How they spread up into my hands
Dissipate like water beads sprinkling across my skin
I like how your twisted tongue turns poetry into song
With verses that don’t rhyme
I like
How you lace my drinks with antiquity
Quiet my sobs with ecstasy
And paint them as honesty
Your lips keep all of them contained within me
Sealed with the kiss of your disdain
There are periods in my life where I completely fall out of love with fiction. I’m not entirely sure why it happens, but suddenly there’s a switch that goes off in my brain, and I hate even the concept of fiction and media– the falsity of it, the mere entertainment, the meaningless indulgence in the aesthetic, as we all slink closer and closer to our deaths, and the earth keeps turning, and we watch a movie or turn the pages of a magazine or forget a poem.
For example, at some point in sophomore year of high school, I read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a coming-of-age novel about the unparalleled bond between two boys. I still remember crying on the floor of my bedroom past midnight when I was supposed to be doing homework, and just let the book completely wreck me (it’s a very good book, you should read it), and when my mom walked into the room, I had nothing for defense except “It was a good book.” I realized that I couldn’t invest my time into a book without getting so attached and emotionally invested. It controlled me. After that, I went for months without reading anything– I got too invested, it hurt me too much, it surprised me with the pliability of my own emotions. I wanted to dominate my emotions, not let fiction dominate them.
I got over that, of course– it’s silly to have such powerful connections to books and movies and take it so innocently for reality. I developed a crucial distance from literature, almost as a defense mechanism to not let to get it to me too much, not allow it to break me and tear me apart, scare me or enthrall me. I started to see it from an “intellectually” distanced standpoint, observing it from the superior perch of examining craft and theme and symbolism, stroking my monocle and saying things like, “Ah yes, the intertextuality…”, or, “The symbolism of this hat demonstrates that…” And that helped me understand art, helped me tame the wild and crazy and unexplainable forces of literature.
Coming to college, things started to feel too crystallized. I stopped connecting to the things I was reading as much, and that may have just been because even though we were reading “diverse literature” in my English classes, it was still taught by white professors to a mostly white student body, creating a strange dissonance with the work. And more than that– the Western-centric perspective of everything I read was so glaringly obvious to me, I couldn’t connect to it at a personal level. The emotional connection I’d once had to art– the kind of cosmic, universe-warping feelings that had made me cry in my childhood bedroom– had all gone. They were replaced with terms and definitions and critical theory. Wasn’t it supposed to move me?
I can’t say I’ve found conclusions to my constantly fluctuating relationship with literature. But I have found a little reminder of why I love what I love. Columbus is a movie about the unexpected friendship between a homebody architect-enthusiast and the son of a renowned architect set in the town of Columbus, Indiana, known for its modernist buildings. In one of the lines in which the main character is trying to explain to Jin why she likes a building, he stops her and asks if she likes the building intellectually.
“I’m also moved by it,” she admits.
“Yes!” He says. “Yes, tell me about that: What moves you?”
“I thought you hated architecture.”
“I do. But I’m interested in what moves you.”
As I most likely move towards a career that intellectualizes art, I must ground myself to my own heart, and remind myself to stay true to the contents of my mind. I want to be committed to that which moves me.
At this very moment, your heart may be fluttering with anticipation, your stomach might be knotted with nerves, you might have a sudden urge to kiss the person to your right, perhaps you are antsy with iktsuarpok.
Descartes claimed that there are only six basic, universal emotions, which he called the “primitive passions”: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. While I agree that all human beings, no matter their language or culture background, certainly experience these six emotions, should we constrain ourselves to vague generalities, when there is an infinite number of sensory opportunities for us to experience this world? Should foreign languages stop us from exploring the inner workings of our brain?
Words are very telling about cultures; they help define what’s important to a culture’s people. In the same way that the Inuits have over 50 words to describe snow in all its varieties, cultures put into words the emotions and feelings that are the most relevant to their society. Words are efficient, yet words also are practical and purposeful vessels of emotion. We may feel “cozy and warm from being inside with friends on a cold day,” but because we don’t have a word that sums up that particular feeling, we would be more likely to let the feeling go unsaid. The Dutch on the other hand, whose vocabulary includes the word “gezelligheid,” can express in just four syllables their warm-hearted comfort.
Words are fascinating. Especially foreign words. Even when you aren’t sure how to pronounce them, their specific meanings that define a feeling you’ve had before somehow brings the world closer together. We become one culture of feeling beings. We bond over our likenesses rather than the differences between us.
True, you might not ever use one of these words while hanging with your friends or in a school paper. In fact, it might be wholly pretentious if you just said, “As Mr. Rochester stepped out of the shadows, Jane Eyre was overcome with a bout of basorexia and nearly succumbed to it.” But, there is something very comforting knowing that the word exists. That someone on the other side of the globe has expressed a feeling for you. A secret between you and the word.
It’s no coincidence that words and emotional expressions are the two most effective ways that humans communicate with each other. Of course, then, we find people striving to connect the two together. Books such as Tiffany Watts Smith’s “The Book of Human Emotions,” Ella Frances Sanders’ “Lost in Translation,” and Tumblr site “Word-stuck” are increasing the powerful beauty, history and art of this compounding. We are inventing a language of feeling, a language that is ever growing, a language not bound by country borders or regional differences, but a language born out of humans just being human.
So.
I have come to that periodic point in my life where I feel emotionally stifled. You know when you have so many thoughts rushing in and out of your head, and you just don’t know what to do with them? There’s school, there’s home life, there’s work, and all you can really do is go to sleep just to get some peace and quiet from your emotion-filled day. Well, I’m there. I guess when I think about it, I could address everything as it comes. Collectively go over why that made me feel this way and just be done with it, as soon as it occurs. But, I guess I’m just human.
So.
What should I do about it? In the past when I’ve gone off the deep end, crying one minute and jumping up and down to a Beyonce song the next, I took to my favorite pastime to get me by. Blogging. Tumblr, specifically. Yes I’d write a long, passion-infused text post about everything I’d endured that day. From the moment I got up, to the time I took to sit down and write, I’d jot down everything. I’d write down my thoughts on why I felt that way, and then forced myself to come up with a better way of how I could go about the situation next time. The beautiful part about this emotional outlet is that no one really follows my blog, and if they do, they have no idea who I am. I could be as boisterous, cynical, selfish, and pathetic as I want because it was my blog, no one else’s. I still go on there from time to time and enact some of my online journaling, but this time I don’t think it’ll do the job.
I could put my feelings into my apartment? Okay, that sounds weird, but follow me on this. Even though I moved into my apartment two months ago, I haven’t gotten around to decorating it. I have high aspirations for what I want to do to the place, yet whenever I get around to buying a pillow or a flower plant, it doesn’t ever seem to come together. Maybe my emotions can open my creative abilities. I could put time into researching what works and what doesn’t work, what I like and what I don’t like. It could be freeing and fulfilling, and it could let me escape the hustle and bustle within my head just for a little bit. Possibility?
Let’s be honest with ourselves. Dealing with emotions are very hard. We’re all human, we all have them. Some more than others (pointing at this girl). But finding fun, creative and, most of all, fulfilling ways to deal with them will always be the challenge. First, we have to come to terms with the fact that we need to deal with them at all. Second, we need to take the time out of our day to do all we can to comfort ourselves. It may not seem like a difficult task to start, but who really wants to go through everything that’s upset them or made them sad that day? But, then again, who really wants to let it build up continuously, to where it becomes difficult to function.  Find your outlet. Blogging, decorating, painting, dancing, it could be anything. I’m still figuring out what I should do with mine, but to be honest, I feel like writing this little post on Arts Ink helped a lot.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a statue worth? Â Or a cathedral or an expertly crafted acqueduct?
While writing about the political messages conveyed by the triumphal statues of Roman emperors the other day, I tried to come up with reasons why someone in 2012 should even care about these crumbling relics from a time long passed.
Why do people create visual art? Â Paintings, sculptures, architectural feats of greatness.
I think it is because there are some feelings so deep, some convictions so intense, that no words can adequately convey them. Â (Or, in the words of my art history professor, “Constantine needed something BIG to proclaim that he was emperor. Â So his triumphal arch is kind of his way of saying, “I won! Ha-ha! Â HERE’S my statue!” Â Standing at 21 meters high, with a collage of spolia from previous emperors on its facade, the arch is quite imposing.
In addition to empowerment afforded by three-dimensional space in art, I also think that the pre-Colombus, flattened globe of words and text is confining. Â Bound by the gated contrasts of dark and light, with no in-between.
No pools of color, no jutting shards of spears, and no three-dimensional transcendence.
Sometimes, you just need to experience a great painting to feel and know the comfort that someone, somewhere else has experienced the same feelings as you. Â And not only have they experienced these feelings, a gifted artist was able to capture them and immortally frame them in something beautiful.
I think art and art history, is not something to be looked down upon. Â Rather than a frivolous and superfluous study of line and color, it is the fibers of humanity, expressed in line, color, and three dimensional spaces that let our souls breathe. Â It is the liberation of our thoughts from the confining jail cells of text.
Although Marcus Aurelius could have written more books of ‘Meditations’ and philosophy, even he deemed it fit to immortalize a facet of his personality in three-dimensional marble with a powerful cape and commanding horse that doesn’t exactly come across on crumbly second century papyri.
