Greg Gerke, Essayist and Fiction Writer, interviewed me for
the Los Angeles Review of Books. He asked wonderfully thought-provoking
questions that helped me understand my work with Robert Musil and how it all
connects to my writing and art practice.
GREG GERKE: In a recently published essay in The
Georgia Review, “Psyche’s Stolen Pleasure: Women Who Like to Look,
Objectification and Animism of the Inanimate,” you write about the spiritual
side of looking and living, by examining animism. You start by citing your own
experience, looking at a fence outside a Berlin café: “The sun was shining on
the cast iron ornamentation and the metal seemed infused with meaning; it was
alive.” Then you discuss animism, by way of Kenneth Clark and a Yeats poem,
before tying that in to the dangers and pleasures of objectification: “[O]ur
desire for a particularly intriguing object or a particularly lovely person
need not (it usually does not) turn violently predatory or inconsiderate of its
object’s pleasure or sanctity.” Then you celebrate the senses, before writing:
“Material, come alive, through our own vision of it, makes us feel alive too;
things and parts of people seen as beautiful are portals to a world where
everything is alive and filled with meaning.” This Bachelardian outlook is so
refreshing against the world of commodification we now live in, where people
get pleasure out of the data on their screens as they walk down the street, but
bottle it and only share it electronically to others in the vast metadata web,
not to those persons they are physically around. Does the world, as it is now
in 2020, repel or impel (or both), charging you to keep shy in your ways of
seeing, or to proclaim them more loudly?
GENESE GRILL: This essay, part of a collection exploring the
tension between Spirit and Matter, was written in response to the deleterious
contemporary moralistic trend toward devaluing the material — in this case,
physical beauty and sexual pleasure. The material world is denigrated today in
favor of the so-called spiritual, which may be exemplified by the virtual, on
the one hand, or by a pious emphasis on allegedly more important internal
beauty, on the other. In all cases, there is a denial of the meaningful
connection between externalities and internalities. Like all of the essays,
this one was searching out correspondences between surface and depth, beauty
and truth, nature and culture, aesthetics and ethics.
READ THE REST HERE: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/approaching-new-consciousnesses-a-conversation-with-genese-grill/
Greg's moving and insightful essay collection, See What I See, celebrating the aliveness we can cultivate through literature and film, and his fresh, uniquely-seen, and vivid short story collection, Especially the Bad Things, can be acquired here: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/author/thisissplice-greggerke/
