active listening
There is a lot of thought swimming here, and it has several origins, but only one end: at least so far.
I need to listen, intently, to one beloved person at a time.
I spent a truly inordinate amount of time, earlier this evening, thinking about aesthetics, and more specifically, personal aesthetic: not so much how one dresses oneself or the objects around one (useful information, but not the straight heart of it) but the... image language inside each brain, and the tiny ways that it leaks out. Arists and writers are relatively rare, but we all make assemblage, discernments, seek and discard. How much do i know about this process for each person that i love, and how effortlessly do i follow their aesthetic?
Not nearly as well as i'd like, and in most cases, it's a simple lack of the correct data, or lack of volume in that data. It's a lifelong, ever-changing process; it needs to be gone over chapter and verse, and them pulled back for pattern, the same as any other analysis. For the non-artist, the shy maker, the person who has chosen or is obligated to concentrate on other things, it can be uniquely difficult to extract.
And there is.... the discomfort in it. We prefer to choose who listens to us that closely, and why, and how much, no matter how we might long for it as an idea. The process is revealing; facts do not necessarily come clean, but questions do, intimate and clumsy and repeated.
I've thought, before about building theoretical objects for each person: sometimes, someone who engenders a strong synasthetic experience for me will eventually have those experiences coalesce into a sort of shorthand image/scene/object. G is a glass-fronted viola filled with living moss, and the attempt to play it. His has stood for long enough, is clear enough that i don't have trouble articulating it, but they seem to take so long to form, and to need protecting while they do.
But still: i want to make these things. There is one that i can make, but for the rest, the ones that have to be crafted from whole cloth, that don't have embryonic experiences slowly gestating in their own time: for those, i need data. For data, i need to learn again how to listen, in a way that will be very different than before.