See What I See

What does it mean today to experience a work of art? In a culture of triviality and cynicism, at the mercy of a zeitgeist that prizes the superfluous and ephemeral, where can we turn in search of the genuine, the sincere, the truly accomplished? And even if we were to find these things, would we know how to acknowledge their value?

The thirty essays in See What I See are the fruits of a lifetime spent grappling with these questions. By turns lyrical and arch, nostalgic and impassioned, gnomic and piercingly insightful, they seek answers in the achievements of the masters as well as in less likely places. For Greg Gerke, the nectar of aesthetic experience is found as often in the human body as in poetry or prose, as much in a movement through the world as on celluloid or canvas.

Along with giants like Rilke and Woolf, Gertrude Stein and William H. Gass, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, Gerke’s touchstones include relationships on the rocks, the wreckage of one night’s lust, desire, heartache, confusion, naiveté, the beauty of the spoken voice, and the persistent longing for a lasting connection with someone, or something, meaningful.