WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS FUCKING ESSAY. I WANT YOU TO CONSIDER YOUR AESTHETICS. BUT NO RIGHT NOW MORE IMPORTANTLY I WANT TO ACHIEVE GREATER RESONANCE WITH MYSELF. HOW DO YOU DO THAT? YOU TUNE IN TO WHAT IS RESONATE AND TUNE OUT WHAT DOESN’T
“Any great art work… revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.” ― Leonard Bernstein
BLAH BLAH STORY: While being a little grumpy and frustrated with myself while wrangling with dozens of unfinished drafts, I happened to chance upon a video on my Twitter timeline of a musician, steelbeans, playing guitar, the drums, and singing all at the same time. A runaway human freight train of rock-n-roll oomph.
I was transfixed. It was exactly the catalyst I needed to get myself together (to write this particular essay, which is now flowing out of me without much effort on my part). I found myself struck with the sense, wow, look at this guy being maximally himself! He’s in tune. He’s aesthetically resonant. He’s embodying for himself the spirit that I’ve sometimes communed with, and felt disconnected from.
Are you impressed? It occurs to me that not everybody might like it. Some might find his style too noisy and chaotic for their taste, which is completely understandable. Even so, the question I’d have for people is, “Can you see how, even if this is not your particular cup of tea, it is exceedingly good at what it is being?” And that question tends to conveniently sort people into “my kinda people” and not – can you appreciate the aesthetic force of something that isn’t to your liking? I don’t have to like horror movies to know that some particular horror movie is a very good movie.
Now here’s an example of a different musician, Dimitris Loizos. (TikTok, Instagram) He has a completely different vibe – tender, soulful, nuanced, with really delicious phrasing. There’s an elegant simplicity to what he does.
I enjoy both of these musicians deeply, thoroughly. I love them and want to see them flourish. I’m so grateful that I live in a world where such artists exist, and I get to witness them, appreciate them, learn from them.
If I’m feeling petty I might also half-jokingly say that I hate them! I hate how beautiful they are, and how their radical acceptance of what is happening in the moment reminds me of the degree to which I am not doing the same. And here I believe I get a brief glimpse through a window into the lives of people who are overtly hateful towards the creative spirit – what is a playful self-admonishment for me, is loathsome, corrosive. I’ve received DMs from people from time to time who told me that my tweets helped them to switch out of being a hater. And, at the same time, I know that there are still people out there who find my tweets annoying, too.
What do I mean by that? It’s a phrase I’ve found myself muttering in many contexts. I know it when I see it. It’s something very powerful, there’s something about internal coherence, external coherence, harmony, fullness, beauty even in imperfection.
Witnessing somebody else embody what I perceive to be aesthetic resonance in its fullness helped to clarify for me the ways in which I have lately been failing to embody my own aesthetic in an honest, full-hearted, full-throated way.
It suddenly becomes clear to me that I’m trying on clothes that don’t fit, living in a house that isn’t mine, decorated with objects that aren’t meaningful to me, it’s all discordant and disharmonious and it makes me feel alien in my own skin. I WANT RESONANCE. HOW AM I TO ACHIEVE RESONANCE. WILL CLOSING TABS HELP ME ACHIEVE RESONANCE? NO, I MUST COMMIT VIOLENCE
“past a certain minimum threshold of idea/audience fit, you have to solve for aesthetic resonance. an interesting question is, do you see aesthetics as stemming from ideas, rooted in ideas, intertwined with ideas, or separate from ideas?”
“Design is how it works”
“was talking with someone recently about how imperfect/incomplete aesthetics encourage creativity because clearly the environment you’re in is in the midst of being created. Sharing works-in-progress is a tremendous gift”
“a bunch of aesthetics pendulum in & out of fashion as signalling games by elites and elite-adjacent classes, and then the chattering classes trip up over each other trying to explain it with nuanced-sounding narratives. tho usually “ew the poors are doing it” explains most of it”
Talismans – THIS SHOULD BE A STANDALONE POST I THINK?
A talisman is simply a meaningful object. Wedding rings are talismans. Oscar trophies and Olympic medals are talismans. The objects have been imbued with meaning.
Learning from others
“When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music”, the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.” – John Ciardi, translator of Dante’s Inferno
I think a lot about this quote about the challenge of the translator. We are all translators. We might not necessarily be translating something from Italian to English, but we are translating what we know… into something that people can understand.
“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfil it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams.” – Jorge Luis Borges
“Man, sometimes it takes a really long time to sound like yourself.” – Miles Davis
Aesthetic resonance is aspirational and kind of a moat?
Wittgenstein allegedly said that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. There’s much to dig into here but I don’t think I’ll get into it in this essay. Some reading here if you’re curious – (plato.stanford.edu)
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let’s talk about artful incompleteness
My favorite thing about this charcoal drawing, shared by DrPunkNomad, is its incompleteness. I love that there are whole sections that aren’t filled in. I love the contrast between the nuanced detail of shading in the woman’s face, contrasted with the loose and sketchy lines of the man’s. I love that the lines where her hands would be trail off to nothing. I like it more, I think, than I would’ve liked it if it were complete.
I’ve noticed this to be a recurring pattern for me. There’s something lively and fresh to me about the drafted lines.
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