I am sometimes overwhelmed by my aesthetic desires. An insatiable craving for ideas, stories, art to fill and fill the formless urn.
At dusk we drive along a classical American highway. The sunsets triggers the most brilliant contrast, an exaggeratedly cloudy sky recedes as the waning glow becomes more pronounced. Some dark underground explosions occur at this time of day, everyday, the sun always making and unmaking itself like peak-a-boo. Speeding through endless roads, our car competes with the drawn-out darkness.
This spectacular scene is so fragile. But the most fulfilling aesthetic experiences always are; held in place by a million moving parts; unsustainably brilliant. Its end already being mourned as it takes place.
It's like going to a concert, simultaneously lost in the communal dancing, while also anticipating the yearning you'll feel tomorrow, in a year, looking back at that very moment. Or trying to remember each joke a comedian tells but knowing none will stick. Or already nostalgic while being in a high point in your life. You're still in it, but afraid of the end.
***
On Malcolm Gladwell's "Revisionist History," he discusses the immense economic and man-power expenses required to create the 9/11 memorial in downtown New York City. He interviews an architect about her year-long project to schematizing the names of the deceased on the memorial. In order for it to be finished for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, making the memorial required many extra expenses and accommodations. It was an excessively robust task, speaking to what we will do to memorialize. It reminds me of the glorious pyramids in Ancient Egypt for deceased kings, or the beautifully intricate coffins buried in the ground. Our aesthetic greed is inextricable from our memory habits. We replace our loved ones with aesthetic beauty; aesthetics becomes the next most-valuable entity after human life. The sentiments once offered from the now-deceased are only appropriately approximated in those art objects.
But the 9/11 memorial points as well to the ephemerality of aesthetics. The memorial requires continual expenses for its intricately-planned upkeep (a cooling a ventilation system so the structure's possibility for extreme temperatures does not harm, armed guards keeping journalists from recording at the site of the structure). Extreme attention and care so that it might keep our sentiments and connections alive in the afterlife.
References:
Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History, "A Memorial for the Living," https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/a-memorial-for-the-living/.