> Chris writes: > > Yes, Cheerskep, I do remember that you first raised this issue several > years ago -- and my response, back then, was to doubt that your AE with a > football game could have very much in common with your AE for Shakespeare." >
I agree with you, on two scores. Most individual contests -- in football, baseball, basketball, etc -- are non-special, earthbound, often drab and unexciting. Shakespeare's plays, even at his poorest, always have something somewhere in them that drops my jaw. WS is a hard standard for anything to match. But a common, run of the mill play can feel much like a drab game -- reaching for "drama" and never reaching it, never giving us an inner Wow! But a great game, like the Bengals-Niners Superbowl did feel to me to have something in common with some successful stage dramas. Three minutes were left, the Bengals had a three point lead, and the Niners were on their own eight yard line, 92 yards away from the goal line. The younger players on the Bengals' bench were already celebrating, when Chris Collinsworth, the veteran, quieted them -- pointing out that Joe Montana had just come into the game for the Niners. "I believe that's number sixteen out there, guys," he said. And Montana did indeed move his team downfield for the winning score with 34 seconds left in the game. It had a classic feeling of inevitability about it, with Montana as the quintessential Nemesis. I tell you I felt something very like theatrical "drama" going on in front of me. Chris goes on: > > "Perhaps this is the kind of query that each individual can only ask > regarding his own experiences? > Again, agreed. I actively loathe Samuel Beckett plays. I know there are some other viewers, with sophistication and their own sensibilities, who would claim he was the greatest playwright of the 20th century. Chris: > > "Or perhaps -- we need some more language to distinguish an AE from all the > other kinds of positive, exciting experiences we might have?" > Yes, and more than language. We need a penetrating up-close examination of various kinds of alleged a.e's. Why do we say the feelings we get from good Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Van Gogh are, in some way, the "same" experience -- i.e. that they are all "aesthetic experiences"? Why do I feel that the effects of Pavarotti, Streep, and Montana at their peak share a "same" essential element? > > And.... no one else had anything to contribute to this discussion, did they? > except, of course, for Derek to wonder what you meant by aesthetic > experience) > > Have you made any progress at all in addressing it by yourself over the past > three or four years? > Oh I have on my hard drive some extended ruminations that I've never posted. One of the virtues of this forum is that we can work on it when we're free. And the drawback is that when we get interrupted -- to pay taxes, or help out a distant relative in crisis, or to work on a play -- by the time we get back to the forum some other discussion seizes our attention. I certainly don't think my ruminations made any very great progress because most of them have dwelt on the preliminary job of figuring out how to best frame the questions -- and the questions are various. One could focus hard on a given a.e., or on the vast range of experiences that I, with an apt tentativeness, would claim do share a core element that other experiences, no matter how intense, don't share. In the end, your "Subject" question above is what I'd dearly love to see answered -- even if it's to say there is no one answer, there are many, as various as the genres, and even within so-called genres they are different. How? Why? ************** Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car listings at AOL Autos. (http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
