Matthew Goulish's Essay 'An Unexpected Revelation'

An Unexpected Revelation

“Write something every day. Good writers write often and you don’t want to be a bad writer.”
That line, written when I was in 5th grade, was just one bullet point out of a letter that I wrote for an English class to my future self. It was one of those assignments that wasn’t graded, but the teacher still forced all of the us to do it anyways because it would “be something to look back on and remember” when we were old and jaded and alone. Apparently, even when I was young, I realized how important it was for me to document what I was thinking. (To be fair, the sentence could have been completely fabricated just to please the teacher. But I like to pretend that’s not the case.) Now, even without thinking about the circumstance

it was written under, that sentence has acted as a form of encouragement for carrying a notebook wherever I go, and as justification for unashamedly archiving my thoughts no matter how inopportune the moment may be. I knew it in 5th grade and I know it now: writing is a way to make sense of things and writing is inevitable. But what actually possesses us to write? And what possesses us to ponder so profusely the situations we encounter?
Take, for example, Verushka Lehndorff, a famous model, who makes a cameo in an early scene of Antonioni’s 1966 cult film, Blowup. Wearing a tiny black, glittering dress that exposes the sides of her midriff and her thighs, she stands in front of a photographer with both hands on her hips. As her full focus is brought to the man in front of her, her eyes flare, and her eyelashes flutter. She lifts her hands up to her forehead and runs them through her hair, and bends her left leg to balance on her toes. “That’s good, hold that,” the photographer says. She performs exactly as she is told, and succumbs to the man’s every command. When he tells her to ruffle her hair, she does it. When he tells her to arch her back while sprawled on the floor, she complies. He takes picture after picture, until his appetite for her image is finally satiated. Without a word, he’s suddenly finished, and he leaves her in a glamorous heap on the floor.
No matter what the circumstance, there will always be a certain intrigue attached to the irrevocable.

A passing moment (like the one involving Verushka) is fickle on the surface, but under the right circumstances, is potentially timeless. Matthew Goulish uncovers this transition in his essay “Criticism.” He explains, “we understand something by approaching it,” and that “we approach it using our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with Childhood” (328). In order to truly see something, or rather, to truly know something, Goulish asserts that we have to look at it in the same wide-eyed manner we would in our youth. Though we, as humans, have a tendency to analyze based on preconceived ideas, only through an acknowledgment of the unknown and an acceptance of the absurd can we truly “[liberate the] critical mind to follow whatever might cross its path” (329). In doing so, Goulish recognized the distinction between the literal and the surreal, and similarly understood the effects of embracing one over the other when viewing a subject. Verushka’s state of being was documented with a brief, exhaustively exploitative photo session, and acts as a direct representation of the concept of actually “viewing.” Everything, from her free-flowing hair to her effortless poses, personifies Goulish’s acknowledgement of the the pursuit of liberation. Though she’s the focal point of the image, this “liberation” isn’t her own; it’s the

liberation of the artist behind the lens. Verushka acts as a sort of liaison between the artist and his subconscious desires, and in this sense, she is merely the stimulus which triggers an understanding of what already exists within the artist.
A painting by Jean-Baptiste Chardin called Le Philosophe Lisant, is yet another example in this same vein of “Criticism.” In quiet contemplation, an androgynous character examines a large book with calm intensity. His focus, reinforced by his unwavering, fixed stare, is entirely on the focal point of the painting: the actual volume he’s reading. Though its contents are unknown, the sheer depth is made evident by its enormous size and thick number of pages. On his right, an hourglass drips silently, and next to that is a quill inside an inkwell. A small pile of coins (or possibly paperweight medallions) sits in front of the book, laying disorderly, as if they were placed haphazardly on the table. The room itself is a direct contrast to the man’s serene presence; in disarray, things are toppled and wonky, and the small silhouette of a human skull is placed subtly in the background.
In this manner, reading isn’t just an extension of self, but the environment acts to explain the artist’s thought process as well.

In George Steiner’s “The Uncommon Reader” he explains, “Reading, here, is no haphazard, unpremeditated motion. It is a courteous, almost a courtly encounter, between a private person and one of those ‘high guests” (189). It’s the deliberate devourment of the ideas of such a “high guest,” or in this case, an author with variant experiences from our own, which serve to highlight our own self-realization. Steiner’s conception of an encounter, however, can be defined as anything which serves to compel an observer and bring forth his own ideas into new form, and can also be described through an indication of where a concept is actually happening. In the end, the environment is as important (if not more important, depending on the circumstance) as what is being studied. In Charles Baudelaire’s “To a Passerby,” he provides a glimpse at this analysis, through his documentation of a woman he had never met

before:

The street about me roared with a deafening sound. Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief, a woman passed, with a glittering hand raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt; Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's. Tense as in a delirium, I drank from her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate, the sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills. A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty by whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you no more before eternity? Elsewhere, far, far from here! Too late! Never perhaps! For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go, you whom I would have loved, you who knew it!

Baudelaire felt the “lightning flash” of the “fleeting beauty by whose glance I was suddenly reborn” that we’ve all felt at one point or another. An anonymous human captivated him enough to convey his thoughts in a poem, even if only for a brief second. To “see,” for Baudelaire, meant understanding the connection between the actual experience and the reflection of the encounter. By announcing he was “suddenly reborn,” the reader not only sees, but experiences the context of what he saw, and offers a basic explanation why this encounter affected him enough to document it. Even if the encounter was only for a brief second, it actually changed him. Though being reborn, at least in the literal sense, isn’t “sudden” at all, Baudelaire’s experience lines up in tandem with the form of the essay, and his sudden transformation is highlighted both in revelation and uncertainty. While the poem starts with describing the “majestic grief” and “glittering hand” of the woman he encounters, it concludes with a question of whether he will see the woman “no more before eternity?” and a realization that he is “too late” in discovering her identity. As Baudelaire begins to realize the change that had invariably occurred during this encounter, he also makes sense of what he experienced and accepts what he has lost. Or so it would seem.
According to Goulish, “Criticism exists to cause a change” and “criticism only consistently changes the critic” (328). When I wrote to my future self seven years ago, it was an indirect criticism on a situation that didn’t even exist yet; a confrontation on what I was doing, on how I was spending my time. In just one line, I reassured myself about the importance of staying connected with my thoughts, and understanding that inspiration and stimulation exist everywhere. Soon, all that’s left from a situation is a memory, which can either last far longer than the specific moment it stemmed from, or be gone before you have time to realize it was ever there. The present, being ever-fleeting, doesn’t exist long enough for us to comprehend it in simultaneity, and we can’t acknowledge the present as it’s occurring. This exact moment you’re currently experiencing is already gone, almost like it never actually existed. Before you have time to realize what’s happening, the present is already converted into the past without any indication or warning. And that, for me, is truly a call to action.