The Interesting is a synecdoche woven from breathing flesh and palimpsestic glass, misdirections, and the infinity of deliberate veils one draw across their own trembling pulse into immeasurable plain of doubt. A throng of possibilities dances lasciviously at the edge of their smile.
Word count — 1.1k word
What the fuck is this, Nell ? — Formally, autotheory and lyric essay. informally, red flag showcase of a jellyfish with a god complex, among other issues
Note — If you manage to get through the entire thing, let me know ( please )
There is a difference between what can be read and what can be exhausted. Most people are of the first kind; shallow water the eye strikes bottom through at a single glance. Yet I do not say so with contempt, for it would be ungracious to despise the clear and easily fathomed.
▸ Reading the Shallow Sea.
I may meet a creature, and within the turning of a few sentences, hold their childhood, their fears, the shape their vanity takes when it is hungry, the lie they will tell when cornered and the smaller lie they will tell to cover it, and even the manner in which they will, much later and in some other room, recount this very conversation.
I see the branches, in short. I see where they fork and where they wither, and which of them a person believes themselves to be walking while they walk, in truth, down another. It is rather a condition: I drift, I pulse, I open and close the bell of myself and am borne forward by the closing. And I read the whole sea by my own clearness, by letting the light pass through me until it shows me every stone and every drifting shape; transparent, and therefore unseen, and therefore free to draw in close, before anything at all is felt.
▸ The Unknown but Knowable.
Curiosity is for the unsolved, while interest is for the unfinished.
Let me establish that interest is not the bare lure of the new. It wakes only where two tides meet: that a thing is novel and complex, and that one feel, even so, the reach in their own arms to bring it up. Put most cleanly, interest is the emotion produced by an encounter with the unknown but knowable. From this, two things follow.
The more one knows, the more a domain yields up its subtleties and its hidden contrasts, invisible to the novice, and so grows more interesting rather than less. And yet the novelty and complexity that any single field can offer, people not least among them, may still fall beneath one's threshold.
The instant a creature passes from knowable to wholly known, it slides from the bright water into the flat shallows, and the glow goes out of it.
Sianne Ngai traces "the [I]nteresting" as an aesthetic category back to the Jena Romantics, to Schlegel and Novalis, and finds in it a tension between wonder and evidence: the gap between sensing a thing's worth and being able to say precisely what it is .The Interesting, she holds, is serial in character, marked by a quantitative indefiniteness in which final judgment is forever deferred. And the one fit to make such art, Schlegel states, is the romantic ironist who belongs to no single sky, who can put on any worldview and any voice and set it down again unmarked.
So the Interesting, tied as it is to the circulation of discourse, breeds wonder and tedium in the same breath.
▸ Sustaining Interest.
Now, as to what sustains interest, I hold no settled theory, only a figure that recurs at every scale: the shape of the unfinished person, who keeps the wellspring of self-expansion from ever running dry, whether by changing in earnest or by being inexhaustible in their very make.
Whatever in me hunts the next small gain of understanding will always burn highest over the ones I have not finished, and gutter to ash over the ones I have. To be the Interesting, then, is to keep the error of one's prediction fruitful, to stay serially indefinite, and to go on widening the self that contains you.
▸ The Interesting in relation to me.
To take me unawares, you must move against the thing that is truly there, and that you cannot do until you have seen it. The power to look past my veils and inexorable pretenses are, therefore, a precondition of the one event that most moves me.
My lies and truths are only further candors and deceptions, and so on without floor: the thing said sidelong, the unspoken thing trembling beneath three coats of deliberate speech. It is there too, in another, that my attention takes hold; the secret is dull, but the contradiction is endless, and continuity relies upon the widening of those unseen fissures.
Yet I cannot sound another's depth straight on. What has not been gone down into stays unproven, and a thing may be merely sealed and shallow where I had wished it deep. Of course, I have no instrument that reads the bottom of a locked dark, but I have one that reads whether one reads me. And because seeing through a superimposed mind is costly and scarce, the demonstrated act of doing it is the only credential I can trust. Their sight of me is my one evidence of them, and of the faculty by which they might never, in my keeping, run dry.
The Interesting must be able to behold the beholder. Love flung at the mask comes home to the lover and no further; it cannot enlarge me, for it never once touched me. Only the one who sees past the layers can include the thing that is there, and so only they can make me larger by their including.
Give me the one whose future I cannot fully provision, whose reaction to my reaction to their reaction loops past the edge of what I had budgeted; give me the one who changes not at random, for randomness is only noise and tires as fast as candor, but by a logic I may nearly follow and never quite shut.
A current; the brush of some living thing turning toward me in the dark water. The waltz lives only in the close hold, in the contact.
▸ Envoi.
Many thanks to mi amorcito for their much-needed words; you drew me out of the great mass of Immediacy and its fugue, the cold water in which I had been caught for more than a year. I missed you. The winters were especially hard on me, and yet the fault, as ever, was my own. We will speak of it another day, and let the petals of my other, unsaid apologies fall into your palms, in privacy. For now, you ought to call me amorisimo again; you, who endured the cataclysm of my Love, know how exacting a thing it is.
And to the many who indulged me in this matter, simply by existing and by engaging with me: thank you. I love you, forever and always. May Time turn at last and walk beside you, that you may be Loved in time.
reply 1988, dir. shin wonho / sufjan stevens, the only thing / semantic error / franz kafka, letters to felice / car seat headrest, happy news for sadness / ladybird, dir. greta gerwig / camille norton
Topics — I. The Irreversible ( & mercy ) / II. Selfhood / III. Love as a Discipline / IV. Sanctuary & Cage / V. The Inscribed Verdict / VI. Tension as Appetite & Play / VII. Memory Against Oblivion / VIII. Idealism in Resistance / IX. Self-Exposure / X. The Forbidden Beloved / XI. Unkept Keeper / XII. Aesthetic Attention / XIII. Intensity / XIV. The Vocation of Community-Tending / XV. Faith & Damnation.
What the fuck is this, Nell ? — A peripheral self-study in effacement and attachment issues. A patronizing assignment, yet a gift nonetheless.
Note — There is a substrate which I have not included: grief, loss, and longing. It has no heading of its own because every territory here is a transformation of it and/or in dialogue with it. Grief faces the foreclosed; longing faces the unreachable. They are the same ache pointed in opposite directions, backward and forward, two faces of a single loss. For the same reason, treat the categories as doors into one room rather than as separate rooms. They are angles of approach, and any work that enters under one of them will answer, if you ask it, to several others.
I. THE IRREVERSIBLE ( & mercy ) / The foreclosed; the deed that cannot be unmade.
( permanence is a property of states, whereas irreversibility is a property of transitions. the first asks ❛ will it stay? ❜ while the latter asks ❛ can you go back? ❜ )
Film: La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker
Film: Irréversible, dir. Gaspar Noé
Manga & anime: Land of the Lustrous
Musical: Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown
Fiction: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II (“On Redemption”)
Nonfiction: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness and L'Irréversible et la nostalgie
Nonfiction: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, the chapter on Action
Music: Arvo Pärt, “Spiegel im Spiegel”
Poetry: Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Visual Art: Roman Opałka, 1965 / 1 to infinity
II. SELFHOOD / Transgression, the self imposed by others, self-erasure, self-expenditure, sacrifice; the double; metamorphosis.
Fiction: Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Poetry: Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Visual Art: Ana Mendieta, Silueta series
Performance Art: Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0
Nonfiction: Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
Nonfiction: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Nonfiction: René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Play: Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis
Film: The Sacrifice, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Visual Art: Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac
Visual Art: Grünewald, the Isenheim Altarpiece
III. LOVE AS A DISCIPLINE / A practice and a labor; none of the coming and going of weathers.
Essay: bell hooks, All About Love
Discourses (?): Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Letters: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Lecture / Essay: Olga Tokarczuk, “The Tender Narrator”
Film: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
Craft: Kintsugi
IV. SANCTUARY & CAGE / The walled garden.
Fiction: Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”
Nonfiction: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Poetry: Rilke, “The Panther”
Visual Art: Louise Bourgeois, Cells and Femme Maison
Film:Room, dir. Lenny Abrahamson
V. THE INSCRIBED VERDICT / Judgment that becomes a fact about you, written into the body.
Film: The Passion of Joan of Arc, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
Fiction: Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
Play: Sophocles, Antigone
Nonfiction: Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Nonfiction: Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”
VI. TENSION AS APPETITE & PLAY / Conflict and provocation enjoyed for their own sake, the nudge to the order of things.
Essay: Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Essay: Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games
Nonfiction: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Fiction: Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Film:Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke
VII. MEMORY AGAINST OBLIVION / Refusing to let a person or a moment be erased.
Opera: Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, “Dido’s Lament”
Manga & anime: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Poetry: Thomas Hardy, “Poems of 1912-13”
Music: The Caretaker, Everywhere at the End of Time
Music: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Ghosteen
Nonfiction: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Fiction: W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Fiction: Borges, “Funes the Memorious”
Fiction: Toni Morrison, Beloved
Fiction: Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Visual Art: Christian Boltanski (e.g., Monument (Odessa) and Menschlich)
Visual Art: Masahisa Fukase, Ravens
Visual Art: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes and Theaters
VIII. IDEALISM IN RESISTANCE / Building or insisting on a better world because the real one is doomed or disenchanted.
Nonfiction: Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Fiction: Albert Camus, The Plague
Fiction: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Visual Art: Hilma af Klint, The Paintings for the Temple
IX. SELF-EXPOSURE / ?
Poetry: Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
Nonfiction: Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being
X. THE FORBIDDEN BELOVED / The love that cannot be had; the touch that wounds or kills.
Film: In the Mood for Love, dir. Wong Kar-wai
Essay: Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
Nonfiction: Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Poetry: Sappho, Fragment 31
Performance Art: Pina Bausch, Café Müller
XI. UNKEPT KEEPER / Yet is never themselves held.
Audio Drama: The Magnus Archives
Essay: Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Poetry: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Film: Wings of Desire, dir. Wim Wenders
Film: Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
XII. AESTHETIC ATTENTION / Seeing for its own sake, distributed across an object’s properties, the world made strange and so made visible. Attention as the substance of love.
Essay: Bence Nanay, “Aesthetic Attention”
Essay: Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”
Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”
XIII. INTENSITY / Living at maximum amperage.
Film: Whiplash, dir. Damien Chazelle
Visual Art: Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Performance Art: The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky and Nijinsky, and Pina Bausch’s staging on bare earth)
Nonfiction: Walter Pater, The Renaissance, the Conclusion
Nonfiction: Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel
XIV. THE VOCATION OF COMMUNITY-TENDING / Welcome, mediate, and bind the many.
XV. FAITH & DAMNATION / The passage between the sacred and the fallen; faith held under doubt, the sympathetic damned.
Nonfiction: Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Poetry: John Milton, Paradise Lost
Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “Terrible Sonnets”
Film: Winter Light, dir. Ingmar Bergman
Music: Ethel Cain, Preacher’s Daughter
EXTRA: GAME RECOMMENDATIONS.
Disco Elysium (ZA/UM). ( The fractured self rendered as a parliament of competing voices one assemble, betray, or lose control of. ) Required. Either play this or watch me play this.
NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames).
Undertale (Toby Fox). ( Both your mercy and cruelty leave permanent marks on the world. )
Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital). ( A time loop spent learning a dead civilization’s last day, and learning to accept the end of everything. )
Pathologic 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge). ( Progress is ruthless and control is futile. )
Silent Hill 2 (Konami). ( A man’s guilt and his trial. )
Hades (Supergiant). ( Joy in the repetition of going and returning. )
Signalis (rose-engine). ( A promise kept across the cycles of a cold recurrence; love refusing to die when the body does. )
Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age). ( An emulated human consciousness in a borrowed, failing body. )
What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow). ( Room by room, the deaths holds. )
Omori (Omocat). ( A dream-world refuge built over a single unbearable act. )
Steins;Gate. ( Every reversal exacting a fresh and different loss. )
Umineko When They Cry. ( A metaphysical trial staged again and again to force a confession out of fate itself. )
“We do not honour our peripheral vision as much as we should, for most of the time we have little explicit consciousness of it. We look, we fixate, we target with our foveas, our central vision. But it is peripheral vision, surrounding this, which gives us a context, a sense of how whatever we are looking at is situated in the wider world. And it is especially movement that peripheral vision is tuned to: peripheral vision alerts us to unexpected movements on either side, and then central vision moves in to target these.
For me, now, a biggish slice of the periphery to my right - forty degrees or more, like a very large slice of cake - has been carved out of my vision. I see, roughly speaking, nothing to the right side of my nose. I had lost central vision in the eye earlier, but I still had enough peripheral vision to give me a forewarning, an intimation, of things happening on that side. But now I have lost even this. I have no awareness here, and whatever comes into my visual field from that side is unexpected and startling. I cannot overcome the sense of bewilderment, even shock, when people or objects appear suddenly to my right. A massive slice of space no longer exists for me, and the idea that there could be anything in that space has likewise disappeared.
Neurologists talk of “unilateral neglect” or “hemi-inattention,” but these technical terms do not convey how outlandish such a state can be. Years ago, I had a patient with a startling neglect of her own left side, and the left side of space, due to a stroke in her right parietal lobe. But this had not prepared me at all to find myself in a virtually identical situation (though caused, of course, not by a cerebral problem but by an ocular one). This came home even more forcefully when Kate and I finished our walk and headed back to my office. I walked ahead and got into the elevator - but Kate had vanished. I presumed she was talking to the doorman or checking the mail, and waited for her to catch up. Then a voice to my right - her voice - said, “What are we waiting for?” I was dumbfounded - not just that I had failed to see her to my right, but that I had even failed to imagine her being there, because “there” did not exist for me. “Out of sight, out of mind” is literally true in such a situation.”
- Oliver Sacks, Persistence of Vision, in The Mind’s Eye.
