Aesthetic Experience

I have always felt silly telling people how something makes me feel, or even worse how I feel. I do not know why. It almost seems like we do not have the vocabulary to adequately describe how or even what we ourselves feel, and the words that we do use always seem so trite.

When reading a poem, listening to a song, meeting someone, reading a book, watching a movie--the question always comes up, what did you think. The answer such a question nearly always seems to imply an ethos affected answer. I felt..., it made me feel..., but does that describe the experience or even add to it. I do not think so. It was most assuredly part of the experience, but how does that define it, how can you use that to describe it? I am by no means a robot, so you(the ubiquitous 'you' who reads everything a I write...haha funny I know, but whoever you may be) do not think that. I just struggle with the concept of expression of something so delicate, so tenuous, that seems to hold by a thread to each memory, to each event--that it is impossible to separate how you felt from any memory any experience any event. That by saying how you felt and only how it felt or made you feel that you are somehow degrading the feeling by ripping it away. When I was in drama school (a long, long time ago) they told us to remember our most painful memory, not emotion we all had some painful emotion, think on it hard, then you would cry. Voila, tears.

That's just it. It is all about the memory itself, the emotions tied to it, unable to be separated. There always must be some sort of emotional investment in everything.

Now to end this rant on this fine morning while all my roommates are asleep and I the lone wakeful sit writing and unable to get to my coffee, will leave you with a link to something Carl Sagan did. Yes, Carl Sagan, the brilliant physicist, who wrote books, including Contact, which was later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and that Texan stoner guy who always seems to take off his shirt...Matthew something.... But he was a brilliant renaissance man, with an interesting view on many a thing, some of which I share with him. That's all for now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M