a picture held us captive

There is no hiding it, or escaping it, this is pretentious.

All I really want to say is that there is such a thing as depth in our lives, that if you were going to try and figure out how to make life more meaningful it would have something to do with it, and that at the moment we have no decent, grounded way of talking about it.

It is not odd at all to us that exactly the same written phrase or sound can be the most significant thing, or the shallowest. And yet if you want to find out what exactly it is about the situation that makes it deep, you’re going to struggle.

It is something like the context of a person’s attitude that allows them to stand-deeply-towards-something (to feign phenomenology). It is something like that, but the thing itself also has to have depth potential. Certainly it is moments that are deep, but also analyses, and words and conversations. Without anyone looking at it, a work of art is not deep. It requires a conspiracy.

There are some fairly safe depth contexts. Poetry is a bastion of depth. Anything that doesn’t pertain to depth isn’t regarded as poetry, but lyric, or limerick, or prose. And after listening to poetry I often end up feeling that everything is deep, that it permeates everything with significance. It is a depth attitude enabler.

Many religions seem to me to be professional depth purveyors. That’s the opiate, it seems to me – the realization of life after death, or gods grace, at a deep level.

Depth is something utterly non-scientific, something you obviously can’t explain with examples, as the context cannot be fabricated just like that. The thought that you will one day die could be a punchline, or could shatter your entire world, and the variable is depth.

What I want to say is that much of academia in the arts is a search for depth, that by drawing out what it is about something that makes it great, by creating a context where you can get to the heart of something, you might spill out for everyone that depth that you fell in love with. What I want to say is that over-analysis and technicalization completely destroys depth, turns it to stone, that the spirit of academia is a contradiction.

In my utterly pretentious opinion, ordinary non-pretentious deep experiences are the best thing our society could support. And yet the forces of shallow enslumberment grow stronger every day.