Hanging around this afternoon without really much to write about, so I thought I’d just improvise. I’m sitting in Pickwick’s once again; it’s mostly empty, aside from a group of 6-7 high-school-aged girls a few tables away from me, prattling along with customary though not unpleasant vapidity. Strangely the women I’ve met recently—with one significant exception, I think—tend to be either good-natured but not particularly interesting, or not very good-natured—morose, in fact—but possessed of more hidden depths, murky though they be. I generally seem to prefer the company of the good-natured ones over the others racked with complexities and insecurities; that is to say, in terms of relationship material I tend to prefer cheerfulness and stability over the more inspired companionship of the moody and unpredictable. I’ve recently emerged from this latter kind of relationship, and for the moment I’ve had quite enough. The exception I mentioned earlier, though I don’t know her very well yet, has every indication of being much more promising: she’s a good deal more cheerful, with a good deal more of that simple delight which is so engaging, and so appears to me quite attractive. There’s a luminous sparkle of good-humour, of cheerful openness and curiosity, of intelligence and playfulness in her eyes that I find immensely appealing, and that is lacking in the languid, lugubrious eyes of the moody. I’m meeting her tonight for dinner.
This reminds of something that occasionally crosses my mind as I walk around town: namely, two things that for me enrich life, that make it in a sense worth living, that provide the impetus for the desire for more life and more intense, are the cultivation or improvement of the mind, and pleasure. They’re not, of course, exclusive of one another, and in many cases they overlap. Many of the greatest pleasures are pleasures of the mind. But pleasures in themselves, sensuous and/or sensual pleasures, are in many cases an unqualified good. Again, not always; but then again, on the other hand, principled asceticism seems to me an irrational doctrine.
The two are related in what might not be an obvious way. Cultivation of the mind is the way to the greatest intensity of life, not perhaps simply in itself, but for the richness it provides, the multiplicity of relations it permits, with respect to one’s environment, both immediate and indirect. It permits one to be receptive to a great number of stimuli, so in a sense plugging one into the universe across a broad spectrum of relations. One becomes, as it were, more integrated with the universe. One schematic way of representing this is through time: the greater one’s knowledge, the greater one’s sensitivity to the environment, and the greater one’s retention of the past (memory), the more factors inform the configuration of the present: the present becomes more intense. Also, we are more sensitive to the multiplicity of relations that present themselves to us from the future, and so our selves become more complex, coherent, and qualitatively more intense nexus of forces.
Another way of thinking about this is, appropriately, through music. Perhaps the most obvious way is through relatively complex structures organized through motives: Wagner. Every moment of music as it unfolds, relates motivically to past moments, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes dramatically. This kind of interconnectedness also allows a degree of anticipation of future moments–these are not determined, by any means, but they fit into the scheme elaborated by the previous unfolding of motives. The peak of intensity, for instance, in Tristan, is the single note during the Liebestod on “Welt”, in the phrase “in des Welt-Atems”. The organic relationships between the motives throughout the opera culminate in this single moment, in which one experiences the entirety of the opera in a single moment. It’s as though the whole 4 and a half hours of music is experiences as a single extremely intense moment, as a single unit, a single experience of great complexity of intensity. It’s interesting that TS Eliot calls the ear the ‘murmuring shell of time’.
Similarly, the ‘improvement of the intellect’, as Spinoza would term it, permits a greater comprehension (in its etymological sense of inclusiveness) within the self, particularly of time, though also in subtle ways of space. Though the mind is still of course finite, and limited, the coordination of ideas, the configuration of the relations between self and environment, leaves partialities that are more than compensated for by the heightened responsiveness of the organism.
This brings me back to pleasure. This sense of coherence, of integration with the environment, is inherently pleasurable. Similarly, the experience of intense pleasure often seems to include the sense of a total involvement of one’s faculties, a total integration of the self in the experience. This works conversely, too: depression is marked by a sense of isolation, stagnation, dis-integration, a lack of intense relations. This is the sort of thing that Pascal seems to mean when he says that intellect and sensation are variations of the same thing. It reminds me of another thought I derived from Spinoza, that all thought, of whatever kind, is essentially imagistic, and ideas of an intellectual nature are distinguished from what are often referred to as emotive ideas or ideas of sensation, merely by a refinement of those ideas and an ability to integrate them in the wider background of other ideas. Emotions are usually partial ideas, intense but rather limited–often intense precisely because they are limited, pointed, as it were. The object of trying to integrate a cultivation of the mind with a sensitivity to pleasure is to strive after those pleasures which are precisely not limited, not partial–or at least much less so than trivial pleasures (what Spinoza calls ‘titillation’).
This has one or two interesting corollaries. The intense feeling of pleasure, of integration with the universe (or at least one’s environment), is what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. It seems to me significant that he calls it a species of love, for something very similar seems to characterise love between people–a sense of total integration with one another. On the other hand, the feeling of integration that comes with more narrowly physical pleasures–sex being the obvious example–still produce this feeling of integration, though it tends not to last long beyond the climax, the peak of intensity like Isolde’s climax in the Liebestod. Isolde is so poetically integrated, through her love, that she promptly expires once she stops singing. So, incidentally, does Senta in Dutchman. Wagner seems to have had a thing for connecting love, sex, and death, though in a rather earthily German, pagan, manner. But anyway, hence the ubiquitous and perhaps understandable confusion of love with sensual ecstasy. If there isn’t this integration of ideas, both intellectual and sensuous, the illusion of total integration disappears once the physical stimulation abates. In the Name of The Rose Eco quotes (coins?) a latin phrase to the effect that all creatures are despondent after sex. Another operatic example might be the thrumming ecstasy of the horns in the prelude of Rosenkavalier, which is followed by a languid post-coital calm, and a lovely little lament from the Marschallin recognizing that this won’t last, as Octavian nestles his sleepy, teenage head between her breasts.
So. Improvement of the mind and pleasure. I suppose it’s somewhat Epicurean, though in the original sense of trying to find valuable pleasures, rather than what seems to be the contemporary meaning of pleasures of any kind. Difficult pleasures, as Harold Bloom says. Temporary, trivial pleasures leave one feeling empty afterwards. They contribute nothing to one’s overall being, indeed, they distract one from further integration. Titillation. Philosophers have tended to ignore this side of experience; I think Roger Scruton has written a book about the philosophy of sex (which I haven’t read), but by and large the austere fraternity of philosophers seem to have thought it beneath their dignity. If Dasein doesn’t get hungry, it certainly never gets a hard-on.
Anyway. I’m downloading some stuff from iTunes, and there are still about 20 minutes to go, so I’ll keep writing. So at the moment, as I started out by saying, I’ve emerged from a rather unpleasant relationship with a morose and moody girl racked with complexities and insecurities. On the horizon is the possibility of a much more pleasant relationship with a cheerful, good-natured sort, though this is complicated by the fact that we communicate in German, a second language for both of us. This makes it difficult for us to be transparent to one another in the sense that I find interesting and absorbing in a relationship. I suppose it does have compensations, particularly if both are of a playful disposition and feel a degree of attraction for one another: one finds oneself pleasantly groping around the awkward landscape of words for some relevant meaning, and spying in the other’s twinkling eyes the same delicious effort. Of course this is only fun because it’s couched in an atmosphere of suppressed excitement, shot through with an electric frisson of interest. There’s also the playful freedom a foreign language permits, as Hans Castorp discovers in The Magic Mountain when he awkwardly confesses his love for Madame Chauchat in French. One might say things in another language that one normally wouldn’t in one’s own; one can (or in some cases is forced to) express oneself with much less precision than one’s caution might normally permit, and so allow for the expression of much larger and dramatic chunks of meaning. Of course, this can sometimes backfire, and expressions of caution can become outright condemnations; but usually, especially with the background of good-will and affectionate desire held in check by a token decorum that provide the context for such conversations, such negative misunderstandings are rare. Naturally, even with this background context meanings occasionally remain elusive, getting lost in a delightful, bewildering opacity of diction. One girl once told me: “I’m so happy my food is glad to cry!” I never quite understood exactly what she meant, but I knew that, whatever it meant, it was a good thing. And so it turned out, too.
Filed under: Ramblings
