
This is an interesting question, and I have been thinking about it for the last 24 hours. I can’t speak for Harrison, but I want to make a distinction between ravenousness–which can be soma-based or a state of mind–and that deep seated longing. The former seems like it might have something to do with dominance, taking over our consciousness like some unwanted virus software code. (When you have gone without food for a long time, the mind loses its ability to free associate.)The longing on the other hand does not need to comandeer at the expense of every other impulse. It feels more like a sensor, pulsing and pulling us towards something overwhelmingly attractive, satisfying, fulfilling.
These are my thoughts today but they could change again as I continue to think about this.