"Approaching New Consciousnesses" Interview by Greg Gerke on Musil, Translation, and My Writing

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/