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Dobody's capsule
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I don't do much these days. Other than repetitively complaining about the predictably horrid weather accompanying this summer's approach, my actions - aside, of course, from the vital needs that get met frequently without a great deal of care and attention - are almost confined between my two opposable thumbs holding a book. I'm ravaging through the ink like a bulimic fax-machine scanner, mostly too occupied with the empty space between the end of a chapter and the beginnin of another, too occupied to concentrate on those things that now come dangerously close, things without which my final year of art schooling wouldn't be complete. Sometimes, the opposable and rightly so opposed thumbs get substituted with a palm spreading its fingers and the pages open, and the other palm ordering its fingers to hold a cigarette.
To say I do so without other reasons than mundane escapism would be to concentrate only on one dimension of the large pattern of things happening right now - between two chapters not of a book, but of my life. I've found a great deal of joy from reading. I read a book, read another, partake in the few activities known both to humans and our common ancestor with mokeys, and think of things to say - or rather write, and think again, of what I should and should not bring forth to the public eye. It is a peaceful existence, that of stepping back, accumulating different forms of knowledge, and finally find the time to be unobstrued by my usual musings and stormy exercises of the mind.
Those who know me truly also know my mind has always enjoyed a greater deal of freedom and determination than my body. Not to say I'm in any way impaired in any sense: my body seems to function just fine, apart maybe from the small knot in the left on my back I can't quite manage to straighten out. Rather, there's an overwhelming sense of fragility that accompanies every one of my pilgrimages in an urban area. A walk to the grocery store or the laundry machines feels like a three-day business trip. A night out for a drink or two is possible, but unadvised for the great deal of polluting sounds that have made me more than once so stressed that I ended up avoiding people's shadows on the ground. Running feels inefficiently draining. The one reason my body will jump up is far from reach, at least across this flat-country's maddening desire to truncate any prospective mountain to a whoppingly disappointing denivelation of a hundred and fifty meters or so: mountains, cliffs, relief marks on your butt from sitting on rough patches of grass, welcoming boulders, and almost-dry soil. Some will say this is nature in a can - consumerist drive to devour natural landscapes like a night at the movies. But I live in a canned home, in a sardine-packed city, and eat and drink canned food and aluminum-enclosed beer. So either this nature in a can is in accordance with my lifestyle and plays an aesthetic role in completing a picture, or that criticism can go find somewhere it'd be more welcome - a toilet perhaps? Anyway, I don't hate people. I just can't put my body in between so many of them.
But in contrast to this severe impairement of my ability to hold my body's faculties in a populated location, my mind has done most of the trekking, the climbing, the shopping, the cooking, it has driven a truck to Kracow and back, driven a plane through storm and sun, and built the wings that took Icarus, and shone the rays that burned them. I'm in no way more a thinker than anyone else. I'm just more of a thinker than a doer. My mind allows me to experience that which my body won't but should. I've found it more than once enjoy itself much more when thinking about an artwork than when I stand before it.
So i don't know why it's never touched books that much until now. I haven't been a book-reader for long years.
Perhaps there comes a time in everyone's life when we need to take a step back. Not so much like stopping the toaster before we're burned, that would only be the wisest decision based on a purely medical need, but more akin to allowing ourselves to be heated up, and instead of fighting it off, focusing on the toaster we're in. What makes it work? What heats it up? What makes the world around us what it is and who does what in it? Forego the usual official explanations of economy, politics, and sociology, or the meticulous technical drawing of cogs in a mechanism. Here the question is much more about the unofficial, the what? who? where? how? when? that transcends the rulebook. A time to shift our gaze away from explanation and into exploration, into perception, as subjective and based on feelings as it may be.
Point is I am unsure about things. Unsure about the painting that I'd done of the world in my head. Unsure as much about the perspective and focal point as I am about the colors, the scenery, the characters and their gazes. Maybe it's time to turn the painting back into a canvas, or just make a few corrections. Maybe I should do like Fontana and slash it and leave it slashed. I don't know.
Here's where in stories, in accounts of events, in pondering and in blabbings-on, across the pages and paperbacks filled with different lives, we find tranquility: not in the letting-go of the rest of our life, but in switching the gaze. Perhaps that time for stepping back is only visible through the pages of those books.
Seems to me like I'm not escaping, just making sure where I should head to next.
If you wrote a reply to this article or on the same subject, please email me at sayhi[at]delyo[dot]be to notify me. I'd love to hear your feedback and link it here.
On... books? ... was published on 2024-06-06