Pilgrimage for a feeling

The experience two weeks ago (described in my last post) is still on my mind, but not in the same way. At first I was just desperate to relive it, to not forget it, and I’m glad that that feeling was there to inspire me to write my last post. I’m quite happy with how my last post came out, but that worry or concern is over now. In part because I went back again last sunday (I’ve now been five times in total, and plan to regularly visit as long as I live nearby) and had an experience that was very similar in some regards, and so I actually can hypothetically relive the feeling or something like it again. In part also though, because time has simply passed. And as well because I was able to record what happened, and how I felt about it at the time, so I am not concerned with that initial moment being lost.

This will be a sort of follow up post, which I said I might make. I’ve tried going about this in quite a few different ways, but failed at every attempt. I tried explaining/ elaborating on certain things I said, and then after deleting everything I wrote a few times because it just didn’t work I tried writing about why I couldn’t or shouldn’t be explaining things, but that was a mess too. This made me think that maybe I shouldn’t even do a follow up post, maybe what I’ve already written regarding that experience is enough, but then why do I have this feeling that I should write a follow up? In thinking about the answer to that question, I realised what I should write about.

The answer to that question, is that this event has changed my perspective on things. I’m not saying I’ve had a drastic change in my worldview, but it’s an important event that will almost certainly affect my life going forward even if only in a few very small and insignificant seeming ways. I’m going to be going back there frequently as I’ve said, that’s already a change to what has been my normal routine for years. I haven’t spent an entire day inside for probably over a month now, because first I was going to the small park nearby and now I’m back to work and visiting this larger park on my days off. The real significant change however, is that I’ve decided that the pursuit of aesthetic experiences like that one is a valuable endeavour in and of itself.

Those few hours were the best I’ve felt, the happiest I’ve felt, in a really long time. Certainly since my first psychedelic experience, shortly before starting this blog so just over a year ago, but if we don’t count that then maybe since I was 15. None of my more recent “experiments” with psychedelic drugs have had such an effect that’s for sure. No, I was happy because everything came together so well, it all made sense. Not rational or logical sense, but aesthetic sense. Why would that music, and that weather, and that part of that park in that city, and those people, create the feeling they did? Maybe you could explain it scientifically, perhaps there is a reason that you could potentially uncover for why people find beauty in the places they do, and why it can be quite different for different people. On the other hand maybe that question shouldn’t be asked, lest we unintentionally lose something that makes these experiences so special.

Of course there’s objective beauty too, there are things that are almost universally considered beautiful and probably for some evolutionary reasons, but I’m talking about the second kind of beauty. Maybe beauty isn’t even the right word, but either my vocabulary or the English language is lacking. The second kind of beauty that really is subjective, where one is entranced by a certain sight and another person next to him is entirely unmoved. Sure that could hypothetically be explained as well, as in one day we might have the technology, and understanding of memory and psychology, necessary to understand and even predict what aesthetic elements will have what affects on what people. However we don’t have that right now, and I’m glad for that again because I fear that excessive scrutiny (ironic I know, as “excessive scrutiny” could easily be an alternative title for this blog) can potentially dampen the effects of experiences of this sort.

A long time ago, when I was quite young, I had a friend who lived in a very big house in a really nice part of the city. It wasn’t actually very far from where I lived, a fairly short walk away from the place behind the town hall I’ve mentioned before (there are several because lots of parts of the city used to be separate towns before being incorporated into the city), but still much nicer. Anyway, on the way walking there once me and my mum took a slightly different route than normal, because as I said it was a nice area with lots of greenery and nice trees and buildings. Somewhere along the way we walked past this one enclosed crossroads area that I felt kind of similarly about as I do about this area of the park I’ve been visiting a lot recently.

I don’t know why, and I was about seven or eight at the time so I was even less equipped to explain my feelings than I was last week talking about the more recent experience of this sort. All I really knew what to say was that I liked it there, and something about it made me feel nice. I insisted we return, I made my mum take me back there going home just so I could stand there for a while. I made sure we went back there a couple more times in the following weeks, but gradually the feeling was lost and then it just became like any other normal street. I tried to figure out what it was that made it so nice, but I really couldn’t, I was just a small boy. I’d completely forgotten about this until recent events jogged my memory though, it’s been many years since I’ve even thought about this place.

It’s possible that in time my appreciation for this little part of the park I’ve found will also fade, as it did for that little spot by the crossroads. It’s a much larger area, and in this case the feeling is more complex as there’s also the music and everything else I talked about, but I believe eventually it will lose what it has. As I’ve said I’ve been there several times since, and testing things out for example time of day (I’ve been there after dark, earlier in the morning, etc) and day of the week, or weather, what music I listen to, what route I take or where I go to sit, etc. So you can view this place like a mineral deposit, and all these factors as the means of extraction, but ultimately the feeling I’m trying to “mine” will be exhausted.

So that implies that novelty plays a role in this, and I already talked about that a bit. I referred to my last post as an anniversary celebration of sorts because it has been a year since I started this blog and the first serious post I made was very similar to the one I’m reflecting on here in that they both describe a walk I took. Well I said in that old post from a year ago that seeing all these places in the city that I had seen before was a very negative experience. Even places that had nice or pleasant memories attached, just made me feel ill when I saw them. And that this very positive experience I got from seeing an area that despite being very near to where I live I couldn’t recall, was almost like an inversion of that first experience.

The thing is, at the very same time I would say that another part of what made the experience described in my last post what it was, was a feeling of familiarity. I can remember it still very clearly, that even though I didn’t remember ever seeing that place before, it felt very familiar. In the post I talk (on multiple occasions I believe, although I did not end up including everything I wrote initially in the final draft) about how I was reminded or brought to thinking about my childhood and my grandparents. I was also brought to thinking about another park, some distance away which was near to where I lived when I was first born and until I turned five years old. So it wasn’t so much that I actually was remembering this area, which would have probably not been pleasant, but that through it I was able to remember other areas and not be upset by it. In fact quite the opposite clearly.

This very familiarity I can also remember feeling back when I was visiting that little shaded crossroads area. Even though it, just like the park more recently, was somewhere I hadn’t been to before. In this older case of the crossroads I don’t really remember the effect talked about above either, where I was reminded of other places. So there’s more behind this feeling of familiarity than that. Although that certainly does play a role. The only thing I can think of, is that when I was very young all places were new to me and so finding somewhere new is what reminds me of being young. The very feeling of unfamiliarity, of seeing a place for the first time, is what I find so familiar and comforting. Of course during your youngest years most places you visit are being seen for the first time, but as you grow up and stay put that happens less and less.

So I went to this thing last Saturday, I don’t want to get into the details. I did consider writing a post all about it, but I’ve decided not to. Quick explanation for context though, I returned to a place I last visited when I was 14 years old for a big celebration I was invited to by some family friends (the same ones from south America I mentioned a few posts ago) and where the incident with the Iranian girl mentioned in my Blackpill Nights entry took place. She wasn’t there this time, not sure if I’m glad or disappointed, but for other unrelated reasons the evening was just pretty miserable for the most part. I didn’t get home until it was starting to get light out either, so I had very little sleep that night which is something I’m getting concerningly used to, and I woke up the next day feeling tired and still quite sad.

Now, usually when I’m really feeling shitty and I just need time to move forward so I care less about the current situation, my cope is to look at the art of Moebius. Jean Giraud is the artist’s real name, Moebius is a synonym that I believe he only used for his science-fiction and comic book work, but that’s where the best stuff is. I’ve talked about the artist before, I’ve used his stuff in header images (like in this very post) before, and what I like so much about his work isn’t something I can easily explain. All I can say that it has a unique beauty to it, and that the worlds and locales he creates are able to draw me in like no other similar artist can. Of course I’m able to appreciate great works of art, I’ve used le old European meme paintings when appropriate as header images as well, but this old French illustrator from the late 20th century with his simple style just appeals to me more than anyone else.

Even though his style is slightly cartoony, it feels less like a static thing I’m staring at and more like a real breathing universe being captured than any other science fiction or comic book artist’s work does. More than any other artist full stop for that matter, and it probably is in part because of his work in comics. I’m not sure if there’s even a specific technique or method that he uses to accomplish this, but when I look at his best stuff I’m there… figuratively. I’m not thinking about whatever is happening (or not happening) in my own life, I’m not even really thinking about “real life” at all. I realised something though, while looking through some of my favourite stuff of his I have saved (it’s mostly splash images taken from graphic novels he worked on and stuff like that, I don’t think he released very many standalone titled pieces), which is that I also get this feeling of familiarity I’ve just been talking about from his work.

I only really realised that it was the same feeling, because of this recent park experience. If I hadn’t had that, I would never have even thought there may be some connection between those crossroads from oh so long ago and this artist’s work. Or any other time I may have experienced this feeling, I’ve been really searching my memories trying to remember if I have but I’m not getting much. I’ll talk about the one other memory I can think of in a second though. Back to what I was talking about, you might wonder if novelty is important why haven’t I got bored of Moebius then. Well, first off I don’t look at his work very often at all. I have as much that is of good quality that I can find online saved, but it’s really only something I’ll actually just pull up to simply look at a few times a year. If you’ve ever seen his stuff posted in a /comfy/ thread on /r9k/ though, it was probably me.

More importantly all his stuff is difficult to find online. There are very few high quality prints floating around, if you go to /wg/ you’ll eventually see all of them, so most of his stuff I haven’t even seen yet, but every once in a while a new one starts circulating. If you really want to see most of his work, you’ll need to buy physical copies. That is, graphic novels he worked on or trade paperback collections, and so on. Even then a lot of his stuff still hasn’t been translated, he was French and mostly worked on French comics, but if you just care about the art maybe that doesn’t matter. There are also some albums of his stuff which collects only things like big splash pages or has certain panels with the speech bubbles removed that I’ve heard are pretty good.

I hadn’t actually bought anything of his until very recently though, in fact that same morning when I had this realisation that his work was somehow providing this same “resource” as the park had was when I finally decided to just go for it. I’ve always avoided it since finding out about him years ago, because I just don’t really buy graphic novels anymore. I used to, I still have loads from my last two years of school when I was 13 to 15 years old. Me and my friend would go to this huge shop, Forbidden Planet, every Friday after school and I bought loads of graphic novels and comic books over the course of those visits. Then when I turned 16 and we drifted apart I gradually lost interest. In fact I really should get rid of most of them, maybe they should get an entry in my Books series.

So I was sitting there, and I just decided on a whim that I should buy something he worked on. I decided on The Incal, which is a graphic novel he worked on with the film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (I’m not going to go on a whole tangent talking about this guy, look him up he’s also done some very cool stuff. I recommend the film El Topo, and the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune) and probably the most famous comic series he was involved in. I was following the very thing I said earlier in this entry, that aesthetic pursuits are an end in and of themselves. His work provides me with something that I can’t find easily, and I’m going to pursue this feeling wherever it takes me.

Now I’ve focused a lot in this post on this feeling that I’ve described as a kind of familiarity, but clearly there’s more than that. I also love Moebius’ art for other reasons, as I talked about very briefly, and during that visit to the park a couple of weeks ago that feeling was just one part of the experience. There are other things in life, places and music and artwork, that can provide those things as well. Or some combination of them, and what I mean when I use this term “aesthetic experience” is the experience of stumbling upon these things. I’ve got a whole list of potential ways one could seek out such experiences, some much grander in scope than others, but I’ve decided against simply listing them off otherwise this post will end up twice as long as it should because I’ll inevitably end up going down a long tangent trying to explain my reasoning. I do however, have a vague plan to perhaps make a few posts for some of the individual things on this list.

Now for the last thing I wanted to talk about. Which is that arguably, these experiences are not too different from certain drugs (as I did kind of talk about last time) in that these encounters do seem to lead to an altered state of consciousness. If you accept that when you drink alcohol, or take LSD, the experience can be described as an altered state of consciousness. Then you have to also accept that how I was feeling two weeks ago in that park, was an altered state of consciousness. I was experiencing and responding to the world around me in a way that I wouldn’t do during what you might call mundane circumstances. Yet the only thing that was different from say, my walk to work, were the visual and audial differences.

Whatever the case, this experience recently has really affected me and I can’t say anything certain yet, but it may entirely change the path I’m taking in life. Or, it might change nothing, both very possible outcomes. I am aware that it might seem like I’m just jabbering about nothing of any real meaning, but if you read through the last two posts and didn’t think so then I hope that you can find some similar experience out there. Thank you for reading.