The aesthetic equation

🧿+👀=?

I started Dhalgren by Samuel Delany months ago with a vague goal of finishing it by the end of the year but it’s been languishing on my shelf. Not out of disinterest. Mostly overwhelm, which is how everything feels all the time now? It takes active work to withdraw, slow down, ground, feel what’s real. I’m not sure how I used to move at the pace I once did, because now I come home from every social interaction buzzing with the traces of other people’s opinions and experiences, with their momentum and sense of time. Not a bad thing to brush up against others — we live in a society after all! — but I find this challenging in the absence of a countervailing force.

I also started this year thinking about the narrow, selfish demands of an audience consuming ‘culture’ as an industrial good. All the associations of purity, selflessness, romanticism remain, but because you’ve purchased a ticket, or a vinyl, or will post an Instagram story about your experience, that expression of art is punted into the realm of a consumable product. And in this present culture, we consume for gratification, pleasure. Where is the balance? The space to ponder aesthetic questions, and feelings beyond simple pleasure?

One of Delany’s characters is a poet named Newboy who holds

“The aesthetic equation,” Newboy mused. “The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it’s a very new, not to mention, vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with the artist’s. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic..”

Magic isn’t simply tricks. It’s an invitation to believe something other than. Despite the insistence on rationality, categorization, fixity, one way of the world, human beings actually need the tension of thesis/antithesis. We need to ask questions and wonder, and not know. We need it because if we don’t believe in magic, there’s nothing left. Where I get the most comfort right now, where I can actually feel happiness, is in the not-knowing. Not in the smooth brain way of clocking out (although I do dabble) but in a way where I’m not trying to manipulate the constant tension. Not knowing isn’t a dead end, but a dimension where questions can linger.

The way Robin DG Kelley talks about Thelonious Monk in this 2020 interview makes me think of the artistic potential of inhabiting tension, of letting others’ ideas and values swirl around you, and doing you in and of that midst. Kelley partially attributes this quality in Monk to public culture: the literal frequency of New York City’s demographics and mid-century public policy oriented toward art as a social good. Public culture is an intervention, a security against ideological monopolies and an idea that the world should be one way. It allows for contradiction, and mistakes, tension and magic. Art, produced in and of the public, unmediated by corporations, can be an intervention in settler modes of relating to a place, to the world — of relating to each other.

I’m not yearning for a nostalgic past, to go back to a time before Twitter or Instagram, or the fucking algorithmization of everything. It’s too late. But it doesn’t have to be the only future we consider — this way of life isn’t permanent. Not every culture believes in doom. But humans do have faith in common. Whether you’re religious or spiritual or deeply agnostic; faith in the market, faith in reason, faith in the algorithm. It’s still faith, a form of confidence, belief. But faith as a practice is a space to ask questions. (The oldest of them all: why?) And sometimes I just wonder where my faith comes from, and whether it can accept my questions.

I think Sault is making music that tries very hard to conjure a public culture, past and present. And that conjuring opens up into a space that feels very alive, very pro-question. I wrote about the five albums they recently dropped (in one go!) for NPR Music. Perhaps after a breather, because WOW this was an unexpected RAMBLE, you might give it a read.

no context curb your enthusiasm @ProManimalUnity