After listening carefully to those notes out of season, I could not supress the following line of questioning, a questioning which, as it were, arose spontaneously at that moment when those unseasonable notes first graced my ears: Does the curtain come down too quickly in this untimely meditation? Does it fail to stay in step and keep the time properly…or even fail to keep a proper sense of time? What insight is Kundera’s observation striving after, even though such striving is prematurely stopped short? Should art be looked for –and, indeed, is it ever found –in historical conciousness? Or should we expect to find the primal possibilities of something like what is later called historical consciousness only in art?
Two fundamental poles govern Kundera’s observation, and obtaining between them is some sort of implied oppostion. These poles are the cerebrality of “historical conciousness” and the “spontaneity” of “sensation”. The former is expected to be delayed, an after-thought or post-script, something gained only after the latter, namely, the immediacy of sensation, has run its course. In this way, i.e. through the expectation of delay, and immediacy, a sense of time underlies the very boundaries of that which is thought to be “historical conciousness”. This curiosity becomes genuinely perplexing when we consider too that this immedacy of sensation, one which would yield, as Kundera puts it, “aesthetic pleasure” or the lack thereof, has a history of its own:
“Almost as soon as specialized thinking about art and the artist began, such reflections were referred to as ‘aesthetic’. Aesthetics treated the artwork as an object, indeed as an object of aesthesis, of sensory apprehension in the broadest sense. These days, such an apprehension is called ‘experience’. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to inform us about its essential nature. Experience is the standard-giving source not only for the appreciation and enjoyment of art but also for its creation…But perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This dying proceeds so slowly that it takes several centuries.” (Appendix to Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art)
In the spirit of Kundera’s observation, I now observe: perhaps it is true that the spontaneity of sensation has nothing to do with “the intense moment, isolated with no before and after”, but rather does it have to do with “a lifetime burning within every moment” and “not the lifetime of one man only, but of old stones that cannot be deciphered”