The Vein, amiright? Ex-acrobat, that's why.
Read The Art of Lingering Part 1 here.
Back to lingering. Part Duo. As per the quote:
Why hurry over beautiful things? Why not linger and enjoy them? Clara Schumann.
Lispector described the act of writing as "the danger of being lost in sensation." I believe she understood that the work required the dissolution of the managerial self — the self that knows what it is doing and plans how to do it — and the emergence of something less intentional, less controlled, more real, less Reel.
And Han's argument in The Scent of Time is not simply that we should slow down, but it is that the capacity for depth perception, for seeing into rather than across, requires a different relationship with time. The time of depth is not linear. It is not productive in the clock-sense. It is achronological: it arrives when you stop measuring it.
What the lingering body knows, the efficient body cannot access. Not because efficiency is bad — efficiency gets the invoices filed and the prints shipped and the emails answered — but because it operates in a different register entirely.
Efficiency is horizontal: it moves across. Lingering is vertical: it goes down. I have always said that the vertical is the way to go. Even in love. PS. Which is why I argue against polyamory.
The contemporary artist is asked to do both. She is asked to enter the dissolved time of the studio and emerge with something that can be documented, shared, scheduled, edited, tagged, linked, optimized. She is asked to be present to the work and present to the feed simultaneously. Han would say — and I agree — that these are mutually exclusive forms of attention. The feed requires a surface. The studio requires depth. You cannot be fully inside both at once.
But I don't think the answer is to abandon the feed, although some have. Take Alexandra Franzen for example; it's been years since she'd thought of any social media and from her lovely new abode in Hawaii. She has Hawaii. She doesn't need socials. But, she is extraordinary. Therefore, knowing that we are not Alex, I think the answer is to be ruthlessly clear about what the studio is for.
The studio is for the work that the feed cannot contain.
The work that takes longer than a reel to understand. The work that has the scent of accumulated time — the work that has been with you long enough to develop complexity, the way a wine develops in the bottle, kimchi in jars, the way grief embeds itself in the body, the way a city develops in memory after you've left it.
Han calls the vita contemplativa a form of resistance. In a world organized around acceleration and production, the decision to stay, to remain, to not immediately translate experience into output — this is, in a large way, a political act. It is also, more practically, the only condition under which depth becomes possible.
Not rest. Not vacation. Lingering is active — the active decision to remain with something before it has become useful. It is the condition of being in the studio and not yet knowing why.
I want to be careful here. I am not romanticizing unproductivity. I am not arguing that the hours that look like nothing are superior to the hours that look like work. I am saying something more specific: that there is a quality of attentiveness, a bodily attentiveness, the kind that happens when you have been with something long enough that you stop thinking about it and start inhabiting it —which is the necessary condition of making something real.
And this quality cannot be scheduled. You protect it.
The studio must be the place where the schedule stops. It can resume at the door on the way out, in the email, the caption, the invoice, the posting hour.
But inside the studio, the time must be allowed to expand into something amorphous. Nasal, Han would say. With the slow development of scent.
What I have made in the hours of lingering — the hours that look like nothing from the outside, the hours I have not posted about —is the only work I can stand behind entirely. Because depth requires the condition of being unobserved long enough to form.
The scent of time is what you make when you refuse to rush it.
"A vita contemplativa without acting is blind, a vita activa without contemplation is empty." — Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa
