The Globe as an Art Form
by Lilith Connor
i. I keep forgetting that with all the cruelness of humanity, individuals themselves aren’t evil. If anything they’re cursed by the system, never able to act outside of their nature. Programmed. It’s sad, but it makes them so easy to control, yet so hard to understand.
ii. I’ve been talking too much about survival. It’s taken up so much of my personality. And at the end of the day, I want to be known for how much love I have. Even in a position where I cannot afford to love, I still do. I love so much it’s hard to put it into words. I love the dew on the window this morning and the storm that enveloped it and how green the leaves are and how I can smell it all as if it were real despite the fact that my window remained closed: open hearted and crisp. Like birth and life. It’s the kind of feeling I always thought of as having your heart cut open, left defenseless to bleed out- I’ve always known that I can’t afford to have emotion.
iii. But I have it anyway.
iv. Think of children, the only truly innocent things we have. I love their wonder, their pure goodness- their helplessness is an obligation. I love animals and their beauty- just think of it, the fact that god created us, and then created a billion things so different from us, things that we could never hope to understand. Things that are parallel to us, but never exactly like us, each knowing something we cannot imagine.
v. Think of all the people, with all the billion little things that make up who they are. They’ve all been programmed differently- their memories different, a little nuance with their response to every word, a billion people we can never hope to understand, but can spend our whole lives trying.
vi. I love the winter- when I was young I used to write poem after poem about winter, about the little footsteps in the snow, the softness of the berries, the little crunch underneath your feet. There was something moving about the stillness of it, the stasis, as if something so beautiful was just ordinary, that we were blessed to come into a world that would cover our feet with lace, envelop our house with these little white sheets.
vii. And the night, and the stars which I want to drink, and I still say I hate nature, because I can’t afford to feel.
viii. I love the flowers. I love roses, with their delicate petals and their haunting, visceral beauty. They have this kind of boldness to their delicacy, this sense that even though you can hurt them, you can never forget. I want to be like that. I want to be the person that people always remember hurting.
ix. Faces too, are beautiful, if less defenseless, because there are things the eyes can say that words cannot. There are people with their stories written all over their faces. There are people who tell their stories with their hair, their lips, their skin. Here are people that make you look twice. There are people that tell you their stories with their eyes. I love the way lips can look like blooming flowers, the way eyes can remind you of jewels, the way roses can bloom from your flesh in burned ink.
xii. But I love all the beautiful, meaningless things. The pretty household objects, the lace string tablecloths and rococo dresses and the little cakes, all curled and filled with pink. I love all the little things, all of the hand adorned ribbons, all of the things that we can do without.
xiii. I love human culture. Think of language, the fact that the framework for every human’s thoughts is not the same, that these words are nothing more than interesting shapes, curled and twisted to another person’s eyes. All the little hidden meanings behind each word, behind each thought, are the result of language. No two languages can have the same phrase, and we can learn as many ways of thinking as we can.
xiv. I love the religion, the history. I love the society, understanding society, realizing all the different ways to study human beings- though I find it the hardest of all my loves to put into words, it is perhaps the strongest. I love philosophy, psychology, all the many languages of thought. I love the fact that in each field there is a different earth, a different world you’re envisioning, and they all exist somehow, all at once, connected yet not. I love the way every part of our world is broken down, studied, as if this earth is really just a metaphor for something bigger, better.
xv. I love the brain, the personality of it, the understanding of all the many things that make a person a person. The fact that we are like a machine- complex, intricate, beautiful. I love the idea of learning, the idea that the landscape of your mind, filled with valleys and hills, can expand, and suddenly, you have a new field to cross. That every thought provides a new path, a new place to go, a new world to decipher- a new world of things to detect. Like building blocks, a billion new combinations per block.
xvi. I love poetry, and I think the most intimate things to us are the hardest to explain. I love language, the multi-facetedness of it. The fact that beyond every meaning, there is a different sense, a new sense, one that has a grip on language, the physicalness of it. The inherent weight of it, the physicality of it- the visual language inherently a part of poetry. In fact every word has a thousand other words connected to it, and a thousand other stories behind that, and in this way poetry is the one thing that can string all the senses together coherently, that can mix the smell of your homeland with the cider and pine. The one with its hand on the web of language, the way it is tinkered and the visuality of it, how the words together are a form of art, link shapes, link textures and tastes and colors. The one that can taste each word and smell each poem, the one that can lick stories for hints of vanilla or essence.
xvii. And besides that, think about how beautiful music is. The one art form that engages all the senses, the one art form that drives all others, that cannot be dissected through words. Think of the heavenliness of it, the colors flashing before your eyes. The stories that you see before them, the million stories, the million flashes of light. Think of the inherent visualness of it, the dance and the film, the layers of symphony and harmony that create something that cannot be undone. The way Lana Del Rey makes you imagine a world you cannot explain through words, a world of mystique and mystery, of beauty and power. The dreaminess of it, the glamour and hurt. The American dream and the American pain- the way you can watch it like a series of dreams, hazy and beautiful. Californian and melancholic, it develops a world like no other, develops a world in which pain and beauty coexist as one, where hope and softness can coincide with violence.
xviii. I love art for everything it is, how it envelops everything. Art is a visual language, one of many languages we do not talk about, the way the codes and visual symbols provide messages the same way blocks to, and yet create something coherent that is greater than the sum of its parts. And once you apply that definition to everything, (and notice its similarity to language) you understand why I see two forms of creation. There is the art that cuts you, the one that stops you in its tracks, the one that fills you with that night sky odor, as if the world is trapped inside its lungs. This can only be achieved through something the artist itself cannot explain, perhaps a bleeding through of the sky or from the gods.
xix. But there is also design, and design can be found anywhere, and can provide a structure for understanding humanity for the good, for the loving of it. The study of variety. Of the different thoughts. Of the movements of different kinds of art, the approaches to cinema, to food, to music. Architecture, dance, anything with variety, yet I feel determined to list them all. Even sport could be applied here, though my lack of understanding of the less artistic sports prompts me to include it in the humanities rather than the creations. The understanding of the symptoms of culture, the most beautiful ones, and understanding what drove its creation- alas, a study of a creation is a study of the creator. Understanding the thought process behind Fauvism or Orientalism allows understanding of the setting, of the human, of the background- it is essentially what an archeologist does, to recover the scene, the story.
xx. Think of the country after country, like a new story to tell. The way everything you know came from where you’re from, the way there are a hundred where’s to choose from, a hundred programs, a hundred cultures and stories and words to absorb into you. Think of the beauty of the things you don’t fully understand, the dances of India and the drums of Africa, of the little things: the carpet, the shop, the billions of histories and stories all waiting to be opened. Always remember the little things
xxi. I love the criticalness of writing, the sharp-eyedness , and I love it because it finds itself explaining, explaining, explaining, and I am thirsty for knowledge like an elixir. The dissection of it, the dissection of society- I find all forms of media to be like little investigations of our planet. Look at the little things this joke observed. Look at the many hidden problems, the many hidden motives behind this character. Look at all the little things in life, the things that must be true in order for these little things to exist. I wish somebody would write it all down in one large book, all the little things, but alas I do not have the time.
xxii. I love the concept of passion itself, it excites me, invigorates me to even see it, hear about it, as if the energy spreads to those around them. For someone so hell bent on the understanding of things, I find that I would not want to be simple enough to be understood on a chart, to be able to be put into words. And those people who are deeply sad, for there is nothing sadder than to have limits, to have constraints, yet this is the reality of human life.
xxiii. But think of the beauty of all things. Of all desires. Of the inherent largeness of it. Of the geographist explaining the earth itself, of the economist explaining human desire. Of the historian repeated the stories of the earth- what an important job, to need to remember our stories. Of our need to be things, and our inability to explain why we want to be them, we simply feel the pieces of a puzzle click into place, as if we were never truly whole without the things that we love.
xxiv. Think of the dancers, creating a poetry of movement, creating a language between stasis and stillness, sharpness and peace. A language between life and death itself. Think of the way the ballerinas float, so perfect they look inhuman, so tear-inducingly beautiful, the way they seem to take the humanness out of life, make it something else entirely. The way they create a new life, a new world, one in which swans with words and graceful deaths are possible, one in which ballerinas float, as if without gravity, on their feet. This is the appeal of dance, I think, the way it takes you someplace else, allows you to live a different life. One of someone elegant, beautiful. Flawless. Think of the way contemporary dancers do the opposite, and their dancers cut you, stitch you up with night. Think of the way humans have always needed to move, needed to say things with their bodies they never could in words.
xxv. Think of all the languages we cannot explain. The notation of music, the computational languages, the languages of textures, of smells, of tastes, all like blocks- things on their own, yet ingredients in a larger creation.
