aesthetics

¿No lo he dicho ya? – escribía Rilke en “Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge” – Estoy aprendiendo a ver. Sí, este es el comienzo. Todavía no se me da demasiado bien. Pero me esforzaré al máximo. Por ejemplo, nunca me había preguntado cuántas caras existen. Hay una cantidad enorme de personas, pero hay muchas más caras porque cada persona tiene varias.

[FACES] by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time. For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face. Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”

suburbia

Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the we.

The environment suddenly shifts in an unforeseen and unwelcome manner.

 

Move to strangeness

 

Human beings need security, order, love, and connection

 

Memories about the past guide this thinking about the future

 

Reactions to a volcano-like event that shook the foundations of the social world.

 

Holding an attitude of benign neglect or cynical indifference

 

A blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one can not react to it effectively

 

An important part of the self has disappeared… “We” no longer exist as a connected pair or a linked cells in a larger communal body 

 

Truth goes underground

 

One cannot simply leave behind

 

Buried in the unconscious, the event is experienced irrationally, in the nightmares

 

Denials that insist on looking to the future and forgetting the past

 

Fragmented and polarized social order

 

Bridging the gap between event and representation

 

A spiral of signification

Source:  ALEXANDER_Cultural-Trauma