Der Ekel
Florian Meisenberg
I can't believe our skin is going to age while it's still on our face. I think about it all the time, especially when I'm smiling. There are ridges that disappear into my cheeks, reverse contours of skin I feel folding back around the corners of my lips. The eyes act too, they also rend around the feeling. My pleasure will wear down elasticity, I think, and these will be the first places I notice myself deteriorating.
In Artful Scribbles, the child psychologist Howard Gardner laments the moment a child is forced to give his composition names, and therefore also, discrete parts. "Giving names is a good game," he writes, "[But] by doing this we have brought about something that is laden with heavy consequence. We have established a connection between the primal realm of scribbling and the already far advanced realm of language."
Categories are dangerous, they court violent desires for permanency. Life isn't like that. We stutter against motion, moving towards "bad infinity," nauseated and bombarded by a constant stream of images. Time collects into a melodic pile of inconsequence. Pastels, grinning faces, stick figures in twisted postures, rainbow sherbet, recurring nightmares…all in the pile, all collecting dust.
In the city we live very closely to the perverse artifice of molded structures. We delight occasionally, whenever we get the chance, on moments that last. Linseed on canvas strips away opacity. When illuminated, the places where the material's been touched lend light a temporary body. We can stand in a room with light for a little while. I think of stained glass, of Bernini's throne in the Vatican, and then I think of light as after-light, the white light of oblivion, that bleeding permeability that comes after disintegration.
-Theadora Walsh