Day 24

Day 24 – The desire within beauty has always intrigued me. The heart of the idea, as I put it in an essay, that “to want is really to want more of something” is hard to pinpoint.

I’ve been slowing reading Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle. Since I’m behind everyone else who have likely read up to the 6th book, I’m just now reckoning with his famous descriptions of minutiae. One such philosophical maundering struck me. He talks about the feeling he gets when looking at particular paintings. He says:

…the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for…even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire.

…The pictures made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what?

…But the moment I focused my gaze on the paining again all of my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?

Have you felt this too? The longing that is in something fantastic. I think this is the thing that also makes certain books impossible to put down, how we say that we’ve “devoured” it. It is something from the idyllic that is not fulfilled by its idyllic representation, but spurred by it.

I was driving up to Sacramento to meet my best friend’s baby when I heard a song lyric that seemed to respond to this question. From Bill Callahan’s song Winter Road, he says:

The blinding lights of the kingdom can make you weep

I have learned
When things are beautiful
To just keep on
Just keep on

Often, it is when things are dark and impossible we tell ourselves to just keep on. I meditated on the idea for a long time.

When things are beautiful, when the beauty is staggering, it can be paralyzing. The mind wants to understand what the body is experiencing. Reasoning gets in the way and we find ourselves further from it.

Do we want it? Do want to be it? Or, might it serve as is a reminder of what possibility means. Possibility is neither having nor becoming the thing we desire, but to hold the thing within us.

I’ve talked about my morning meditations before, those dedicated to manifesting. The point of these is to hold the idea of what I want as a vision, not one that I see coming true, but as one already part of my being.