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Moments in love art of noise11/23/2023 Over a month ago, I received some not-great news about my once-healthy knee, and since then, my early morning runs have turned into early morning bicycle rides. But it is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. I wonder if the question should be more like we live most of our lives invisibly, and there is a kind of goodness here, in this invisible work of a life - how can we acknowledge, celebrate, and live in this invisibility, rather than attempt to make every moment more brightly visible ? I don’t know. I think our cultural tendency in the wake of such a point might be to say ah, how can we make the invisible more visible ? And though there is truth to such a question, and goodwill at the heart of it, I wonder if it’s the right kind of question. And so, when Nye writes that this project will never be finished, she is also hinting at the ongoing invisibility that makes up a life, even in this time of hyper-transparency. And what of the time before then? That time of ordinary labor is often a time of invisibility. In finishing, the work becomes visible, seen, published. It is finishing that signals to a wider public the need for celebration. But it is finishing that is what is most visible in the aspect of any work. It is a moment when something is acknowledged, and often rightly, since the fact of finishing can be a moment of triumph, even beauty. It might instead be:įinishing, too, is a kind of visibility - isn’t it? It signals the end of something, and it often triggers a celebration. It might not be the visibility, the curated self moving through the curated world. Which might not be the party, the people. Perhaps that truth about our culture’s appetite for so much visibility is what makes the no that lands in the second line of today’s poem so jarring, especially for a poet who is as generous as Nye, a poet who wrote that happiness “flows out of you / into everything you touch.” But the no of the poem’s second line - though it might seem at first to be ungenerous - is actually a no of generosity, isn’t it? It is a generosity toward the self, a generosity that extends that same self the kindness to disappear into the world, into the soul, into whatever the body or mind or heart might need. This is the same world where, in “a culture with a seemingly insatiable appetite for self-promotion and exposure,” it is also true that “the human need to be seen has its limits.” I find myself thinking about such things often lately, in a world where, as Busch writes, “a new vocabulary has emerged for…visibility.” Optics. The nature of the subject makes it difficult to be comprehensive, but my hope is to compile a field guide to invisibility, one to reacquaint us with the possibilities of the unseen world, to reimagine and reengineer our place in it with greater engagement and creative participation.Īnd so, I find myself thinking about invisibility and disappearance today. It is not loneliness, solitude, secrecy, or silence. When Busch brings up this poem in her book, she writes: Such ideas, of flammability and littleness and smallness, feel so at the heart of Nye’s work, and they feel at the heart of today’s poem as well, a poem that perhaps urges the reader to make themselves as small as possible, to “become a cabbage” (an idea I find myself cherishing). Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,Īn absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
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