I want more time to look out my window. To stare at a piece of art, for hours, maybe even a full day. It would be nice if, if only for a little while, I could expend energy on not expending energy. I collect art, and yet I can never appreciate it. Because accretion continues, because there are more artists, and so there is more art. There’s a unique idea out there that we are to be discerning with our own distinctions, but even those whose lifetime is spent making it, they are making it, and that’s subject to a discourse of ownership, of buying of selling, of economy. To make art is to apply value to an activity, which will invariably be valued, subject to sharing it in any capacity. The world, nowadays, has very few secrets.
And yet we want our secrets. In a sense, we’re all trolls, toiling away to have a little slice of stored away, some object or subject no one else can touch. Because it’s ours. Or at least, we want it to be. We don’t want to share it, not because it’s beautiful, but because we spend effort, excessive effort, really, on hiding things, even in an age where we have very few secrets. It’s speciality by exclusion. So instead, we become unable to share, and due to all the energy we spend on hiding away, carefully locking our doors, we become unable to simply appreciate because we are too busy quantifying. Something in the system did this to us, and no one knows how, but we all know.
To slow down, we ourselves are now forced to speed up. We cannot linger, we cannot enjoy the sunset, because the sunset provides no quantity, staring out the window provides no material, it is without asset. Society claims to love its simple beauty, but it is highly attuned, programmed maybe, to ignore it. Perhaps because it cannot be produced, cannot be quantified, that society has chosen to ignore their ability to slow down. We appreciate and move on. We linger only when forced, by being placed in a space which we cannot escape lingering. These are called vacations.
But a vacation is always sped up. The distractions we create to enjoy ourselves are endless, but little comes of our temperament. Only here, in a space secluded are we allowed to appreciate. We yearn without knowing, and we are lost when we claim to know, because knowing is no longer enough. We must now possess knowledge, we must now possess ephemera which cannot be quantified. The nature of the vacation requests such possession. We are now in a position of quantifiable enjoyment, which lasts a few days, and is then placed in a unit of memory which we now possess. It is not the memory that is dangerous, nor is appreciating the time spent, it is rather that the construction around what these appreciations mean is based on our attempts to systematize and quantize and declare ownership over qualities, rather than quantities.
To learn to slow down is difficult in a society about possessing. Slowing down now involves not just appreciation, but similarly moving away from declaring ownership. Society now builds even the vacation based on ownership. We can own a certain amount of enjoyment for a certain quantity of money. We know quantity is an ephemeral quality built largely to allow us to oppress one another. Because society wants to own, even if there is no qualified relationship with ownership. It is hardly a surprise that owning is now the indicative rule of quality in our society. Those who own the most are supposedly those of quality, when it is known that owning indicates only quantity. What we want is the quality of experience and sharing the experience of quality. What we get is a rhetoric based on possession.
Society is being pushed further down a difficult path to reconcile. We want to own everything. We want to “get” an education. We want to “have” a certain quality of life. Our language is permeated with a concept of possession, even for those things we cannot possibly possess. And society reflects itself through a mirror of the rhetoric it promotes. It is impossible to escape if language itself creates a constant struggle with the concept of things being more valuable than experiences. Unless we promote experiences over ownership, we will never experience a living quality. Unless we are willing to change ourselves, and evolve our discourse, quality escapes us. Not because we believe we must own ephemera, but because we cannot escape its rhetoric. We are tied down by our language, by the manner in which we discuss experiences. Only when we break free of possession, can we begin to appreciate quality, whether these evolve in objects or subjects. And so, in my own path of “owning,” I have often missed the ability to appreciate, so engorged by the system so as to be weighed down by possessions.