A Renaissance hysteric takes the Internet

Excerpt from my medieval & Renaissance studies seminar notes today:

Fra Angelico
• CALM DOWN.

Fra Angelico—for context—one of the better medieval religious artists, was said to have been unable to pick up a paintbrush without shedding tears. Calm down, Fra Angelico, I wrote him through the ether. I imagine that makes your job a bit difficult, as you are a painter.

Only we were spending a class on artists and Pygmalions of assorted calibers, and after a long litany of artists and observers struck dumb with revelation, knocked flat with beauty, spun into tornados of tears, arousal, or tearful arousal, Fra Angelico’s sort of the natural capper. Pretty much everyone in the Renaissance who’s writing about art cries at least once—the just-once is a rarity.

We were talking about art as the face of God, sure, but the historical-hysterical affective response to art is bigger than divinity. Or maybe nothing’s bigger than divinity,  but the tornado of Looking At Art broadens the umbrella of divinity, makes every emotion as big as God, all kinds of profanes turned sacred. Pygmalion wasn’t thinking about the goddess when he looked at his stone, after all; he was thinking about the women. We talked about audiences wanting to press their hand to oil, to marble, sure for a minute that they’d brush flesh, walking away with astonishing insatiable hungers for figment women and beautiful stone ideal boys. But mostly they wept, they shook, they knelt and bowed their heads and gave themselves over to the indignity of loving art to the point of abjection. We have diaries over the ages of people racked with agony and ecstasy in the name of art—not only of making it but of looking at it. Everyone’s a little Pygmalion at least once: that dude started by looking. Everyone’s a little Pygmalion, no matter what the emotion guiding them.

The class discussion was, in large part: Really? You start to wonder about the truth of these accounts after you get to maybe the fifth diary of collapse. Can they all have been crying like that? Maybe, maybe not, but you have to give the tears some credulity. They track us all the way up to the Victorian age: these weepy, adoring diarists certainly can’t all have been lying.

So the discussion gets to psychological discrepancies. The historical mind, we are taught, responded differently. Not from biology, but from conditioning. Different world, different place for art in the world. The ghost in the room: the idea that knowledge, perhaps, hems us in, that we don’t cry because the magic’s gone, that Pygmalion’s under too much scrutiny to feel the flesh under his stone.

I hate that ghost. I bit my lip and found I’d skipped the really? altogether. I spend time on the internet, y’see. (Says the blogger. We know, we know.)

I spend time on the internet, where I see the words “shaking”, “sobbing”, “screaming”, and assorted other emotional sibilants thrown around on the daily. Our record, when it comes to Looking At Art, is not going to be altogether different from the revelators that came before us—the emotional vocabulary of online reaction is all powerful emotional hyperbole. Hyperbole, yes: it’s taken for granted that not every typist is, in fact, shaking, sobbing, or screaming. We all spend too much time on our laptop in public for that. It doesn’t matter if maybe some of the diarists lied. We’re still doing the same thing.

It doesn’t matter that it’s hyperbole, that your lips are closed as you type your howls, that your face is smooth at the café when you type your crisis into being. You get good news, bad news, media news, and something in you throws your soul’s hands to the sky. In your head, still as you are, you see a version of yourself that’s flung itself bodily to the floor, Pentecostal with emotion over a favorite show, a new book, a good movie. There’s something inside you that’s screaming, capable of ecstatic overwhelm even in silence. The internet’s for hysterics, and the catalogue of them makes them sincere.

Perhaps I give everyone too much credit, or too little for their control—I know I overreact, that at least once when typing “shaking” my hands have in fact shook the keyboard, that I have in my personal ridiculous overaffective manic artloving obsessive tactile thoughtless youth thrown my body to the ground more than once and probably more than five times and probably will grow out of this and probably have not done it for the last time, walked once full-body into a plate-glass wall in an agony/ecstasy fugue thinking about Battlestar Galactica, bit down hard on a fistful of knuckles and clutched hair at the last Borgias trailer because I was in a café and couldn’t make a sound out loud. But I can’t shake the sense that even those who have better control and far better physical deadpans than I do are still tapped into something cosmically earthshaking. We—the big We, not just art-lovers, not just people at their keyboards, the big fuck-the-caveats We of humanity through the ages—are capable of caring so deeply about unreal things that it racks us to the bone. It doesn’t matter that the words are exaggeration. Some piece of us is always shaking. Some piece of us will always be shaking. Someday this will be our record, and it will be true.

–
(The fact that it’s been a month, by the way, is not altogether to do with irresponsible blogging habits and more to do with the fact that my new place is—to this day, over a month after moving in—getting methodically dicked around by the wifi guys. Living a Santigold song is not all it’s cracked up to be.)

In media res:

What makes you special, Isabel? The same question, every time you start something. Why are you here? What makes you special, what sets you apart?

Oh, plenty, I think, always ready, always self-certain, until it’s time to put pen to paper.

What makes you special, Isabel? asks the internet, and the answer is, of course: nothing, yet. I am twenty and cruising for a book deal. I am the internet 99%. I am One Of You, and therefore nothing among you. Not yet.

The thing that gets me—back between the pen and the paper—isn’t a lack of belief in my own deserving so much as uncertainty as to what constitutes appropriate evidence. What sets you apart? Well, paper, let me tell you. And I tell something, and I bring in supporting characters, preformed shaper forces on my life. I tell a story about my parents, about my friends, about the last men to cross my path, and it’s not until I’ve ended the last sentence with a period and a flourish do I figure out that I’ve avoided the question. But what about you? Well, what about me? I’m right here. The thing that sets me apart, implicitly: my ability to tell the story. That it happens to me, but then moreso that it becomes a story in my telling of it, that through my narrative command it (no matter what it is, whose it is) becomes Mine. I’m the most important character even when I’m not even there, the pen-and-ink evidence of it says, don’t you see?

I’ve got a writer’s hubris and now I have a blog. I’m going to review things on that blog. Book reviews, mostly. I am not even going to begin to pretend that this is a book blog in any organized kind of way, though. I know better already. All right: bigger. I’m going to talk about TV because I am learning to love TV; I am going to talk about movies if they grab me by the throat. Songs, maybe. Theater, as much as possible. Media of all kinds, because media is the highest form of catharsis when it’s good. Which is very, very good. And when it is bad, it is horrid.

And my life will sneak in, naturally—can’t resist talking about narrative, can’t resist talking about that narrative.

I will not talk about any media that does not send me into a frenzy, whether ecstatic or furious. Consider that a promise and a warning.

In the long run, it comes down to a sort of odd practicality: I am here—this website is here—because all other social media expects brevity, and I am not brief. I am excessive. This, then, is going to be excess and nothing but excess, given shape by language, catalyzed by outside sources and tempered with passion. This is the one constant I can deliver you—that, and me as the deliverer.

My name is Isabel. I run a blog named after the fact that every story worth telling has got a Circe, if you look hard enough. I live in a wonderful city (NYC) and am currently moonlighting in another wonderful city (Florence). When it comes down to brass tacks, there’s nothing you can pinpoint that sets me apart from my genre (recursive sorceress isle that it is) or my generation (I am the target audience for Girls and it annoys me all the time that Lena Dunham functionally has my hair). The fact that I have a blog is more or less a testament to this. But it’s my testament, and like any testament, no matter how apocryphal, it strives toward the sacred on a good day.