It is a bit of a puzzle to my wife and house mates why I do not want to frequent Cute Overload. I am not a macho type and I quite readily talk about my cat Sweetness as being cute. I will recount episodes in which I have found him being cute, and take cute pictures of him.
this is a cute photo of SweetnessThe answer came to me out of a conversation my wife and I had on our way to the train/grocery store. She has been thinking about and posting on solitude In part due to Tripp's posting on solitude. She asked if she needed to be alone with her self beyond her sewing? My answer was yes. A thought I had but that did not get expressed was that meditation is the practice of solitude, especially a breathing meditation wherein one seeks to detach oneself from all thoughts. The Christian tradition calls this apathea, sometimes translated passionless but is similar to the Buddhist notion of detachment. Now you might be asking "Where are you going with this? What in the world does solitude and detachment have to do with cute and Cute Overload?" Bear with me I'm getting there. For certain types of Buddhism (what I am most familiar with) detachment is how one is free to have compassion for all living beings. Compassion that is tied to a relation or feeling is a limited compassion and one that cannot be for all l beings. In the Christian tradition we speak of divine love a love beyond friendship, family, or romance, a love that is not attached to mere emotion or sentimentality.
It is the oddness of my spiritual journey that I learned apathea from Buddhism to find that it was at the core of my own faith. That the boundless divine love Christ showed us and that which I , as a disciple of Christ, am to show all people, is only achievable through detachment. From this perspective it is needful to Recognize that the deepest and truest love is without sentimentality. True love the love that is the source of all sentimental love transcends sentimentality. I am called to develop in myself this apethea that allows me to love beyond sentiment. I have been doing this through various spiritual disciplines specifically breathing mediation for 18 or so years, first as Buddhist sitting mediation and then as a more specific Christian discipline using the Jesus Prayer.
So, I believe that as a follower of Christ that I am called to a love that is beyond sentiment. I have meditated and practiced other disciplines seeking detachment and apethea so that I can have proper attachments and be open to the divine love. I can freely be sentimental about Sweetness, my wife family and friends, and might talk about Sweetness being cute because there is a proper attachment in which I recognize the limits of emotion and that love. However, I do not wish to be sentimental about things with which I have no real connection, and thus practice the opposite of my spiritual disciplines. For me Cute Overload would be the consistent practice of engaging in meaningless attachment, and thus works against what I feel called to in my spiritual life.
Now am I saying that anyone and everyone who looks a Cute Overload and gushes over cuteness of things to which they have no real relation is exercising in improper and meaningless attachment? As one practiced in spiritual direction I must say I don't know. I would consider it a possibility for one to enjoy Cute Overload and not be caught up in a sentimentality that attaches oneself to things in away that works against apathea. My point is not to judge those who look at Cute Overload, but to explain my own avoidance of its sentimentality, and express my own understanding (in terms of two spiritual traditions) of why one may chose not to engage it. If you like me are seeking that Love beyond love that is the source of all love, then it may be that you are called to avoid attaching oneself to things with which you have no real relation beyond the sentiment of cuteness. The operative word there is may. Maybe it is that I am more able to be distracted, or simply more affected in ways I don't want to be or something. Though, I have also written this because I believe seeking detachment that allows ones compassion and love to be transcendent and not limited by attachment to be a good thing, and something all people should seek. Also in the end I do believe that attachment to sentimentality is a primary enemy of apathea. However, the ways of achieving apathea may not all involve avoidance of Cute Overload, in my case it does.
Fascinating reflection, Larry! I guess my attraction to Cute Overload is mainly the specialized language that has developed in the text that accompanies the photos and videos: a cat cannot be "adorable"; it's "anerable." Something astonishingly cute isn't "ridiculous"; it's "redonkulous," or "redonk" for short. A "head tilt" expresses a reaction to cuteness but with an element of parody. All of this is in contrast to what I consider an overly sentimental cuteness site, Daily Puppy, whose captions run something like, "Amber loves to steal socks and chew on them, and she would spend all day sleeping in the sun if she could." Barf! Cute Overload, on the other hand, has created a bit of a genre, and that's what I enjoy about it. Personally, I find it helps counteract the oppressive grayness of winter in the city, if only through a quick visit from an anerable bun or kitteh.
ReplyDeleteAs I read this I found myself wondering if you've read Bonhoeffer's Life Together. I'm reading right now for a class and a lot of what you said here resonates well with his discussion on "human" versus "divine" love in the first chapter.
ReplyDeleteAlso could you maybe shoot me an email? I have a matter of discernment that I could use your counsel and prayer, if you're willing. the email address is jason_barr(at)jesusradicals(dot)com.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteI hadn't really thought about Cute Overload that way. Actually haven't spent enough time there to have observed this. I would agree that what you describe of the other site is as you say "overly Sentimental", but I would still argue that even given the interesting linguistic development it is still expressing sentimentality. Also, I must admit that I have always seen LOL Cat as sentimentality as well, alternative and at one time "edgy" perhaps but still sentimental. Admittedly, all of this is in an alternative and perhaps less bourgeois form of Sentimentality.
I also can see how Cute Overload could brighten your day in the midst of a Chicago winter.
Still, for me (I emphasize this) even Cute Overload is too sentimental.
Jason,
ReplyDeleteI have not read Life Together in its entirety. I certainly would not deny a Bonhoefer influence. One of my professors at North Park Seminary was one of the foremost Bonhoeffer scholars in the world.
However, I must also admit that I came to the conclusion that while I find Bonhoeffer very congenial I see others things like the Philokalia as reading I need to turn my attention towards.
i have never thought about being sentimental in that way! very interesting! i don't get too attached to cute things if i don't know them. they often need to have some sort of affect on me, or i on them. like my dog buster that we had for 14 years, for example. he even made my family tree. :)
ReplyDeleteglad you cats are still going strong.
Larry,
ReplyDeleteI got your email but for some reason my reply to you keeps bouncing back to me. I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I sent it to your myspace as a backup.
Carolyn,
ReplyDeleteGlad to offer a different perspective.
To be clear I think I may be using attachment in a slightly more specific and broader sense than you mean when you say you don't get attached to cute things. If my argument can be sustained and cute is a form of sentimentality and sentimentality (whether momentary or sustained) is a form of attachment meaning the opposite of what one seeks in prayer and meditation then even if one doesn't think about a cute object much after noticing its cute or its something you could pass, the act of identifying an object or picture or animal etc. as cute would be in the definitions of this argument an instance of attachment as opposed to an instance of detachment. Thus I am arguing about "spiritual" states, not about if one may feel emotionally attached to something one sees as cute. I too would say that I don't get attached to cute things in the sense you are using but I recognize that when one is identifying thins as cute one is in a state (even if momentary) of attachment as opposed to being in a state of detachment.
I guess I don't quite understand the difference between identifying "cute" and identifying "beautiful." I look at Cute Overload most every day; some days the photos aren't particularly cute to me, but when they are, I enjoy them.
ReplyDeleteI also look nearly every day at http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/, billed as "your daily dose of imagery." It's gorgeous/striking photos from I think Toronto.
I also make a point of looking at the sky every day. In all weather. Simply because it is so beautiful, and that feeds my heart.
How is being fed by beauty different from being nourished by cute...? When they are both created by God.....
Now, there is one related sort of "cuteness" that I firmly name bourgeois, tacky, and quite frankly sinful. When my coworker brought me a photocopy of a cute bitty fluffy kitten WITH the caption, "Lord, if You can't make me thin, please make my friends fat," I looked straight into her face and said firmly, "I don't want that sentiment around me."
That isn't cute. That's petty.
From my sense of the use of the world "cute" in contexts like that of Cute Overload I would differentiate it from "beauty" in that cute does not open one up to awe, where as I would understand beauty as doing so.
ReplyDeleteCute is limiting, in a sense it is shallow, it points out the smallness of a thing or being, or its vulnerability and lifts that up as primary. In that sense cute is related to beauty the way kitsch is related to beauty. Not that cute and kitsch are necessarily the same thing though there can be overlap there.
I at least find little if anything transcendent in our identification of things as cute.
When I find Sweetness being or exhibiting cuteness it is not in admiring his strength or the intricacies of his body and being but when I see his smallness often (and this is a positive connection with beauty) in relation to his larger suroundings, or us. Yet it is in focusing and lifting out his smallness and isolating it that an act or pose appears cute to me.
I think sentimentality is also the case of this sort of limiting of persons and phenomena. It is also why I associate both of these to attachment, because in the technical sense that I am using "detachment" and "attachment", attachment limits our engagement with reality, and makes large what is really very small or shallow or possibly even unimportant. Because of this attachment clouds our discernment.
The recongnition of "beauty" as I understand beauty is an experience of detachment, of not being able to grasp what is seen or experienced and of that object or phenomena or collection of objects and beings as being part of something not fully comprehensible. Beauty then is then related to the experience of the Holy and mysterium tremendum, it in a sense arrests us instead of us limiting and arresting an object, being or experience.