Positivity

[leafofgrass]

I'm getting pretty tired of election doom-and-gloom already.  I'm as guilty as the next fellow, but, really, haven't we had some time to get it out of our system by now?  If one plans on doing something, then do it, but enough sitting around complaining.  I, for one, plan on retiring back into my former sardonic ways and wait for the next major

Comments

[arynash]

Even with happiness staring us right in the face, there seems to be some constant impulse to pursue some kind of perfection that will never be discovered in someone else (or ourselves, for that matter). Realizing that it is the other person's imperfections that make you love them is quite possible the most beautiful thing that can happen because at that point you become free to simply love instead of having to cast an image of yourself to fit with the mold you have already made of the other.

I found this reflection particularly beautiful, (not to mention relevant to my life right now.) Cog Sci people have done some studies of beauty, or so I have been told, and when you construct an absolutely "perfect" face- it is ugly and terrifying.

Actually, all of this reminds me of the first two or three of the Duino Elegies. Every Angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you. Rilke goes on to say that beauty or perfection would annihilate us. Our insurmountable imperfections (as opposed to those we can in fact overcome), are part of what make us us. Remove them, and we would no longer exist. Perhaps what makes life bearable for us is it's imperfections, as you so elequently say...

Oh, and that dinner description? I'm drooling.

[leafofgrass]

Cog Sci research on beauty, frankly, frightens me. In fact, Cog Sci research on anything frightens me. As a good Merleau-Pontean, I'm not scared of science in general, but that one just strikes me as particularly misguided.

With that said, I'm glad that someone found some value in my words. I sometimes fear I'm being a bit cheesey--especially after that St. Andres!

And for the record--my dissertation is going to be on a concept of life/experience that revolves around affectivity.

[arynash]

Cog Sci research on anything frightens me.

Oh well, I guess you really shouldn't be friends with me then- I'm something of a cognitive scientist- or on my way to being. Sort of. I just intend to incorporate it in my work.

I guess what I found particularly insightful about that nugget of thought above was the insight it gives into a certain sort of fear of commitment: the fear that something out there is better, and the strangely entailed fear that we are not good enough for what we have found.

I'm actually working on a poem that deals with these issues. I think some of these ideas might be incorporated as the poem develops.