Entrancement

Ensnarement

Fascination that immobilises. Beauty as arrest, holding attention past the point where the viewer would have chosen to look away.

The word

From trance, Old French transe, which meant the passage of dying and the dread of it, from the Latin transire, to pass over. To be entranced was originally to be carried into that deathlike passage. The word's modern softness is recent; underneath, it still describes being taken somewhere without consent.

The feeling

The decision to look away is quietly removed. Attention narrows to the object and stays; blinking and posture go unattended, and time passes without being counted. There is no urgency in it, which separates it from craving: the state is complete while it lasts. Its end is usually external, an interruption, because the exit was never inside.

Against its neighbours

Aesthetic Pleasure releases the eye when the looking is done; entrancement withholds the release. Wonder is active, generating questions; entrancement generates nothing, holds everything, and calls the holding itself the point.

In the work

The eye is not released. Detail accumulates at the centre past the point where a reading can be finished, so the gaze keeps going back to it.

3 works composed with Entrancement

  • False AwakeningSold · 1
    $340
    • Su2
    • En
    • Dz
    • Dr
    • Ab
    EPOCH · 2023

    False Awakening

    Entrancement is the suspension itself, the haunting melody that fixes the gaze above the chaos and will not release it.

  • Deep DiveSold · 15
    $123
    • En2
    • Lv
    • Lo
    • Sa
    TERRA · 2023

    Deep Dive

    Entrancement carries the piece: the pull into the heart is a spiral, fascination that holds fast once the fall inward begins.

Composed with

Also in Liminal

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