We have our finger poised on a button to move on, the moment we are less than thrilled.
Breaking News: Young Boy (8) Listens to Entire LP! [In exchange for 30mins of Nintendo Switch.]
(Listen at 45 mins into the broadcast, and find out which artist and album his dad forced upon him for the reward of gaming time; and hear him remember the rehearsed lines that it was not only worth it for the privilige, but that he had "enjoyed it quite a bit". )
I woke up Saturday morning to Julian Worricker on the BBC World Service and a brief report on the loss of a culture that is able to appreciate the integrated whole, as found on the traditional Long Playing Record.
Album afficcionados in anoraks will go on about how once the LP saved our lives from the narrow confines of bourgeois suffocation and conformity. The post-war record industry marked the new spurt in growth of an individualised commitment to enrich the self by “communing with the machine tethered to the corner of your livingroom.” Or if you are a little younger, perhaps your bedroom.
It is the commitment to limit oneself (by free choice) to a composition made by our fellow humans that make us meek enough to understand every I is but one part of a whole. We ought to be involuting again from this unfolding of unique identity to morph our self into a selfless instrument. If we don't we will only grow lanky and our disconnected heads will drop off like over-reaching seedlings.
Only whole things can be recollected successful. If we undergo an intense experience, such as listening to a whole album used to be, it aids the recollection of a sense of self once we are more than free, left to float outer body never to return.
Apparently time constraints are the leading excuse to not sit down for 30 minutes or an hour (if you want to listen to side A and B.) There is also an excessive urge to be totally unique and individual by composing your own album in a playlist of favorite songs. This is fairly self-delusional, because what you can download from the mainstream providers is very pre-selected for you! Still haven’t found my Daddy, yet….
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When did it happen that we became too unfree to fill in an hour at will? Which brings me to the great example of a female artist who just lived her life the way she wanted to. The nerve! Especially in the first decades of the 20th century, when there weren’t any Blue-Chip Female Artists. I present to you: Georgia O’Keeffe.
At first, she wasn't that free, perhaps. Bound by the beauty that is one's talent in love. Until the bastard old fogie Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed his young student obsessively and married her as an intellectual and artistic equal left her for a younger woman. That is talent gone haywire (poorly tamed by a too puny ego) wanting more of life than it needs.
It takes a lot of courage to beg attention for the wider wonder of our world. The break with Stieglitz (we forgive him because we understand his function) converged more or less with Georgia feeling trapped in her own (erotic) image and it took moving to New Mexico to remake it into the independent woman who has become an icon for self-rule and the communion of womanhood with the landscape.
We don't all need to be drawn to O'Keeffe's art. I always have been, and a pair of hands, which much later I discovered to be hers (taken by Stieglitz, the sonofabitch), which I had found as a card stuck on a box and cut out to pin up on my wall in Barcelona, inspired me every morning to stretch a promise of such courage as hers along the view across the city down into Mediterranean, as I walked my kitten on a leash, to prevent her falling down five floors, as a bouncy ball through the balusters of the railing , sipping coffee for breakfast and probably smoking a cigarette. I intuited then that I was mapmaking and every little observation was my independent choice. These early lessons in patient assembling and often forlorn disassembling, to only reassemble soon after with a vengence are necessary if we want to cohese a meaning from our fiddling and wriggling about.
We can't all be like Georgia O'Keeffe with steely self-reliance. We are not all on the same mission to be that alone, that strong/fierce and independent. Some of our landscapes are harsher and rockier than others. But what we could try to do is listen attentively to or observe at length an entire composition of one of our fellow human beings - or go crazy and leaf through an entire oeuvre, or what the heck: visit an exhibition, which might cost you the better part of an hour - to feel less fragmented, separate and easily dispersed (like dust) in the wind. For to want only instant thrills and hits would be to miss the point of having a life at all. It is there to experience yourself in time. Time is not a limitation, it merely marks a period in which a life can be lead.
Life is largely pause. The more we speed it up, the less we hear (for the loss of the interval).
Choose your notes with care and then sound them all exactly as they need to be. Maybe one day, somebody will want to listen to all of you, too....
Top:Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abstraction White Rose, 1927. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, London