Sophia Efthimiatou On Receiving

Before it turns into a celebration of Substack, Sophia Efthimiatou’s post has some wonderful thoughts about having nothing to say as the entryway for true receiving, especially artistic receiving. “What has been lost,” she says,

“is a quality that never came easy to us to begin with, and that is our ability to receive. To receive, as Steinbeck put it, “anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine.”

Recipience has been diminished everywhere in our culture, worst of all in art, which to be considered art at all must fulfill its duty to receive us generously, and where successful, create more space within us for reception. By reception I do not mean acceptance. I mean an anticipation of our humanity, in its totality, from misery to glory. This quality is inherent to all the works we have commonly accepted as “great,” be they plays or novels or paintings or film. But instead of extending an invitation to their audiences, contemporary artists are more and more inclined to abuse them. I have found myself trapped in performances that attempted to rehabilitate me in ways similar to those in “A Clockwork Orange.” Any discomfort I felt did not arise from a sudden recognition of the failings I was instructed to acknowledge within me, but from the stiffness of theater seats I had to endure for indefensibly indulgent runtimes. It occurred to me that I was being treated exactly as I was on social media: like an invisible, inconsequential void, the dark depths of which could only be reached by the loudest projection of opinion. Artists seemed to forget that I was not there as a passive voyeur but as a human being sharing time, oxygen, and a sacred silence with other human beings. It is the silence of amphitheaters and libraries and cathedrals, of the seconds between the last note played at a concert and the eruption of applause, a silence that enters us all simultaneously like communion and within which a unity grows.”