The goddamned computer deleted a pretty good entry of over 600 words that I thought I’d posted here this morning.  I don’t know what happened.  Now I will attempt to re-write it in spite of being not at all in the mood to.  (Save after every letter, save after every letter save after every letter, then save again.)

Well, I decided to have dinner first.  When I came back, I checked the reviews I wrote for Small Press Review earlier today, I’m not sure.  They were gone, too.  Not destroyed by the Internet but by my computer.  Again, who knows what happened.  There were only two of them, both short.  But my morale is shot.  I thought I’d had an okay day, but it was completely wiped out.  Nonetheless, let’s see how far I can go on my second try to write this entry.

I’m angry now.  Maybe that will help.

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While John Keats is my all-time favorite poet in English (although he died too young to make my list of the ten greatest anglophonic poets), I’ve always scorned what he wrote about “a thing of beauty (being) a joy forever.”  Not that it wasn’t effective in the poem he put it in.  I’ve been questioning my opinion for several months, though.  I think I’m right that every thing of beauty, as I define “beauty,” must eventually become boring–although it may later regain its beauty.  That won’t be because it changed but because its engagent change enough to perceive it in a new way.  Its beauty was not restored but its engagent’s perception improved.  But I don’t think that can go on forever.  I wouldn’t mind hearing Beethoven’s Fifth right now, but I know that four or five years ago, I was sick of it, and that if I heard it now, I’d not want to hear it again for at least two or three more years.

Of course, certain people are close to immune to boredom, either because not bright or so incapable of dealing with variety that sameness appeals to them.  I’m certain, too, that there are others so sensitive to some work of art, and its history, that they are continually learning enough new things about it to always appreciate it.

What keeps me from being absolutely sure that a thing of beauty is not a joy forever is that I’ve come to believe some things can by a joy forever.  My cat, Shirley, is a good example of this.  Earlier today I came up her asleep on a ledge in my home and thought, “all she have to do is go asleep to make me her slave forever.”  An exaggeration, I suppose, but what exemplifies serenity at its best than a sleeping cat?  Wherever the cat decided to go to sleep!

Aside from that, I marvel at the fact that I’m just about always happy to get a visit from Shirley, as I was to get one from each of my other cats–even though they all act just like just about all cats act!  Each cat thing they do enthralls me, not matter how many times they do it.  I think that’s because I, and most people, are instinctively drawn to cats (and dogs–I like dogs a good deal, to but prefer cats because less needy, and less bother, and less noisy).  In fact, I think we instinctively consider cats and dogs kin–that is, our innate “kinempathy” not only automatically compels us to like other human beings (so long as they don’t trigger our not weak sensitivity to possible enmity) but to like cats and dogs (again, ones acting nice) because we once were actual kind of theirs–that is, we and cats and dogs share ancestors.

Not that I know anything about pre-primate evolution, I just too strongly identify with Shirley to believe we aren’t cousins.  Not that I don’t understand that better explanations exist–that cats evolved into a species able to take advantage of us–and we, to a degree, to take advantage of them, to our mutual benefit.

Before leaving the subject of cats, I want to reject the idea that they and dogs are just baby-substitutes.  Yes, they have things in common with babies, things that appeal to everyone’s maternal instancts, but they are much more intelligent and self-reliant than babies.  Better-looking, too, to those not women or their fathers.  Maybe not all dogs, but all cats, for sure.  Babies don’t catch up in actual intelligence to a one-year-old cat till they’re three or four–however superior they are at intelligences human being are superior at, and that psychologists focus on.  By that I mean that cats can quickly find their way around in the world, physically and mentally,which is what intelligence is for, more than anything else.  I believe most of us are born with images of cats and dogs in our brains, as well as images of babies, along with instinctive ways of reacting to them.

To get back to things of beauty, I think people-related instincts like friendship and love (two different things in my psychology) are more complex than our instinctive love of beauty, so more likely to last to begin with than the latter.  Human beings, too, are more complex than artworks, so more able to present facets of themselves that defend them from becoming boring.  They are also capable of change, which artworks are not.   Clouds, I just now remember, are constantly changing and thus constantly beautiful.  But a single unchanging cloud would soon become boring.

By beauty I now want to say before I lose the thought I mean the purely sensual attributes of a thing that give pleasure.  With that, I’m through.  I surprised myself by saying pretty much what I said before, and a little I didn’t say, in less than an hour.  I still wish I hadn’t needed to.

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Here’s a portion of what I addled into words yesterday, thinking it would be part of the essay I’ve been working on for more than a week:

No, here’s how I’ll put it: (effective) made-art gives one pleasure dependent on both its cerebral and pre-cerebral evaluceptual ratios, but the first will indicate its artistic pleasurability while the second will indicate its accompanying pre-artistic pleasures such as, perhaps, a painting’s primary colors, and archetypally-significant subject matter like a mother and child. With the latter, I will bother sentimentalists with my heartless reductionism by saying that in my philosophy, a human infant is never beautiful, beauty being something attainable in my philosophy only by art (born as well as made). What people mean by the word when applying it to a baby is mainly “healthy.”

If i had any influence over our tribe’s use of words, I would suggest the healthy baby be called “lovely,” rather than “beautiful.”

Oops, I just remembered what I looked like as a baby. I was beautiful: curly platinum blonde hair, brilliant dark eyes and a fair complexion with rosy cheeks. It’s hard for me to speak of, for it was all downhill for me from the age of three on. 22 years later I was as bald-headedly ugly as I’d once been beautiful. But my point now is that it can be proper to call a baby beautiful–as a born-art object, but only if the judgement is of those qualities of the baby that cerebral evaluceptual centers have determined to be beautiful.

I have not really thought through any of this before, so am certainly not doing a good job of presenting my view, or maybe I’m doing an excellent job of presenting a ragged, possibly silly view. Be that as it may, an easier way to make sense of my slant is to consider a sexy singer’s performance of a song. There is the song as a work of made-art; there is the singer as, say, a sexually-attractive performer, and there are the two together as a performance. What I’m trying to focus on in this essay is the song–even though the singer will inevitably be partially a work of born-art (or even somewhat of made-art). Of course, the performance as a whole–and whatever background and level of participation a given member of the audience brings to it–is all that counts . . . to someone whose purpose is to enjoy it. But my interest in it here is different.

 

It may have proven of great value, because it added one complication to my essay too many.  That made me decide on a whole new plan of attack: to write only (or almost only) about what I’m calling “cerebral evaluceptuality.”  That will mean considering only art, although I’ll probably need to mention things like “born-art.”  But only briefly.  It should make my essay much more readable.  We’ll see.

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Tragedy

I think I’m in a state of possibly-productive confusion about tragedy.  For years I’ve been trying to explain why so many people could have such a good opinion of it if, as I contended, human beings were sane and therefore preferred pleasure to pain.  My problem, then, was to figure out what pleasure anyone sane could get from a tragedy . . . or any narrative that seems on the surface ugly or unpleasant.  While working on the first entry to the continuation of my Scientific American blog, I’ve recently had more ideas on the subject.  Here are the latest of them, unedited, from what I wrote yesterday:

Tragedies are essentially anthrocentric (i.e., most concerned with personal human feelings), although highly narrative because their final goal is not triumph but kincognition, specifically a shared feeling of not being alone in misery.

I suppose that, in actuality, whether a given work that is significantly both narrative and anthrocentric is a narrative or anthrocentric work can only be decided, very subjectively, on a case by case basis.  Is King Lear a narrative verse play because more the story of good triumphing over evil in the end (in its protagonist’s mind, for certain, and probably in the time to follow) than anything else, or is it an anthrocentric verse play about a great man who has made a grievous mistake that will result in an experience of kincognition for most?

Sudden thought: it seems to me most to glorify a poetic mind’s use of words to create a beautiful world vastly more important that what happens to the extremely flawed mortals whose near-irrelevant suffering is contrasted to it.  Which would make King Lear for me a lyric verse play.

Another thought: that a tragedy can confirm one’s or existence; also that one’s understanding of ethics is valid negatively, by showing the results of living by ethical standards the opposite of yours.  To put it crudely, Macbeth give us pleasure by confirming the validity of our belief that murdering someone is a Bad Thing.  Or, more generally, letting one become entirely ruled by ambition is evil.  Which makes it advocature (i.e., utilitarianly didactic)!

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