Emil P. Asdurian: Read

It is there any persuasion in love? At first glance, it looks as if there shouldn’t be! If love, the pure one, if there is any pure such a thing, due to erroneous strike of Eros, like a thunder wounds one or both victims with a certain madness, and there is madness in that complete or partial lack of reason, with such a force so that none, even after long time gone, is ever healed by such a fatal occurrence. Someone can say there is the truthfulness of it as it is its beauty. Scientists, and especially biologists, including those who study the human species, will profoundly disagree, and will make sure to bring facts to your face so much so that you slowly will hate it, those vague colorless explanations that they bring, and become angry with oneself asking why in the name of God, you fell for it, when it was so obvious from the beginning: first your vulnerable mental state, commanded certainly by a hormonal imbalance or bumps from the miserable lonely life, certainly not always true, then scents or signs left behind from the other involved party, such a beautiful peacock tail, with monstrous eyes that freeze you like innocent prey, or the marvelous chirping sound of a Siren’s song to the sculpture from air that is built in front of your eyes, not by a magician or an artist, but by a living creature like you, sometimes as in one of the Balzac’s tale in a desert with a leopard, to one with more similarities that madly interchange until they cannot feel those separate parts or specialized senses, but are as one. A story with a story, that by having a fable or a theatrical event, a rhetoric out or within, must have an ending, and like any other disease with a certain course will end with a remedy of autosuggestion or psychotherapy of very specialized shrinks that make their living like oracles or priests by doing exactly that, destroying with too many explanations what was previously a nightmarishly-sweet-dream. There was a shake about it from the “new discoveries” of the twentieth century: Expressionism. Something between symbolism and Impressionism that the ancient Greeks couldn’t complete being spread thin among war and philosophy, among building themselves and their society, from whom, as from love we haven’t yet escaped. For Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his manifesto-letter was a “language condition” and the impossibility to totally express what he, poor ancient educated lad, loved most, life itself. Which is, as he was unfolding a mental state without the most beautiful sentiment of all, a lack of colors to impress the passion that was boiling his pure spirit, to a selected few, as unbroken lines in Schiele’s painting when the hidden, concealed emotions are those that make the kill. “The stroke is dynamic, grows fainter, following the structural ductility of a fast thrown-in movement. Jagged, with hard angles he loves the bone structure. Schiele’s strokes are like calligraphy, which captures the body’s expression in just a few lines.”5 Sending to us what only a canvas with small brushes can send to the eyes, to just some vage dynamic lines that express an ecstatic twitch or a complete surrender there after. The universal timeless concern and conflict of the “modern representation into the real” and vice versa in art. I believe, as it was foretold in ancient inscriptions as they went from one type of governmental tyranny, to build public edifices to democracies to gain back the sold liberties and citizen rights, during human history the mind’s ideas progressed much faster than the epoch’s used language, which in another time was the inverse, like a double pendulum pushed and kept both going on with minimal, but yet with little progress. And then, what? In this equalizing equation, nothing as nothing was in loss, and the remedy is simply to understand, feel, touch, divide, perceive separately one by one as well as together, with no selection or instead a cruelly meticulous one where everything regardless of whom it belongs to nor where it comes from, but no matter, based on such an infinite vast experience, you sip a little of the thirst that it brings, inebriating what veils your senses to see what you were afraid to feel a while ago. Read! Everything and everyone. Read to love and love to read!

Further readings:

1. The Look of Things, Poetry and Vision around 1900, by Carsten Strathausen, University of North Carolina Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8078-8126-0

2. The Lord Chandos Letter and other Writings, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New York Review Books, 2005, ISBN 1-59017-120-9

3. A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, Edited by Neil H. Donahue, Comden House, 2005, ISBN: 1–57113–175–2

4. The Ancients and the Postmodernists, Fredric Jameson, Verse, London New York, 2015, ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-593-8

5. Schiele, by Parkstone Press International, New York, USA, 2014, ISBN: 978-1-78160-867-8

EA completed 1/21/23 all the rights and copy rights are preserved.