Q: Thinking Through Loneliness also draws on artistic and literary works. How did working with these texts help you in thinking through loneliness?
I wouldn’t know how to discuss any intense experience of suffering without reference to artistic and literary works. To be moved by a work is as essential, in my view, as to be inspired or provoked intellectually. I was struck by the longing for intimacy conveyed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved decades ago on my first of many reads, which has stayed with me. And who can read Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Metamorphosis’ without shuddering over the terrifying alienation and loneliness of Gregor Samsa, understanding our own alienation through an encounter with his?
It would be difficult to analyse loneliness by referring exclusively to philosophical texts that engage with the subject, since there are so few. And in general, aside from Fromm-Reichmann’s 1959 essay, ‘Loneliness’, and a handful of other works, I found the social science literature to be rather too scholarly for understanding such a complex experience. Many of the categorisations of this or that type of loneliness landed too far from the original experience and as a result glossed over the vicissitudes of loneliness.
The most poignant descriptions of human experience always come from artists and writers. Given their intent is not to settle the rich complexity of an experience into something more systematised and palatable, we really must look to them for understanding.
Q and A with Professor Diane Enns on Thinking Through Loneliness (2022)
One thing after another forming a landscape
A suspended moment of living hope
“[Anne] Carson suggests that to catch beauty is not the point; it is the yearning after it, the running after the spinning top, that gives us pleasure. “Beauty spins and the mind moves,” she explains. “To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” […] In Carson’s reading of Kafka’s story, eros expands, understood in a broader sense than sexual love. This is eros as a force or magnetic pull that draws us outside of ourselves to converge not only with other individuals–with varying degrees of intimacy–but also with ideas and with the worlds we create and inhabit. We rise above the boundaries of our selves, our bodies, our circumstances and immediately collide with other being and things. ” – Diane Enns, Love in the dark, Philosophy by another name. 2016.
*Anne Carson, Eros the bittersweet, referencing Kafka’s “The Top”
Georgia O’Keeffe
Hello, welcome!
AG2023_1022926ab or before we leap up to become Flight 828
even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall.
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
AG2023_1034061a or bailen la cumbia
Lejanía · Lisandro Meza Cumbias Colombianas
Cumbia Campesina · La Tropa Vallenata
Flor Maria · Aniceto Molina
A flower is a node on a network of botanical systems of interconnection and regeneration.
[…]
much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is […] time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty
Rebecca Solnit
AG2023_1044727a or maneuvers to expose an enchanted one
Untitled (FG–maneuvers to expose an enchanted one) i
A section of Félix González-Torres‘s essay on Roni Horn’s The Gold Field, 1980-1982.
1990, L.A. The Gold Field. How can I deal with the Gold Field? I don’t quite know. But the Gold Field was there. Ross and I entered the Museum of Contemporary Art, and without knowing the work of Roni Horn we were blown away by the heroic, gentle and horizontal presence of this gift. There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company, it didn’t need anything. Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly. A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination. This piece is nothing more than a thin layer of gold. It is everything a good poem by Wallace Stevens is; precise, with no extra baggage, nothing extra. A poem that feels secure and dares to unravel itself, to become naked, to be enjoyed in a tactile manner, but beyond that, in an intellectual way too. Ross and I were lifted. That gesture was all we needed to rest, to think about the possibility of change. This showed the innate ability of an artist proposing to make this place a better place. How truly revolutionary.
This work was needed. This was an undiscovered ocean for us. It was impossible, yet it was real, we saw this landscape. Like no other landscape. We felt it. We traveled together to countless sunsets. But where did this object come from? Who produced this piece that risked itself by being so fragile, just laying on the floor, no base, no plexiglass box on top of it. How come we didn’t know about her work before, how come we missed so much? Roni’s work has never been the darling of the establishment. Of course not. Some people dismiss Roni’s work as pure formalism, as if such purity were possible after years of knowing that the act of looking at an object, any object, is transfigured by gender, race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation. We cannot blame them for the emptiness in which they live, for they cannot see the almost perfect emotions and solutions her objects and writings give us. A place to dream, to regain energy, to dare. Ross and I always talked about this work, how much it affected us. After that any sunset became “The Gold Field.” Roni had named something that had always been there. Now we saw it through her eyes, her imagination.
Félix González-Torres, “1990: L.A., “The Gold Field” first appeared in the catalogue Roni Horn. Earths Grow Thick (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1996). The text is reprinted with the kind permission of Roni Horn, the Wexner Centre for the Arts, and The Félix González-Torres Foundation.