alive

How to explain the pleasures and surprises of remaining so long in this book? Fleeting epiphanies, moments of discovery. This is what I was writing toward all along. Or, this is what I meant when I made this note, all those years ago. There is pleasure, comfort in recognizing the circuitous paths and mysteries of our own imaginations and preoccupations. The way early drafts are notes to our future selves, little gifts we leave for the smarter, more insightful, more perceptive future self that we hope we will one day be.

I am thinking about bodies and embodiment, and the strange disembodied time of remote classrooms. We speak still in metaphors of room and space, about being together, which can feel somehow real and intimate, and also cold and alienating, all at the same time.

On Friday, a reading and conversation event with another author, whose book I blurbed last year. We talk about visual essays and hybrid texts. I am surprised to find that the imagery on the screen, the videos she has made to accompany her reading, make me think more of the page, of the physical book, of how the pages are turned in time, the narrative moves forward in time, propelled by it, even as the visuals on the screen are encountered in a kind of simultaneity.

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag says that interpretation of a work of art takes the sensory of experience for granted and proceeds from there. There is a steady loss of the sharpness of the sensory experience, she says. See more, feel more, she urges. Let us recover our senses. Yes.

Yes, allow it all to come together, the body, the mind, the senses as we move in and through our experiences. As we see and are seen, feel and are felt. We are seen and known through our senses, should our creative work be any different?

In place of a hermeneutics, she says, we need an erotics of art.

See more, feel more.

This seems to me related to the justice we talk about when we invoke issues of race and equity -- in the art world, in publishing. We speak as if the mind were untethered to the body, as if the imagination could transcend the lived experience of the physical body. As if consciousness isn't shaped by how we see, how we are seen. How we feel and how we are felt.

An erotics of art. An aesthetics of aliveness, connection, embodiment. A movement toward experience, toward feeling deeply, spontaneously. The knowing of logic and of narrative yielding to the knowing of being held.

What I hope for: tenderness, curiosity, wonder, desire.

Patience, care, attachment, love.