odds, ends, mostly ends
a new year’s resolution i just came up with as i listen to some arthur & yu, read ian watt, and think about the course i’m teaching this quarter –
those affective ties i foster to cultural products, specifically the tethering of music to emotions and events at certain moments in my life — those ties need to diminish. i used to acknowledge these openly, could view songs — even those tied to bitter moments — with some detached affection because they help maintain some connection or memory of the past, which i would otherwise lose. music, though, even more than images, only intensifies inevitably inaccurate projections of the past. and at that point, whatever enjoyment is to be gotten out of a well turned phrase, melancholy chord progression, or sweetly held note, is lost or buried under the weight of a memory.
[says marilynne robinson, explicating proust, to me via A (erm, A in LA, that is): “The mysteries of apprehension and comprehension, destiny and will are all negotiated by him [proust] in aesthetic terms. By this he means to restore us to a kind of experiential innocence, as if we could be recalled to a time when language and memory, when our mind and our senses, astonished us, as indeed they should never cease to do. His metaphor for this is the memory of the impassioned perceptions of childhood, but the state he describes is an atemporal one, in which the senses are awakened as they are only sometimes by art or when we are dreaming.”
there’s so much respect here for aesthetics as an enabler of awakening, as restorer. it is great when music can do this, but it’s much better in the abstract (ie, arthur & yu’s “1000 words” and its conjuring of a web of memories and feelings that don’t belong to me or correspond to a specific, real time or place — coolness, yearning, a man wooing a woman on the street in a city in the 1940s) than in the personally specific (”i summon you” and its tethering to drives through pennsylvania countryside when i’d think of a certain loss). better in the sense that sometimes i would like loss to be not so vivid, and not so immediate whenever i hear that song.]
a provisional retirement then of aural memory posts while i revise my thoughts on art, affect, and memory. maybe some genius worship, or at least some appreciation for craftsmanship, is in order.
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at an end, hopefully, to last quarter’s malaise and ambiguity. fellowships need applying for; books need reading; papers need writing; academic career needs prioritizing.
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and a photo of my family’s parol, the destruction of which signalled the end of our french-filipino, but mostly french, christmas:
