hurtling back and forth

someone should wash the windows in this studio....but this is kind of beautiful

Having one of those moments, weeks rather.

It's not that things are not working, they are working splendidly. Perhaps it is that there are just so many things.  Working. Splendidly.  I'm re-reading a small text that sits in my study and begs me to pick it up and engage with it over and over again.  On Beauty and Being Just  by Elaine Scarry is a debate - a mix of personal and philosophical insight that is at once engagingly poetic and perplexing.

This is a text that one picks up and dwells on again and again.  I don't really want to review or reflect on it here -  at this moment it's serving as a jumping off point for this current state of mind.

Scarry writes, "...beautiful things have a forward momentum, the way they incite the desire to bring new things into the world: infants, drawings, dances, laws, philosophic dialogues, theological tracts.  But we soon find ourselves also turning backward, for the beautiful faces and songs that lift us forward onto new ground keep calling out to us as well, inciting us to rediscover and recover them in whatever new thing gets made....hurtling us forward and back, requiring us to break new ground, but obliging us also to bridge back not only to the ground we just left but to still earlier, even ancient ground...."

Hurtling originates in the 13c from hurtlen, or hurten - to strike.  Think of moving or being caused to move at a massive speed, wildly, uncontrolled.  My studio and my study are not large - but they are packed with images, books, materials and projects that make me feel that I am ping-ponging back and forth with the beauty of them, the necessity (self-inflicted) of addressing each of them, and the new directions they propel me towards.

This is not a bad thing.  Just a tad overwhelming.