People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
Archive for the ‘sensations’ Category.
Calling All Shrinks: I have irrational, intense, visceral aversions to (1) the idea of eating someone else’s home cooking, and (2) brain teasers. I possess no talent for the latter, but I don’t think I hate working them because I fear it getting out that I am unintelligent. There is just nothing at stake in pondering them that I consider worthwhile, which is not the same thing as saying that I think they’re worthless; I recognize their value—and their great attraction for disciplined thinkers—as mental gymnastics, but to me they epitomize pointlessness (honing skills in a vacuum). I had the same aversion to “writing exercises” when I was learning how to craft fiction; if the technique embodied in an exercise seemed potentially valuable, I adopted it for a story in which I had invested emotions, hoping it would help me in conveying feeling to the reader. That seemed worth the effort. As for other people’s home cooking, this is not a “health issue” or the product of any other conscious consideration, much less the manifestation of a subconscious distemper. I think physiological changes in my olfactory function or perhaps my taste buds, or maybe both, took place a few years back that make me gag on kitchen smells, even prospectively.
I’ve heard about moderation all my life, but I’ve never seen one.
If God is a shrimp, I’ll be in a lot of trouble when I die, because I’ve single-handedly depopulated the coastal waters of this divine arthropod, driving up the price unconscionably so the shrimp fleets can pay for the extra fuel they have to buy. But if God locks me out, it won’t be as though I hadn’t already savored paradise on earth, and plenty of it.
I want to write at the intersection of the sensibility and the mind.
At least we are consistent. The same American public that thinks Justin Guarini’s losing the American Idol competition is a “tragedy” thinks AI is a “great work of art” and Adam Sandler is “funny as hell”.
Having sex without ardently affirming the rhapsodic beauty of the other person’s self, yearningly joining your whole sensibility with the other as well as your genitals, is like slam-banging down the street in just the chassis of a car; though perhaps, getting your rocks off, you don’t particularly mind how foolish and self-involved you might appear to bystanders. Of course I’d never deny the pleasure, for what’s its worth, of the little electric jitter that is what you have at the end if sex is all you’re after.
Some of the Hippie boys were so pretty that after they explained that I had mistaken their gender, I almost said, “I don’t care.”
In the 1960’s, the gaudy light-displays and the pathetic dilapidation of the dancers agitating the bouncing fringes on their hot pants and sheath skirts were not the most truly disgusting feature of the go-go clubs. It was the nature of the leers that split across the faces of the sixty-year-old businessmen who wanted me to take them to the clubs that browned me off.
When we experience art, what we feast on is the being of its creator.
The tagline of a series of fast-food commercials running now should be adopted as America’s motto, because it epitomizes the end-result of forty years of the unrestricted self-indulgence that began in the late ‘60s with the valiant admonition, If it feels good do it (till it hurts). It was seriously believed that what was needed by the most pampered generation in the country’s history—a generation that had already long-since placed its pleasure and comfort ahead of everything else— was even more pleasure. Not unpredictably, pleasure-seeking as the object of behavior soon devolved into simple appetite-satiation, but it took more than a quarter century for the socio-cultural consequences fully to manifest themselves. The ego’s descent into abject self-absorption and the consequent lack of consideration for others has ultimately metamorphosed into the universal, violent, infantile and gut-wrenching incivility we endure today. The tagline of the commercials goes: Don’t bother me, I’m eating.
I don’t say this lightly. I have tried my best. I have worked at it and I have worried about it. But the plain truth is, I’m not going to stop smoking cigarettes until they stop manufacturing them, after which I’ll switch to cigars, which I also inhale.
Spareribs are magnificently succulent, but to talk about barbecue exclusively in terms of ribs is like discussing a voluptuous beautiful woman in terms of just her elbows.
“Food is only nutrition as far as I’m concerned.” How about eating this?
Our lives consist of a continuous multiplicity of responses to an ongoing barrage of stimuli.
In the wake of Summa Thompsologica, I can only justifiably “judge” people by evaluating whether their behavior contributes to or detracts from their psychodynamic integrity. The standard for this evaluation is the coherence of response to stimulation.
My wife and I took our parental obligations earnestly, and in fact the kids grew up to be superb adults. But then as well as now, the violence and drugs and wildness ravaged every neighborhood, and I can’t help thinking that on any given afternoon, getting out of school, either of them could have taken one route home instead of another, with the consequence that I’d be buying Christmas presents this year for only one of my babies.
We are no longer sound when we have reached the point of giving pleasure to ourselves at the expense of others; we have forgotten or have never learned that pleasure comes in degrees of intensity. The most profound pleasure occurs when all of our faculties are engaged, not just our sense organs.
Americans are hedonistic but they will never be Epicurean because they have conveniently overlooked the great philosophy’s cardinal tenet: moderation is indispensible to preventing pleasure from either cloying or becoming destructive.
Commercial advertising is one of our principal nemeses. As consumerist materialism saps our essence by diverting us from our needful concerns and authentic self-interest, the advertisers step up the intensity of the imagery and phrases that evoke our former normalcy to goad us into buying some new dingus or other while preventing us from understanding what we’re doing to ourselves. How many thousands of nuclear families have gone into hock buying presents this Christmas, imperiling everything they live for and on, from next-month’s electric bill to Sissy’s college fund, because they were lured into doing so by soft-focused images of idyllic nuclear families? We are moths to the flame, the kamikaze consumers. To paraphrase the exquisite Vietnam-era tagline: We are destroying the village in our very effort to preserve it.