I think I have information-poisoning.
—John Pavlovitz
That line comes from a January 2018 post called “I Don’t Want to Know How Bad It Is Anymore.”* A few lines later Pavlovitz adds: “I know that the only way through this historic, catastrophic sh[it] show [of the era of Trump], is facing and confronting reality; as ugly and disheartening as it is and trying to change that reality, alongside people who also care deeply because they too understand how sideways it all is.”
As I read his complaint about “information-poisoning” in the context of those later lines, it strikes me that Pavlovitz is assuming “reality” indeed to be what presents itself to us as reality so incessantly in all the information we so constantly keep ourselves busy processing. However, what if reality is not at all what all our information processing tells us it is. What if, instead, reality is what all that information diverts us from—as is so powerfully depicted in the 2018 Amsterdam Light Festival installation above? What if all our incessant information processing diverts us from the actual truth? What if we can find our way back from all our diversions and reenter the space where truth can occur, only if we for once withdraw from the world-less pseudo-world that all our “information” advertises to us, diverting us from the silence wherein alone what truly is can be encountered?
What if the light that so absorbs the three figures in the Amsterdam installation above, alienating them from themselves and isolating them from one another and from the very city in which they sit—the light of their information processing devices—is anything but truly illuminating? What if everything information processing gives us is not reality at all, but sheer diversion from the real? Furthermore, what if all that has nothing whatever to do with art, in the fully proper sense of that term? What if it only has to do with what passes itself off for art when it really is not art at all, but some sort of improper substitute for art proper?
Our word advertise comes from Latin ad-, “to or toward,” plus vertere, “to turn.” To advertise is literally to turn the attention of the recipients of the advertisement away from what is actually right there in front of them, and toward something else, something in one way or another offered for sale. It is to break the creative silence from which all things truly come, and to fill it with sheer noise, for the sake of profit.
* * *
HOW TO BE A POET
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
—Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems (Counterpoint, 2012)
* * *
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the mouth of the semi-autobiographical character Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce distinguishes between “proper” art, on the one hand, and “improper” art, on the other, distinguishing between them in terms of the affect each elicits in the beholder.
“The feelings excited by improper art,” Stephen says at one point, are such things as self-centered desire or loathing. Such desire urges us to try to possess what it shows us, and such loathing urges us to flee from it in disgust. In contrast, in beholding “proper” art—which is to say art proper, not some advertisement pretending to be art—says Stephen, “[t]he mind is arrested and raised above such [selfish] desire and loathing.”
* * *
All art done for the sake of advertising is improper art. It diverts from silence, and engenders possessive, not ideal, desire. Proper art has nothing to do with such diversion and diversification.
*https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/01/06/dont-want-know-bad-anymore/