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Language/the beauty of the cycle…a collection of essays en route!
Hi All,
I have nothing as well-defined as most of you posting here (everything’s exciting!), but I”ll post some very brief thoughts: I’m writing a series of essays that look at the way we look – that is, the aesthetics of seeing, received forms of beauty, and the way conventions of seeing keep us from the beauty of decay, our place in the cycle, the fullest concepts of “life” (from a recent essay: “cliches are an ecological problem”)… any great readings/films, etc would be great. I”m currently reading “Entangled Life” (Merlin Sheldrake) and “Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World” — THANKS! Lia Purpura
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A topic much on my mind and I’d love to keep trading references here. The first book that comes to mind is The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins by Midas Dekker, a book of essays, very well-written. It reads at times like the musings of a grumpy misanthropic man. But there’s also a lucidity to many of the sentences, which come across as stark and blunt truths as they meander through nature and architecture and art and biology and the science of decay. Like this passage–
“If you imagine life as a cycle, then the infant is followed by the child, the child by the adult and the adult by the old man; but after the old man comes the infant again. Les extrêmes se touchent. Old people and children have always had a special bond. Grandchildren usually get along with their grandparents as well as their grandparents get along with them. What one cannot yet do well, the other can no longer do well. While one crawls because its legges are still rubbery, the other walks bandy-legged because its legs have become brittle. Young and old are literally and figuratively more earth-bound, more animal-like; sometimes both wear nappies; they’re friends in fate. They both face the unknown.”
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