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.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space these last couple of weeks’ worth of train commutes. I’m sure his thoughts will find there way into many postings – it’s just rich prose dealing broadly with inhabited spaces. This quote seemed linked to the topic of wilderness for me:

“At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream” (page 137, 2nd edition, 1994, translated).

One of the readily apparent benefits of the wilderness, and an image of it, is simplicity. Sometimes, I experience simplicity as discomfort – almost a form of anxiety – concerning my accoutrements, technological or otherwise. That is the barrier that someone like myself needs to push through in order to reach into the simplicity. It’s a counterintuitive process to consider: that simplicity can be initially overwhelming.

As with Olafur Eliasson’s artwork (see earlier post), zeroing sensory experience onto as singular a focus as possible can prompt all sorts of surprises, epiphanies, and reconsiderations. This is perhaps hinted at by Elaine Scarry (earlier post) as well, when she claims that one of beauty’s evident effects is to let us suddenly but enjoyably into the experience of being wrong. She talks about having been wrong about palm trees. I’ve had similar experiences of being wrong about volcanoes, forests, hillsides, weddings, sporting events – all sorts of experiences and places that have (for me – I know, volcanoes too!) accumulated some amount of cultural “blah” in terms of discourse, but when experienced as new, as fresh, they can surprise and invigorate.

That’s another strong point that Bachelard seems to be making constantly as a phenomenologist of the imagination: the experience of something as new, as a first time, is uniquely to be prized; whereas the effort to logically reconstruct an experience starts to lose that sense, even more so when it is reconstructed in order to be classified as “done”, as “fully understood”, as something no longer in need of investigation. This is the error of learning from a stale setting (say, a textbook) things that have been originally learned by others as amazing encounters (though I’ve seen this error reversed without being corrected: presenting as amazing and sudden insights that were only gained through endless drudgery and formulation).

We’ll return to this soon.