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It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS

dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.

ETYMOLOGY

From Greek. Depending on how you slice it, astrophe could mean a couple different things: – a/strophe would be the act of not turning, or – astro/phe, the act of turning to the stars. Reader Krokonil suggested an alternate etymology, from Greek astron “star” + atrophy, the wasting away of muscles or organs due to lack of use or trauma). “For us the stars are wasting away, because we will never reach them.”

TRANSCRIPT

It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

The more you look to the sky, the more you find yourself back on Earth, confronting certain possibilities. It’s possible there are other names for our planet, that we will never know. That there are constellations that feature our sun, from an angle we’ll never get to see. That there are many other civilizations hidden beyond the veil of time, too far away for their light to ever reach us.

We dream of other worlds, and name them after our old discarded gods, and they seem almost as distant-too far to be seen with the naked eye. Only ever in artist’s renditions. Or a scattering of pixels on a monitor, with the colors tweaked to add a bit of flair.

Even our own neighborhood is impossibly vast. We’re used to showing the planets nested together-because if we drew them to scale, they’d be so far apart, they wouldn’t fit on the same page. And even our own moon, that seems to hang so close to Earth. But still so far away that all the other planets could fit in the space between them.

It’s possible our spacesuits won’t need treaded boots ever again. That one day soon we’ll tire of wandering and move back home for good. And we’ll get used to watching our feet as we walk, occasionally stopping to hurl a single probe into the abyss, like a message in a bottle. Maybe it shouldn’t matter if anyone ever finds it. If nobody’s there to know we once lived here on Earth.

Maybe it should be like skipping a stone across the surface of a lake. It doesn’t matter where it ends up, it just matters that we’re here on the shore. Just trying to have fun and pass the time, and see how far it goes.

Kitsch and the Modern Predicament by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 1999:

Kitsch and the Modern Predicament

by Roger Scruton

In a celebrated 1939 article, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review, the New York art critic Clement Greenberg argued that figurative painting was dead. “The alternative to abstraction,” he wrote, “is not Michelangelo but kitsch.” Every attempt to make the painted image vie with the photograph, he believed, would lead to disaster, as clichés took charge of the canvas. Henceforth painting must provide its own subject matter: it must be self-sufficient, pure, uncontaminated by the figurative image. The future of painting lay with the “abstract expressionists,” as Greenberg described them: the artists who treated painting like music, as a medium for expressing emotion through the use of abstract forms. Greenberg was perhaps the most influential art critic of his day. His essay set the agenda for an emerging school of New York painters and also set the price tag on their works. Vast sums of public and private money have since changed hands to stock American houses and American museums with works that, to the ordinary eye, have nothing to recommend them apart from their attempt to be abreast of the times. The avant-garde ceased to be a realm of caution and experiment and became, under Greenberg’s tutelage, a mass industry. So long as you avoided the literal image, so long as you defied all figurative conventions, you, too, could be a modern painter. You, too, could establish your credentials as a pathbreaking artistic genius, by doing something—no matter what, so long as it left a permanent mark on a purchasable object—that no one had done before. And if you got lucky, you could be rich and famous, like Cy Twombly, on account of images that look like accidents—and might even be accidents, like the numbers that win on the lottery. Of course, some painters refused to take this path—painters like Edward Hopper, who worked to purify the figurative image and to see again with the innocent eye. But critics and curators remained skeptical; they had invested too heavily in the avant-garde to believe that it was, after all, only a fashion. Hopper’s success was therefore viewed as a freakish thing—a last-ditch survival of an art that elsewhere had been killed off by the march of history. For all truly modern people, the critics went on saying, Greenberg’s maxim still held good: don’t touch the figurative image, or you’ll land yourself in kitsch.