#on bees

[florilegium-archive]

"There were hours enough, lonely hours, in which she let dignity go; then there were others when, clinging with her winged concentration to some deep cell of her heart, she stored away her hived tenderness as if she had gathered it all from flowers."

The Golden Bowl, Henry James

[florilegium-archive]

"that perhaps most flower-loving and honey-sipping member of the great Bloomsbury hive, its packed passages and cells"

The Golden Bowl, Henry James

[florilegium-archive]

"We should imitate bees, and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it was apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state."

Seneca

[notcaycepollard]

my friend: so i'm going on a date tomorrow any tips?

me: okay so when you get to the date this is real important

my friend: uh huh i'm listening

me: whatever you do just don't do this

my friend: go on

me: just do not okay DO NOT open your mouth and disgorge a mouthful of live bees onto the table at her

my friend: hold on i gotta write this down

my friend: no... live... bees, okay got it, any other tips

me: nah i think as long as you avoid the mouthful of bees you'll be set

me: just be yourself

my friend: but don't BEE myself huh

me: exactly.

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: on bees

on bees

Maddox Pratt, 2015 Web 5min

on bees is a short game poem about art, or really about a single artwork, and specifically about art as a way of introducing rigor to how one sees things. This makes writing about it feel a bit recursive. Rigorous perception is like, my whole thing. Every time I sit down to write something about a game or a TV show or what have you, I think a lot about how I'm looking at it; how others might look at it; what it means about me that I look at it the way I do.

on bees has a few lines that resonated with me a lot: "Perception is a commitment, / Perception is a responsibility, [...]" The artist in the poem makes drastic changes to her environment in an attempt to explore a certain experience of seeing. This makes a lot of sense to me; perception is an active process, one that involves a lot of choices. And the more you make those choices consciously and with intent, the more clearly you can see the world.

Well, I started calling these things diaries to give myself permission to go on self-indulgent tangents, so I'm going to go on a self-indulgent tangent. To be clear, the reason I think about perception in this way is that I never had the luxury of taking the world at face value. I've had to deal with distortions of reality my whole life, ranging from disordered emotion to paranoid delusions to hallucinations. I've grown into a certain acceptance of all this. What I see and hear and feel is all evidence, which I approach with the same open-minded skepticism that I would, say, information I found on Wikipedia.

Along the way, I got impatient with people who take perception for granted. Perception is a responsibility. You decide what you see and how you see it. If you're not doing so consciously, you're letting some part of your mind you don't understand decide for you. I respect the artistic project described in on bees because it acknowledges how active and strenuous the work of seeing clearly is. I dig this, and the Sisyphean nature of the task it describes.