Wilderness – III
Pascal: “The only thing that consoles us in our miseries is diversion, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries” (Pensées, 414)
There is a world of difference between seeking newness and seeking novelty: the first is a kind of search for personal renewal as an individual or community to whom the current state of affairs is clearly in error – the second is a search for effective means of escaping that reality. In a sense, diversion is despair in action.
But, you might ask, what’s all this talk about otherness and surprise and sensory engagement all about if not diversion?
I’ve been considering this problem as I’ve been finishing Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. In his chapter called “Intimate Immensity” (isn’t that perfect for our work here?), he writes that in the desert, “we can experience concentration of wandering” – an existential state not available to a habitual diversion seeker, a state of knowing ourselves as addicts to the artistic equivalents of pain killers. In the best sense, wilderness can induce withdrawal.
Bachelard goes on to describe the concentration available in the deep ocean: a singularity of experience, an external one-dimensionality which precipitates intense inward realization in the explorer (reminding me of Eliasson’s artwork and mantra: “devices for the experience of reality”). Bachelard’s connection of intimacy and immensity is so interesting to me because of this type of image. He’s describing and advocating imagination-strengthening experiences which are simultaneously non-addictive, partly because they are laying bare personal realities rather than covering them up, as with diversion. This type of approach is of enormous importance to our thinking about the films we make for the Cube. If a digital medium is to be used at a large scale, yet “against” dominant/addictive models, the intensity of the wilderness is one paradigm in which we can work.
Tags: bachelard, Cube, desert, diversion, imagination, ocean, pascal, sea, wilderness
August 28th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
[...] One of us recently had the immense (and probably unrepeatable) chance to spend a day at the Yves Klein retrospective With the Void: Full Powers at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn museum. I recommend Blake Gopnik’s review in the Washington Post. Gopnik has a pair of great lines that sum up the experience of Klein’s artwork: “They aren’t just a feast for sore eyes. They’re more like a lifetime’s worth of ocular nourishment.” Klein has been particular influential on our recent thinking, especially as we experiment with creating experiences that focus an observer onto the framing of singular experiences of beauty (see our earlier posts on laying aside “Manyness” as Kierkegaard calls it and entering the Wilderness). [...]