What is required, in order that we may be moved? It’s election season, and so getting voters to bother in order to get a candidate over the line, defeat the fascists, save what needs saving are all familiar. Or become familiar again – we always need refreshing and reminding, suggesting that we, or at least a great majority of us, default to an unmoved state. Why this is so and clearly observable is interesting on its own – savvy, cynical, overindulged, entertained to boredom? – but not the point here and I trust there is one.
A thing less caused by duress that might conjure our being touched, stirred, triggered in the parlance, toward some deep, emotion reaction, speaks more to the missing element than a threat’s reminder. We cultivate a different relationship with perceptions of things (or people) as marginal, that keystroke which leads to indifference. We become acquainted to those, perhaps to the point of even preferring them as an antidote to feeling or being bothered; confessions about this analgesic effect on our psyche readily reveal the why and how of pharmaceutical and entertainment industries designed for succor and we are presently dropped back into a chicken-and-egg debate itself designed to go not further.
Separated into special trips to the museum, objects within them become otherwise monuments to their impossibility, especially so the impossibility of encounters with them as art that moves us. A painting or sculpture in the wild – a photographer friend once installed an entire show in a deep woods, precisely and only for those who might accidentally discover it – is not after all in the wild or naturally occurring. Yet it is deliberate, as is our maintaining of preference for engaging with it. We do these things on purpose not once in a while but on the regular, cultivating in a true sense our own power to be moved, keeping it limber, flexible, not in need of fury though neither beyond it. Far less effort than remaining unmoved, the sway of a leg or reach of a perfect hand should stir us with instantaneous, ready fascination – that is, we promote and prioritize that possibility within us. Daily, if we can; hourly, if we’re lucky.
Marginalization of sensual effects upon leaves us reeling in the face of those who temp, scare, or frighten us with the artificial, which should hold far less sway over us than it does. But we struggle with the demigods of artificiality, as if any of their product worthwhile upon our senses, our capacity to stir, and be stirred. Figurative language was the first to be born, proper meanings the very last to be found. Provocation on this continuum should be the bare minimum.
Now don’t forget to vote.
Image: From the aforementioned forest photo show by Shaman.