On Apr 11, 2009, at 10:43 AM, William Conger wrote:
Regarding the length of perception, my late pal, Ed Paschke, used to
say, "Keep the clock ticking".
We are caught in the gap--hooked on the dilemma--between the immediacy
of a perception and its fleeting persistence. What holds in our
memory? How long does the savor of a tasteful morsel last? And does
the flavor excite as it sits on the tongue, or does it diminish before
your swallow? In the study of retinal response, the excitation of the
rods and cones lasts only a short time, and the perception passes--the
stimulus stops stimulating--and there is nothing to receive. Many
animals respond to movement, i.e., changes in the excitation of the
receptors in the eye. They must continue to be stimulated or the image
fades.
Perception is based on differentiation: something has changed.
Fashion is a cultural phenomenon in which shapes, forms, colors,
dispositions of elements retain their ability to excite and stimulate
for a short time, for weeks or seasons, until their particular forms
become familiar and lack the stimulating power. Hence, the touting of
the new is the exaltation of the unfamiliar that has not lost its
power to stimulate because...
... immediacy is fleeting.
How frequently can you eat pizza or ice cream or chocolate or a
particular cut of meat or vegetable before you lose interest in that
dish? How long before you *desire* to taste it again? How does that
desire return? By a unique memory that has faded so that only a set-
piece remains--the generic taste of chocolate, the generic melody of
"your dance," the generic memory of the object of any appetite.
Satiation is the end of immediacy, the blunting of newness, the de-
powering of the stimulus.
The pendulum swings between the Rubenistes and the Poussinistes,
between the miniaturists or easel painters and the large-field
painters, between ostensible verisimilitude (Rodin) and greatly
abbreviated formalism (Brancusi). And though there may in fact be
nothing new under the sun, the immediacy of any particular thing rises
and falls, so that our interests in them, and our desires for them,
similarly rise and fall.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
