In the details.
My dad asks me every year on my birthday, "Do you feel different?" Or some similar variation. And I have to say that I never do. It's not as if I've aged a year overnight. Aging was happening every minute of every day. I never noticed it. Blowing out candles or opening wrapped gifts doesn't make me feel older. In fact, I never feel particularly excited about birthdays. I don't dread them either. They just seem like every other day.
I turned 30 on Sunday. Again, I wasn't too terribly excited or depressed. Actually, I was somewhat relieved to have finally passed through the ridiculous second decade of my life. I feel relieved to have that nice round number to fall back onto.
This morning, Bruce Springsteen was performing on the Today Show. At one point, he was playing the guitar and a harmonica at the same time. The harmonica was attached to him around his neck by metal rods that made me think of some sort of human-machine hybrid from Futurama. It looked rather silly, but I was also amazed by his dexterity and talent. I've never been a big fan. He doesn't play the sort of music that I really love. But playing the guitar and the harmonica at the same time seems like a feat to me.
One thing that I notice about myself now that I have to attribute to my latest years is an attention to details, a propensity for amazement. I feel in many ways like a very young child in the way that my mind turns continuously to the wonder of the world. During my teens and twenties, I was severely angst-ridden, and I took everything for granted. I had in my mind an idea of how the world worked - cruel, mechanical, ungenerous, predictably stacked against me - and that idea prevented me from actually looking at the world. No wonder I was constantly bumping into things.
In the past year or so, I've found myself on more than one occasion standing in front of a painting at the NOMA with my nose just inches away from centuries old canvas, enthralled by the idea of brushstrokes. In years past, I may have nodded my head and said, "Nice painting." But now I feel compelled to see into the painting. To see the hand that created it by seeing each unique feathering of oil paints. I see, for example, the young woman who sat patiently to have her portrait painted. But then I gasp in awe to realize that she is only a finite number of artistic techniques, geometric shapes. She is just a painting, in short. And I'm agog by the fact that a human being can use a brush, paint, and a series of wrist movements to capture the idea of a young woman.
Poetry is also new to me. I read poems in high school and college, of course. But their impact was limited to their immediately discernible content. Obviously a poem about love or passion was readable. A poem about a landscape waszzzzzz. And I do still love romantic poems, but I find myself more and more fascinated by the words themselves. A word without context has no value. But a word that has been meditated upon by a poet is imbued with pricelessness.
Details are what affect me now. Before I could look at a person and see a person. But now I look at a person and I see millions of possibilities that I can never know. I see the biological brushstrokes that created this artistic rendering of humanity. I know there are brushstrokes buried beneath brustrokes that I will never see, even with the most powerful x-ray. I imagine the words that stumble into one another in other minds, creating thoughtpoems that I will never be privy to.
The mystery is in the details because the details are too small and too many to know.
I turned 30 on Sunday. Again, I wasn't too terribly excited or depressed. Actually, I was somewhat relieved to have finally passed through the ridiculous second decade of my life. I feel relieved to have that nice round number to fall back onto.
This morning, Bruce Springsteen was performing on the Today Show. At one point, he was playing the guitar and a harmonica at the same time. The harmonica was attached to him around his neck by metal rods that made me think of some sort of human-machine hybrid from Futurama. It looked rather silly, but I was also amazed by his dexterity and talent. I've never been a big fan. He doesn't play the sort of music that I really love. But playing the guitar and the harmonica at the same time seems like a feat to me.
One thing that I notice about myself now that I have to attribute to my latest years is an attention to details, a propensity for amazement. I feel in many ways like a very young child in the way that my mind turns continuously to the wonder of the world. During my teens and twenties, I was severely angst-ridden, and I took everything for granted. I had in my mind an idea of how the world worked - cruel, mechanical, ungenerous, predictably stacked against me - and that idea prevented me from actually looking at the world. No wonder I was constantly bumping into things.
In the past year or so, I've found myself on more than one occasion standing in front of a painting at the NOMA with my nose just inches away from centuries old canvas, enthralled by the idea of brushstrokes. In years past, I may have nodded my head and said, "Nice painting." But now I feel compelled to see into the painting. To see the hand that created it by seeing each unique feathering of oil paints. I see, for example, the young woman who sat patiently to have her portrait painted. But then I gasp in awe to realize that she is only a finite number of artistic techniques, geometric shapes. She is just a painting, in short. And I'm agog by the fact that a human being can use a brush, paint, and a series of wrist movements to capture the idea of a young woman.
Poetry is also new to me. I read poems in high school and college, of course. But their impact was limited to their immediately discernible content. Obviously a poem about love or passion was readable. A poem about a landscape waszzzzzz. And I do still love romantic poems, but I find myself more and more fascinated by the words themselves. A word without context has no value. But a word that has been meditated upon by a poet is imbued with pricelessness.
Details are what affect me now. Before I could look at a person and see a person. But now I look at a person and I see millions of possibilities that I can never know. I see the biological brushstrokes that created this artistic rendering of humanity. I know there are brushstrokes buried beneath brustrokes that I will never see, even with the most powerful x-ray. I imagine the words that stumble into one another in other minds, creating thoughtpoems that I will never be privy to.
The mystery is in the details because the details are too small and too many to know.
posted by Autumn at 10:20 AM
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