13 ways of looking at lockdown

Abstract

The extremities of a state of pandemic lockdown intensify, through physical and emotional constraints, an aesthetic of perceptual experience involving the senses, or sense perception. Part of this pandemic perception requires living “with uncertainty, […] which involves living with the [cognitive] dissonance” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020). So many artists found sensuous aesthetics to live with these dissonances (Sarasso et al., 2021), such as street performances while emptying the bins, or orchestra members performing via Zoom (managing transition delays to suggest harmonies across isolations). Wallace Stevens enlarges an aesthetic of the sensuous through a non-mimetic form of practice, what he terms “the phenomena of perception”. The phenomena which illustrate the pressures of imagination and reality infuse Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the model and catalyst for this poetic suite on lockdown. This suite is rhizomatic, exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “rhizome [which] has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”(27). The intention is to map a mass of roots, avoiding a structural tree system (beginning, middle and end) which suggests binaries or dualities. This rhizomatic presentation of extreme moments of “being between” presents an array of mappings or tracings, “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions” (Berry & Siegal, n.d.).