Coco Young: Tennis Elbow 102

SAUDADE: “A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy” (Manuel de Melo)

Yearning is a self-canceling double move. It is a desire that extends forward only by calling back the past, a longing and searching that is shot through with passivity and even fatalism. The result is a tugging in time; an indefinite in- between-ness, where the present appears as either always dissolving—the future merely passing through en route to the past—or as all-there-is, everything at stand-still. One who is in a state of yearning is constitutionally unable to occupy the present yet feels hopelessly moored to it.

The Portuguese word for this feeling of wistful and wishful longing is saudade: a nostalgic awaiting for those people, places, memories lost to the past. It is a part of the lore of saudade that the concept is closely tied to the phenomenology of port cities and the Portuguese’s long troubled relationship to voyages on the sea. Coco is herself from a port city just beyond the other side of the Iberian peninsula, Marseilles, an ancient Mediterranean city with roots that trace back to the Greeks. And she wears its influence openly on the canvas. Seaports are places of ceaseless transit, but the unremitting epicycles of loading, unloading, docking, departing can induce feelings of stagnation, even a dizzying ennui.

Restlessness turned listlessness. What lies on the other side? Two answers: Time hastes for no one. Nothing may outpace its telling. We keep in stride, indeed we must, as we are pulled along its side.

Or, perhaps not. Here, an alternative possibility: we escape our suspension in time through an act of creation.

– Lily Hu