RICHARD SEYMOUR: Designer on Beauty
designer, designer on beauty, pathos, perception, ted talk
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And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
In the years since I’d given up drinking, I’d worried I’d grown dull. Yeah, sobriety was healthier—it made you more “present,” “alive,” “in touch with your feelings”—blah, blah—we all know the benefits—believe me, I don’t need to be convinced. But sometimes, when I was having one of those 4 a.m. existential crises when your eyes snap open in a panic and you start inventorying all the deficits of your life, I worried that by giving up booze, I’d forfeited the last of whatever had made me really interesting and edgy and effervescent.
— Susan Jane Gilman, Donna Has Left the Building
I had seen loneliness before that and had felt it, too. But I had never seen or felt it so raw. Thirty years later, I still remember it. Only now I am not bewildered. Now I understand that a person can be wild with loneliness. I understand that she wanted so badly to talk to me exactly because she sensed I was the only person in the house who was indifferent to her appearance. But it didn’t work because she didn’t know how. She had put on the suit of “model” many years before and now she couldn’t take it off, and it hurt and confined her.
— Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
I thought the moment had come yesterday, when you left your breakfast untouched. I broke off a piece of my own breakfast bread, which you ate from my hand. (Like reading mass together.) By evening, though, your appetite had returned. So let’s think no more about it. Let’s look to this day, and only this day. This gift of a perfect summer morning.
And once again, packed like frozen food and battery hens
Think of all the starving millions
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones
Your royal highnesses
Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat
Well of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat
Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat
But someone's listening in
Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.
— Loretta Nyhan, Digging In
I want for what I love to go on living
and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,
for that, go on flowering, flowery one,
so that you reach all that my love orders for you,
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know by this the reason for my song.
— Pablo Neruda, When I Die I Want Your Hands On My Eyes