Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence

Cadenza

296 The words life drawing evoke art classes with which we are familiar, easels scattering around a naked model, and something less clear, the intimation of a different practice, ceding control, letting your life be drawn by sensual singulars beyond representation, into beauty, becoming becoming. Wittgensteinians deny it, but you can feel those senses entangling like lovers’ limbs. And the happy discovery of those befriended senses glows even warmer for having been there, all along, quietly waiting for our affectionate attention. It’s enough to give you hope. We all know how easy it is to try too much: Anxious we will lose the essential, we squeeze so hard it all escapes through our fingers.1 It becomes difficult even to choose the adjective for what we enjoy. In face of the allure of pleasure, the tastes and textures we enjoy disappear. The reprimanding moralists were right about that, anyway: Seeking simply pleasure slights the very things we enjoy. So we turn from pleasure to fulfillment, earnestly working to achieve some goal we think important. Fulfilling our desire for Cadenza These little things—nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness—are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is Cadenza 297 financial security. Leading a fulfilling life as a physician. Fulfilling our dreams for our families. Who doesn’t sometimes succumb to thinking of their life in terms of hurdles to hurdle? Even if we don’t always follow through, we always begin by intending to focus our attention on what must be accomplished in order to achieve the goals we seek. The final victory brought closer by means of several intermediate achievements. And the world shrinks. When we give our lives a purpose, a point, when we set our sights on fulfilling goals, then it is only this purpose that lights the world. Where its light doesn’t reach, the world falls back into darkness. It has its advantages, of course. If you want to accomplish something, then you would do well to focus your complete attention on what your sought-for accomplishment requires. But then the entire world falls into two categories: either relevant to my purpose or irrelevant. Tasks present themselves either as work or as squandered energy. With a little luck, you will succeed. But what, here, is fulfillment? Everything is beautiful. Everything is textured flesh. But with your eye on achievement, with your eye on fulfillment, you won’t feel it. With fulfillment as your goal, fulfillment is reduced to simply crossing a line, getting the job, making the deal. It is as if the flesh of fulfillment had been reduced to a conceptual representation of itself, a conceptual certainty with nothing overflowing certainly, no taste of desire without desires. The round peg is pounded into its round hole, and we are done. Now what? Mostly we conceive our lives in terms of a fulfillment we lack, a success we seek, and when fulfillment is ours, it’s over. Then what? Another success ? Seek it. Achieve it. Here is your degree. Here is your long-awaited letter of promotion. Then what? A life can be lived this way, leaping from achievement to achievement, never slipping into the warm thick of liquid corporeality, the Cagean Sea. Give up fulfillment. Give up your goals. Give up your fantasy of meaning. That is the first movement, to drop your goals, but it is only a beginning. Blank pointlessness, the negative mode of pointlessness , and existential anxiety reveal themselves when we move no farther than the first movement. Becoming arrested. It feels awful. It feels awful, and when the morning light plays through the forest leaves, drawing our gaze up from the ground, we refuse. Restoring our downturned gaze, we refuse the dappled bright. You could stop there. Some do. But there can be more. Even with your eyes turned from the wood morning yellows, it is hard to avoid lichen 298 Cadenza greens flashing on the forest floor. Listen to their shapes with your eyes. Always and all ways things draw our attention. Let them. Fulfillment rewards our refusals, but a life fulfilled is not enough. Drop your aching for fulfillment, and enjoy being drawn into the lichen’s moist dry. Release your affections from their instrumental yearnings. Release your attention from...