Ego death
I've got quite a lot I want to write about this week, not least about a book deal I just signed, but I'm just off a plane from London via JFK and I can't do the more structured, longer stuff just yet.
Let me start with Begin Again, a sound installation in the Tate Modern which moved me more than any other piece of art I've witnessed. It's a room filled with strange musical instruments, all hooked up to the utility pipes and "deeper architecture" of the building. I believe there are magnets, as well, but I can't completely confirm that. Upon entering the white room which houses it, you're immediately enveloped by a pulsating series of sounds created by these impersonal forces of gravity, air, magnetism, and thermodynamics. If the building, pipes, and instruments are made by humans, the sounds aren't.
My video of it is here, though it won't embed properly because YouTube really wants to upload it as a short so a link will have to suffice. The second, embedded Instagram link is from the artist.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2yFzakJpnzs
I can't put it any way other than I found myself gasping for air between sobs the second I entered. I immediately got it without reading the placard describing the piece. I don't know that I got grief from it, but smallness. My smallness. I'm primed to think that way in the best of circumstances, but the structures of mind I operate under means my own realizations of personal insignificance don't ride at the top of my being, so to speak. We're all just moving in systems, insisting on the importance of an us even if maybe there isn't much of an us outside those systems.
Portentously, I was having a conversation with my daughter about what art moves us in the pews of St. Paul's Church (not Cathedral) the day before. I'm moved by two things: art which reminds me of how small we are and art, usually made by collectives of people, which tries to impose an order upon things which insists against our smallness. This is how I can weep in Begin Again (smallness) and in a cathedral (we aren't small and there is order to this).
This is, I realize, a very white guy encounter. The entirety of cosmic horror as a genre is the psychic slap in the face which is realizing how small you are. But I like it. I wasn't scared. I was reminded.
But also "I like it" probably isn't accurate. For that five minutes wandering around in that white room I did feel a sense of ego death, like I wasn't there in any sort of subjective sense. There was just sounds and systems moving without me but also around me.
It was a little unseemly, but I wept. I'm trying not to weep now as I type this and remember.
