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Hard-Wired for the Aesthetic? · Sep 10, 10:00 PM
I spent the better part of three hours this afternoon making like an elderly Asian gentleman, repotting & trimming my “bonsai” collection. The first edge of fall has transformed the air. It is dryer & cooler, but the sun is still warm & many plants still insist on putting out last spurts of growth. The new lawn, planted from seed at mid-summer, is still green & lush.
When I was living in Vietnam several years ago, the bedroom window of my apartment overlooked the rooftop of an adjoining building, on which a fairly extensive garden, grown in containers, flourished. Space is tight Hanoi & the population density is high, but the Vietnamese are a nation of gardeners & even in the cities they find a way to nurture plants. My desk was situated in front of that window overlooking the neighboring building & I enjoyed watching while, most evenings, an older man came out onto the roof & did a combination of calisthenics & Tai Che, then tended to his plants. I did not feel I was intruding on his privacy—rooftops in Hanoi are semi-public spaces—but I was clearly watching a meditative practice. A practice based on an aesthetic view of the world, not an instrumental view.
The word azure was invented for the color of today’s sky & the word white was invented for the color of the clouds. Here is the center of it: I worked with the plants, worked to a purpose, trimming roots & changing soil mixtures & repotting; but I was also learning the contours of each of my small trees. I put the word bonsai in quotation marks above because all I really have are “pre-bonsai,” or bonsai stock. I don’t yet have anything that could be called a mature bonsai, though in a couple of years I may have a couple of trees getting to that point. (I have held off buying a mature bonsai until I have demonstrated to myself that I can work with & be responsible to the simple little trees I’ve picked up for six dollars apiece.)
So, I have been reading about the techniques of training bonsai & the reading reminds me of nothing so much as the reading I did as a teenager, lapping up books on the techniques of poetry. There is, in the practice of an art & in the study of an art, a reservoir of stability, even peace. All those crazy poets are not crazy because they are poets—no, poetry has given them a living center when everything else, even their own souls, has turned to shit. Poets are not so much masters of language as poor bastards for whom the world is a blur & a swirl, but who have found some techniques for slowing things down. (Things in that last sentence carries the burden of Wordsworth’s desperate attempt in Tintern Abbey & the Immortality Ode to stitch the mind & the world back together after it had been torn asunder by the rationality of the Enlightenment.)
For all my political consciousness, I remain located in an essentially aesthetic space. But I do not make the mistake of setting the aesthetic above the social, political & historical spaces from which others write & speak. Others speak from other places & it is the totality of speaking that constitutes human Being. Clearly, these “spaces” or perspectives do not exclude each other & in fact intersect in complex ways; but speaking for myself only, I feel hard-wired to the aesthetic. I suppose there are geniuses who move freely among perspectives, but most of us, I think, are either born or early-trained to a particular way of looking at the world. This strikes me as a fortunate result of human evolution: each individual ideally can specialize in one way of looking at the world, but at the same time is capable of recognizing the legitimacy of other perspectives.
Theories of consciousness & justice need to include & account for this plurality at the heart of human Being.
* * *
— MisterBS 09/11/2004 03:41 AM #
Up in New Hampshire, my niece, who turned 17 today, once again faced the issue of celebrating anything on a 9/11 anniversary. Her parents found the perfect solution: they made her get up and blow out a single candle stuck in her breakfast muffin before 9:00am so that the anniversary of her birth took precedance over the attacks.
— Candice 09/11/2004 08:00 PM #
— jd 09/11/2004 08:31 PM #
— Shelley 09/13/2004 11:53 AM #