 Eros and the pain of love by Marcio Faustino. Cupid is the Roman god of love. He is the counterpart of the Greek god called Eros, the god of erotic love, the painful desire of what is not possessed, of what is somewhere else, inciting the imagination about the absent desired other.
Her eyes gaze at the void while she is deeply immersed in thoughts. Her hands as trying to reach and hold the pain inside. As Siri Hustvedt points out, the somatic experience induced by thoughts are no less real than a direct somatic experiences out in the world. Or as Hannah Arendt said, every emotion is a somatic experience. The source of our imagination and thinking are our feelings. Our feelings are the interpretation and meanings given to what our body senses experience. According to Antonio Damasio, the mind is a product of our body, not a distinct apart from it. The image has a kind of movement, she is not still but moving, either in a bodily sense reacting to her feelings or in a mental sense of the dizziness, caused the mental travel. Such movement in the image is not only suggested by her body expression and composition but also by the backdrop in a leaning position. The rugged backdrop is a curtain which suggest the scene is in a private setting. We look not as spectators of the scene but as a voyeur of what was supposed to be behind curtains. On the other hand, it also symbolizes a stage background of a performed act, like in a theater, like a fancy sculpture.
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 Photo by Marcio Faustino. This photograph is from a time I used to go around with my middle format Bronica camera to photograph Dublin and around Ireland; This time in Wicklow. I took this photo in 2012 and in it we one of the medieval Irish towers we sometimes find in the country landscape. When one looks closer they find out these tower don't have a door on the ground lever but, instead, the door is on the high top of the tower with no stairs to it. They were build like this in order to be accessible only with a high ladder brought to it, which monks in the medieval age would do to take whatever is of high valuer to hide in the tower during unsafe times like in wars and invasions.
One of the main characteristic of the image is its kind of stony scenery, not only because of the rocks in the river and landscape but also because it is complementary to the stone building back in the scene. It is like the scene is saying that the building is in its right place, where it belongs to, a rough old construction in a rough landscape. A second interesting aspect of the photo is in how it is framed, with the river crossing the lower half of the image vreating a diagonal visual line in it. Such line creates two visual perceptions: The first in the invitation it offers to our eyes leading it from the foreground to the back ground of the scene where we find the main subject of the image. Of course we eventually would extend our look to the image background and back to the foreground, but such visual like helps making this vidual exploration of the image a more pleasing experience. On top of that, river streams always suggest a travel to its course. The second visual perception aspect of the river is the feeling of dynamism; the water in movement. The photo is a long exposure which gives this smooth water shape in movement - although the main reason for the long exposure was the dark orange filter on the lens which I used to create a nicer contrast and texture. Finally, there is also the the elements balance between the big stones in the foreground and the tower in the back ground. They are the two spots point which incite our eyes to travel forwards and backwards again. They both leans a little to the right side of the image, and it is the river stream line in its diagonal position pointing to the left that compensate the weigh of the two main image's objects leaning on the right side.  A couple in Bournemouth shore. The comedian Jim Carrey said in an interview that, with his comedy, he has realized what all people want: to be free from concern. Despite the fact people usually don't take him seriously I don't think he said it casually. We tend to believe through thinking we will find understanding of things, solutions to problems and knowledge but - the most likely - often we think to withdraw us from reality, without realizing it, so thinking becomes an addiction especially when we are going through stress.
We don't experience what is going on in our mind with our senses. It is as whatever we think about ceases to exist to our body senses once it's projected in our mind. We experience our thinking through meaning, ceasing to be a somatic experience. Or as Alan Watts used to say, those who think too much have nothing to think about other than their own thoughts. Hannah Arendt explained it in her book The Life of The Mind: "All thoughts arise out of experiences, but no experience yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operation of imagining and thinking. Seen from the perspective of thinking, life in its sheer thereness is meaningless; seen from the perspective of immediacy of life and the world given to the senses, thinking is, as Plato indicated, a living death". Plato's associating thinking to a living death wasn't his negative point of view though. While we are thinking we are unaware of our own corporeality, which Plato understood as achieving our pure soul quality. Plato's philosophical tradition was perpetuated through Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance by the Catholic church, influencing philosophers as Descartes who concluded "the soul can think without the body". This reflects the belief of a duality. The distinction between body and mind (soul). Against the occidental philosophical tradition is the belief that we think because we have a body; the mind being a product of our body and not distinct from it. Again, thoughts arise out of experiences - from our body senses. As our experiences turn into thoughts the bodily experienced thing disappears. As Arendt puts it, "in order to appear in my mind only, it must first be de-sensed, and the capacity to transform sensed-objects into images is called imagination". The imagination deals only with what is absent to our senses. The mind deals with nothing other than itself. Perhaps we could say that the opposite of thinking is body experience - perceive with our senses. On the other hand, as the Greek philosophers believed, only the spectator and never the actor can see and understand the spectacle of life, because the spectator is free from concerns. The spectator is not acting in the spectacle but only contemplating it. Different from the old occidental philosophical belief, something suggests this contemplation is not done through thoughts and imagination but only through somatic experiences. I personally believe the best meaning we can give to life is leisure. As Aristotle understood it, not the free time we got after a day of work, not a play and not a recreation but the deliberate act of abstaining, of hold oneself back from the ordinary activity determined by our daily wants in order to contemplate it. This contemplation is the act of leisure, "which in turns was the true goal of all others activities, just as peace, for Aristotle, was the true goal of war" - quoting Arendt again. While for the Greeks the spectator may understand the 'truth' of what the spectacle is about, but with the price of have to pay a withdrawal from participating in it, the oriental wisdom presented by Alan Watts suggests something different; that we can be both the actor and the spectator. As the Taoist story goes, imagine if you were god and knew all without surprises; how boring would it be!? So we play this theater of life for fun - just as children do their play sometimes taking it too serious and forgetting it's just a play - and as we grow older we forget who we are, we forget we are wearing a phony by taking it too serious and thinking it's what we are. The spectator is the one who can see the play and enjoy the spectacle while still playing it, only knowing now that it's all a play and people forgot about it. - Like actors playing in a scene for a movie sometimes taking it too seriously mistaking the playing character as themselves, or living the character but still knowing he is another person behind it. As I understand it – or from my point of view which can be questionable – contemplation is the way we can experience what is around us with our body senses, until the moment we gain the awareness about the spectacle we are in, without our thinking distraction that alienates us from our somatic experiences. This is why I think art is important. The thing that makes us stop and listen, see, feel through our senses. Pay attention to our somatic experience and step aside from the vicious meanings in thinking. Truth and meaning are not the same thing. Our thinking doesn't bring us the reality truth but meanings, because our verbal language, associated to words, is metaphorical and not analogous to the mental images created from our somatic experiences. "Most people have experienced the odd sensation of estrangement that comes from looking long enough at a single object", says Siri Hustvedt in her book Mysteries Of The Rectangle. She goes on: "for all of us there was a time before we knew what things were called, and then the world looked different. Cézanne's still life is a rigorous effort to return to a vision unburdened by meaning". In other words, Cézanne's attempt was to see in painting what was lost in language. When we look, listen and feel hard enough, long enough, we contemplate and find a world beyond meaning which tell us something else and which our verbal language is too limiting to comprise. |
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