Philosophy is my academic background, if you didn’t know. I took classes on political theory, logic, phenomenology, existentialism, metaphysics, ethics, language, all that. My alma mater leans quite heavily into aesthetics, meaning a lot of the professors’ academic focuses were on things like beauty or color. I took only one of these, a class called “The Objectivity of Beauty”. The class revolved around the idea that contrary to popular belief, beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder (beauty here referring to a judgment of “good” for the object’s aesthetic qualities, can apply to music, film, art, whatever.) I don’t remember it super well, I think one of the points was that when people disagree on if something is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, it comes from a difference in knowledge of or attunement to the work; another was that many things are immanently beautiful and don’t require deliberation, so they must have some intrinsic property that resonates with the viewer e.g. sunsets. I can buy some of this, I guess, one doesn’t need much background on light refraction or the color wheel to appreciate the purple hues of twilight.
Well, something has happened to me recently, I have more room in me for beautiful things. Colors and their contrasts are sharper, my skin is more sensitive to the sun and the wet, and sounds feel like they’re finding a home of couple inches deeper into my skull. A couple of times a day, I’ll feel like crying because I’m overwhelmed by sheer sensory input. I feel like cobwebs have been dusted away from those specific areas of grey matter, that I’m feeling things for the first time in a while, not emotionally, but physically, kinetically. I’ve always loved music and it has always had a way of willing me into movement, but recently, I can’t seem to listen without frisson, without the songs boiling out of my lungs and erupting out of my throat. I can’t seem to ignore the different textures and shades of green in the park, the feeling of my feet on hot pavement. Of course, I’ve always perceived these things, but I suppose it was a kind of passive consumption, mindlessly processing and disregarding stimuli throughout the day. I don’t think I’ve ever really paid attention to what it is I’m looking at, not in any intentional sense. And that makes sense to me, the world I’ve lived in is purely mental, I’m sitting on a bus mindlessly gazing out the window-I see the road signs, but my mind is elsewhere.
In my phenomenology class, we studied this guy named Merleau-Ponty, who was trying to explain the quirks of human perception and its relationship with the material and how that impacts, well, everything. I don’t remember the class well, but I do remember a big point from the professor. “You are where your attention is.” At least I think that’s what it was, but the general point is that your consciousness, you, is not isolated inside your head, but is pointed at the things you perceive. We do not take the material into ourselves and reduce it to thoughts nor do we simply reflect the object as a mirror, we burst outwards, we entangle, we intertwine ourselves and our senses with the material, we share the same flesh at the moment of perceiving. The one doing the seeing and the object being seen are interdependent. We’re things among things, we’re perceptual objects and perceiving subjects and all that. Two quotes of his to think about because I certainly can’t articulate the point.
“Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside of myself”
“The world is… the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
I guess I was thrown out of myself and into the world, which would explain the sensitivity of recent. It’s been nice, though I am suspicious that I am having a low-grade mental breakdown or descent into psychosis. Time will tell. For now, however, I’m enjoying feeling the world and taking in the sense of it all. Maybe there is some objectivity to aesthetics, it feels like qualities are much more immediate to me now. And there’s also this craving I have to go feel something beautiful, whether that be a gust of wind or a flower patch or my feet on cool rocks. My sister gave me a long lecture today over Zoom on the history of the modern architecture movement, I’d like to see some of those buildings in person. It’s hard to intertwine over the internet. I want to stand in a church and look up and see the details. I think tomorrow I’ll drive to Atlanta and go to the botanical gardens, maybe eat some food I’ve never had.
Sorry I haven’t written in a while, if you can tell by today’s quality, I haven’t had much of anything to say. I’ve got like three half-written posts like this in the drafts but I just don’t know how to word what I want to convey. For this one, I just figured I might as well post something just so I don’t take too many days off. I don’t really know what the point is, I guess that the mania continues and the world is nice to be in and I crave more of it. That’s about it.
Morning of the Next Day
I’m sick. Great.
jeez, louise 