I have always considered myself to be someone who feels, deeply. I find myself moved by the smallest parts of the world around me: dramatic soliloquies in movie theaters, sun filtered through trees, seeing my friends' beautiful faces. One of the many beautiful realizations of my adult life thus far has been grasping just how many people around me feel the same way — tender and emotional — and how wonderful it can be.
Relatedly, I have always prided myself on being an articulate person (I hope this is conveyed on my blog otherwise this will be an awkward and presumptive post) who can put words to ideas and feelings. I have always viewed one of my own greatest strengths to be verbalizing the thoughts that bounce around in my mind, likely a product of years spent participating in speech and debate or mock trial. My desire to be able to categorize everything that evokes an emotional reaction is why I am more interested in reading than looking at paintings, and why I am much more likely to be moved by the former than the latter. To me, it feels exponentially easier to understand the emotional significance of something that communicates in the same way that I do, with language.
But, in recent months, I've started to consider the idea that perhaps a perfect explanation of my every thought and feeling might not be the most engaged way to move through the world, to honor the feelings that are better left unexplained. Ironic, isn't it, to then write a blog post about it? Oh well — can't win 'em all.
A few weeks ago, I was at an art gallery to see an exhibit that a friend of mine had helped curate as part of a class. I spoke with someone I had seen at the gallery before about how the exhibit was put together — the class had decided upon a theme and then voted on each individual submission. I asked him what his least favorite piece at the exhibit was, and he pointed to a set of two large collages, which my friend had said was one of her favorites. I asked him what he thought made certain pieces of art good or bad, and he told me that he sees art as emitting a frequency, that each person has a frequency of the art they find compelling, and a piece has to align with a person's wavelength. Clearly, I ought to stop asking artists questions.
He then told me that he thinks art is anything that makes you feel. A revelation barely worthy of an intro art class, sure, but one that reminded me of a Q&A I read with artist and author Jenny Odell about two years ago, about her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The whole interview is a beautiful meditation on time that really pushes back against the idea of maximizing our efficiency at the cost of our own happiness, and I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. But, the part that I find meaningful here is that Odell was asked how people ought to answer the question of finding meaning in their lives. She answered: "The closest thing that I have to an answer is that I want to be in contact with things, people, contexts that make me feel alive. I have a specific definition of alive, which is I want to feel like I am being changed." The interviewer responded with — "That's a pretty good on-the-spot answer for 'tell me the meaning of life.'" I concur. I appreciate Odell's embrace of the feeling of being changed, not the pursuit of knowledge accumulation or any particular type of advancement, when I find myself too caught up in the pastime of making my life neatly explainable.
When I think about Odell's words, I am also reminded of John Green's nonfiction book The Anthropocene Reviewed, which I thoroughly enjoyed as I feel I am a direct product of his young adult books. Green is an author I've long admired for his ability to write beautifully simplistic prose and create work that still proves to be compelling even as I have grown well out of his target audience. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays where, each chapter, Green rates a different object or concept that plays a major role in his life.
I remember lending the book to a friend, and hearing back that they weren't a fan. The book, my friend told me, isn't really Green rating anything at all because it's just about his own life. Their takeaway always makes me laugh because I can't really imagine a collection of essays, especially reviews, not being about the person who wrote them. Green's writing in this book embraces the etymology of the word essay, from French, meaning "to try." He makes very few conclusive statements about the world but he instead draws a rough portrait of the state of affairs in his life. There is no conclusion; he is still living it.
One chapter that I think of often is titled "New Partner," named after a beautiful folksy song by Palace Music that Green describes as "kind of magic." Listening to it, for three minutes and fifty-four seconds, makes him into a version of himself that he used to be, and reminds him of parts of his life that were painful and wonderful. My favorite part of Green's musings on the song, which has since been added to many of my playlists, is that despite his masterful understanding of the English language and all its quirks, he doesn't have a precise explanation of what all the lyrics mean. He writes of one particularly enigmatic couplet: "I know that means something; I just don't know what." Given the number of language-related accolades on his resume, if Green wanted to analyze the lyrics to the point of complete understanding, he almost certainly could. But he doesn't. He lets himself feel changed.
He writes in another essay, which happens to be my favorite, entitled "Sycamore Trees" about a tree that he walks past with his son. It is the end of an essay about the chronic pain of realizing one's own meaninglessness in the world. This nihilistic pain, he writes, is "a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. [...] Everything hurts. [...] What's the point of all this pain and yearning? Why?" But as he looks at the tree, he feels a push against hopelessness. He feels its solace and relief: "And that's the point."
The power of this magic is a precious, fleeting one. He adds, when writing about music, that one must be careful with a magic song: "listen to it too often, and it will become routine. You'll hear the chord changes before they come, and the song will lose its ability to surprise and teleport you. But if I'm judicious with a magical song, it can take me back to places more vividly than any other form of memory." I used to record everything that made me feel anything with the worry that, if it wasn't written in permanence and made digestible, the feeling might be lost. But, I think, that the whole point might be to lose the feeling and make space for a new one instead. Then, perhaps, if the time is right, one day I will come back to them and feel something wholly different instead.
That being said, I wanted to share a few pieces of art and writing that have made me feel alive and changed recently. No visual art this time around, but who knows what the future holds. À la Green, I give them all five stars.