My initial response to Susan Stewart's book On Longing was how difficult it must have been to write the book. Experience is such a personal reflective thing and yet somehow she was able to find the middle ground and capture the basic conceptualization of experience in writing. I found that because the statements in the book were both specific and open ended they became very relatable and ultimately triggered a personal reflection and thought process.
1. The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale
1. The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis had an exhibit called
“lifelike” that emphasized scale and pushed ordinary objects into extremely
unordinary situations. This picture shows one of the small-scale works where
the artist had downscaled two elevators—they even made real noise, lit and
opened. This sentence reminded me of this experience because I remember how
this exhibit caused me to compare my body as a mode of recognizing the scale of
these objects and how I felt immediate intrigue in these everyday objects just
due to scale when in reality they are just everyday objects, and are normally completely ignored.
2. The capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic
experience.
This sentence reminds me of when my soccer team hosted a
team from England for 3 weeks and I had two girls, Kelli and Emer stay with me.
They quickly became part of the family, and we still check in with each other
every so often—I remember the day they left being so filled with the joy of having them in our lives as well as the sorrow of them leaving. What really captures this feeling for me is that we traded jerseys and signed them as a
object of remembrance of our time spent over those weeks. The jerseys are
handwritten accords of some of the funny things that happened and when I packed
up my belongings this summer I vividly remember packing those away and thinking
about the entire experience.
3. The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the
3 dimensional into the miniature that which can be enveloped by the body.
Deephaven Beach is arguable the place that shaped my life the most. Here I met my closest most lifelong friends, spent countless days with my family and always felt completely content and safe. Italians have a saying 'A Tavola Non S'Invecchia' -- at the table one does not grow old, meaning spend time surrounded in good conversation surrounded by people you love because those are the moments that matter and the rush of life always seems to take moments such as that away from us. For me the table is most evidently Deephaven Beach. The countless time spent there lead to so many unforgettable memories--the type that are completely enveloped by the body and become who you are.
4. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss
This is a picture of the back of my childhood
home that was sold this past year. What is remarkable is that like this
sentence states I never held as firm onto my childhood memories made at this
house, in this backyard, until now that I no longer live there. It seemed only after leaving for the last time
on my way back to school that I felt flooded with all of the incredible
nostalgic feelings of childhood.
5. To have a souvenir of the exotic is to
possess both a specimen and a trophy.
I can't help but laugh every time I see my old fake IDs. Definitely a souvenir of the exotic--my parents would roll their eyes at their current state, framed in my room, absolutely turning them into both a specimen and a trophy. To me they are representative of a lot of good fortune and a lot of funny memories from my years in college before I turned 21.
No comments:
Post a Comment