Subjective resonance occurs when a particular piece of art or song resonates greatly in accordance to one's perspectival understanding. This phenomenon, in its truest form, is exceedingly rare, but its lesser versions are universally experienced by everyone at some point in life. The factors leading up to resonance - perfect or otherwise - are complex, and almost entirely up to the subject's own frame. In short, the reasons for something feeling like it (the art in question) is speaking to me are as complex as people themselves.
There are a few key components to this resonance that can be discussed, however. Most prominently; nostalgia, personal temperament and cultural affect. Of these, I would argue, nostalgia is both the most prominent and best understood by general populace. It is also something that doesn't have much at all to do with a song or art-piece's actual depth or quality. To the contrary, in fact, as the more widespread something is (the larger an audience it can reach), the less complexity it tends to have, and baser the instincts it tends to target. Leaving that aside for now, the point of this post was to explore how subjective resonance between an observer <-> art piece, or between two observers of a singular art-piece (observer 1, <-> art-piece <-> observer 2) functions, and how the artist, the creator, when attempting to convey his or hers "inner world experience" is irrevocably distanced from the audience. We can begin with a simple example of music, where a group of people are listening to a particular piece. In this party - lets say of five - someone chooses an old song that someone else recognizes; perhaps they have shared similar thoughts and feelings when listening this song back in the day, decades ago, and by communicating these memories they notice they have a shared degree of subjective resonance with the song - and now, thanks to this new experience, each other. This brief moment of subjective resonance is one of the most widespread utilizing nostalgia, as many pop-songs tend to be tied to certain eras and periods of peoples' lives, and so, it is no wonder they can form these kinds of bonds, and are easy to resonate with, thus producing easy topics for conversation. All goes well as long as the people share a degree of similarity in temperamentality and overall psychological make-up, along with cultural background. No resonance can be achieved if the person choosing the song is not "fitted" to this social environment with his song-choice - in other words, if the song is too esoteric for others to recognize, or the person too obtuse in his demeanor of self-presentation. Proceeding with this simple example to a more complex one, let us consider a work of literature or visual art. For this one I'm writing through personal lenses, since I cannot probe into others' motivations in creating highly abstract arts. For me the reasons are twofold: 1. Authentic expression of the unconscious forces, and; 2. Creation of mirrors for the psyche. For the first I could say that the attempts at both literature and visual arts are simply a journalist reporting of mental phenomena and picturing said phenomena. Unfortunately one cannot simply bring a camera into the unconscious and take pictures, and so, it must be mediated through imperfect skills, and some (a lot) of information & accuracy is lost in the process. Now, granting for the sake of argument to the artist that his intentions are genuine, his efforts nevertheless are largely in vain due to aforementioned imperfections in technical skill. Even more alarmingly, even if the artist was to reach literal perfection in capturing these unconscious currents, no other observer can ever fully subjectively resonate with it due to the inherently impassable subject/object divide. They can empathize, subjectively resonate with a great amount of perspectival understanding, but they will never be able to truly see (for the lack of a better word) through the artist's eyes, of what he actually experienced and wanted to convey. Overall, there are so many obscuring filters in the way of art-mediation; the artist's imperfections, the audience's imperfections, the great chasm that divides us all - the subject and the outside world - and so, even the genius artists will always remain misunderstood and ultimately "unreachable". This is not the artist's, nor the audience's fault. It is simply the innate nature of things. This truth, I have realized, is one of the aspects of The Essence of Isolation. The imperfect version of this truth I already mediated - entirely unconsciously - in the early story of "Crawzinscky's Theory of Isolation" back in 2018, when being at the nadir of Dark night of the Soul, in the depths of shadow-work. I will perhaps expand on the other aspects of this truth in the future - or maybe explain this one in greater detail... but I think this shall suffice for now. For Sophia.
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A.K
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