The Blackberry Walk

Up again, drinking coffee in France, watching French morning television, hoping to find some more cel anime. Alas, none found yet. Before my girlfriend awakes, I thought I'd share a morning thought for the day. Let me pose this phenomenon found with the television. When you're only half paying attention, you tend to stare at the TV more when the ads are playing than when the program is playing. Why is this? The dichotomy I'd like to present today is between the eye-catching and the beautiful - between what does grab our attention, and what deserves our attention. The advert, in its flashiness, loud colours, and bright sounds, draws your attention, it makes you look up. By contrast, the most beautiful piece of gentle subtle animation won't make you look up or draw your attention in the same way - in fact, when watching, you might even feel a bit bored. Boredom isn't a sign of poor quality. Boredom is a sign of under-stimulation. What many want out of art a kind of hypnosis, fixation upon the work, and a sense of detachment from reality. Flashy colours, high-FPS CG, and those neo-Stravinsky-Wagner sound tracks so common and tiresome in modern films, yank your attention in the attempt to bring you into their world by force. These run of the mill films focus on engagement over beauty. Beauty is more subtle, more complex, and requires greater skill to produce. It is more valuable and meaningful. The difference between the eye-catching and the beautiful is of cheap whisky against good beer: you've distilled one component of beauty out, the inebriating component, at the expense of all the flavour and body of the beer. This dichotomy has use beyond art. Sexiness is eye-catching, and when distilled out of love is cheap liquor to the beer of a loving relationship. The beauty of a lady is a kind of fullness - sexiness is but one component of a greater whole. But just because she may be eye-catching on the street, does not reflect upon her virtue as a person or her potential as a wife. In fact, historically only certain unsavoury occupations sought attention based on this lower eye-catching attention. For another example, there's the idea of the 'vocal minority', when a small group are mistaken for the majority by the noise they make. Eye-catching here might not be the best metaphor - ear-catching perhaps - but those who make the most noise aren't necessarily the one's with the most to say. Such examples will be abundant to most. The idea of the vocal minority is easy to visualise since we have a conception of loudness, and examples of people speaking louder over others to have their thoughts heard. But with sight we don't have the same idea of loudness, of a 'loud' image trying to grab our attention at the expense of those images with more value. Despite living in a time saturated in loud images, we have no word in common parlance to identify, criticise, and hopefully ignore the garish, the distracting, and the hypnotising. Adverts are a kind of poison to the mind - that so many defend them, and decry the use of adblockers, continues to amaze me. Just as a dangerous vice like pornography reconfigures the mind, so too do the loudness of adverts, distracting us, ruining our capacity to be absorbed by actual beauty. I remember a teacher of mine in secondary school saying that he as a child was engrossed, mesmerised, by the beauty of the fireworks, but his son had little interest. He reckoned it was the mobile phones, and the phantasmagoric stimuli on its screen - and I think there's truth in that - but even off the screen, there are adverts on every bus-stop, on walls, sometimes digitised and animated, distracting your attention with bright poppy colours, with a kind of 'sex-appeal', away from the true beauty of the city. Edward Bernays is the father of modern advertising and HR - it is no coincidence he is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. That sex-appeal, the quintessential eye-catch, is so prevalent in adverts is because knowledge of the base drives of man are being weaponised against us. These incitements to sin, adverts, are so deeply un-Christian, I'm shocked no mass movement, outside of internet libertarian types, has started! The temptations of the eye have never been greater, never been more abundant, and never been more encouraged: resisting is harder than it has ever been. Like all sin, the best medicines are avoidance and fasting. Detoxification from loud images can be simple, like picking up a physical book instead watching a documentary to learn about a topic - it is to reduce the eye-catching lights show in favour of subtler beauty, beauty not appreciated otherwise. Look at the baby grapplinng with their iPhone: they cry when it's taken away! Our addiction to screens is our generations undoing, barring us from contact with the beautiful. Future generations will see our addiction to this mind-altering drug as as absurd as giving heroin to children, as they did 130 years ago. We ruin ourselves chasing what is eye-catching, in all cases, whether it be screens, art, or women. The eye-catching appeals to our base instincts; base instincts sharpened on the whetstone of the veld rather than post-industrial life. Beauty, however, is transcendent and eternal, the goodness of beauty is apart from the base passions. May Lady Beauty be our measure to guide us from the eye-catching!