In a message dated 3/12/12 4:39:25 AM, [email protected] writes:
> Do you feel that an a.e. is supposed to be cathartic, i.e., provide a > kind > of purge? > > In truth, no, though I concede there seems to be an element of "readiness" involved; e.g. satiety, exhaustion, can play a part. Satiety can certainly be a factor in matters of sex, but to address this a bit more clearly, I might shift the comparison of "pleasures" from sexual to gustatory. One can sit down to a table covered with a variety of comestibles. Some of the edibles "taste better" than others. Indeed, some of them occasion a taste that calls for a superlative adjective. "This veal dish tastes exquisite!" But when you've eaten your full, the taste-pleasure weakens, you've had "enough". The readiness, the possibility, for gustatory pleasure diminishes as the taste-receptors in the palate are "exhausted". Something comparable occurs if I try to read poetry for hours on end, or spend half a day at the Metropolitan Museum of art. Still, I'm not inclined to call gustatory pleasure 'cathartic' or 'purgative' the way one might characterize the feeling of orgasm. In response to Conlin's good posting, I add this. Without "defining" consciousness, I can say I've never been aware of confusing a palatal experience with a sexual experience. Similarly, when I've had an "aesthetic experience", I've been convinced this feeling was a genus distinctly different from sexual or palatal. As I stood in front of one of Van Gogh's SUNFLOWERS in the Kroller-Muller Museum, the whelming sensation was of a "kind" different from those other two. And when I first had an aesthetic experience from poetry (from a poem by Dickinson and a poem by Auden, both on the same night) I knew this feeling was different from anything I could remember from my earlier reading life. (And this was after college where I'd read much poetry in fulfilling academic assignments. I concede I was a very slow starter.) This is not to deny that my aesthetic experiences were subject to ranges: ranges in power, and ranges in genre sources. Still, though experiences from poetry, music, paintings et al were distinct, I've had no hesitation in maintaining they have been of a "kind" different from sexual, palatal, etc. Moreover, I've been convinced that certain "out of the studio" daily-life experiences were yielding an aesthetic experience: on a sporting field, a landscape in Italy and California, on television as I watched the unfolding of a "real life" drama. There is obviously much more to say, but I'll save some of it for my next posting, more completely devoted to Conlin's posting. (One last remark, in reponse to something Joseph (Artsy6) asked: The late piano concertos of Mozart provided some of his "best moments". And passages in some of the operas. To show I'm not an undiscriminating pushover for anything Mozartian, I report that, for me, IDOMENEO provided only three hours of tedium.
