First, I loved the Agamben reading on
contemporaries! What a concise exploration of what it means to be of one’s
time, or rather to be timeless…
Especially in his discussion of fashion
as a style of sin derived from adam and eve’s first adornment of leaves, and
the idea of always being slightly out of date.
Aesthetic contemporaries.. Cody Cobb,
Claire Denis, Pina Baush, Yoann Lemoine, Sorcha O Raghallaigh. I tend to connect
most with musicians, writers, and skateboarders in terms of contemporaries,
influence, and perspective. At the same time, I’m interested in putting
together many voices of my contemporaries from all around saying the same
thing… but then don’t we all say the same thing anyway?
"Thus, like a
precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art,
in which a single individual lifts them self for an hour so high above their
personal destiny that their happiness shines like a star and appears to all who
see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own." Hesse
What struck me most in the Agamben
reading is the necessity to reveal darkness in light of the present. I am
currently reading De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, in which he jumps ship from his
typical excursions in pleasure to write about suffering. Suffering as the place
of realization, innovation, and mystery. The truth where there is no shadow.
I feel Wilde is a true
contemporary. I was walking in London with my friend Melody at the beginning of
night, and she introduced me to Oscar Wilde with the quote “the only spoiled
life is one whose growth is arrested.” De Profundis describes a period in
Wilde’s life when he was sent to prison for 2 years, and there found in
suffering the secret to his happiness.
Wilde says “Pleasure for
the beautiful body. But pain for the beautiful soul.”
"Now I find hidden
somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole
world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in
my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility. It is the last thing left
in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the
starting-point for a fresh development. It has come right out of myself... It
could not have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected
it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it... Of all things it is
the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that
one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one
possesses it."
To seek to taste the fruits
of all life’s pleasures, and to live inside of and seek out the depths of
suffering. This idea of darkness as a pathaway to something more is present in
both Agamben and Wilde’s work…
Wilde very much lived
everything he knows.. having Wilde’s work is like ‘having a friend in the
diamond business’ – knowing somebody who sees life from the same place you do,
who has been to many hilltops and river valleys, and can at least show you by
example, that what you know is not unique.
His example reminds us what we are
incapable of living – the past
and the present as being unlived. As
Agamben defines the contemporary, he gave everything he had to his time.
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