ontological ruminations - buckets, peaks and perfect peaches
Jun 2, 2021 14:02:01 GMT
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Post by rayge on Jun 2, 2021 14:02:01 GMT
Ahem, I stated writing this a week or so ago, but got Porlocked halfway through, and have just rediscovered it lurking in an unconsidered tab, when I was looking for something else entirely....
Because Snee's excellent comic thread has gone a bit serious navel-gazing walkabout (actually quite difficult to gaze at your navel while walking about, unless you are robustly indifferent to collisions with lamp-posts), partly my fault, I thought I would start this one for my more abstruse speculations on meaning, fulfillment and that sort of stuff - not to forget nonsense, which gets a bad rap in some quarters not too distant.
Anyway, let's lurch back to the point, or at least the approach to the point: in that thread I said "The bucket list seems to me to be in thrall to an idea, a world view, that I personally think is mistaken: that joy, pleasure, excitement, completeness, whatever, is intrinsic in things and places and experiences, rather than the person. Mistaking the map for the territory," and then, not to be too self-quoter extraordinaire, about it, "What I'm saying is that making happiness, fulfillment, etc dependent on things outside yourself can often lead to disappointment whether you achieve them or not...I engage with the world in front of me and seek the joy fulfilment, etc. in that, rather than yearning."
What the bucket-list concept is about, especially the canon list, is the idea of peak experience; the unique, or at least very singular feelings you feel on standing before, in or under some natural or man-made wonder, which, having felt them, will give your life more meaning (assuming of course you have the leisure to contemplate any higher purpose than staying alive). A corollary of this is that without these experiences your life will have been poorer, that you will somehow have failed to fulfill your potential: the age-old trick of advertising, stimulating feelings of inadequacy, fear of missing out.
And here's the thing. I didn't define 'peak experience' in any way, but I bet that when you read the phrase in the last paragraph you had some idea of what it meant. Perhaps - probably - not the same as I meant by it, but something drawn from your own experience of life, good memories and transient epiphanies.We're all capable of that response to certain events in life, even though they are often quite mundane. Look at that story about the puppy in India by preludin's resident sensitive lout. Obviously deeply affecting and memorable, but that's not not because it was India, or a puppy, although no doubt they helped, but because of what he felt, his experience, which came from within. As it always does
And that capacity for epiphany, for peak experience, can, in my experience, attach itself to quotidian moments, too, no transcendent triggers (nor drugs) required. There's a few fleeting seconds I recall from various times in my life that were indeed no more or less eventful from those surrounding them, and their persistence has no particular reason, to the extent that I sometimes conjecture that their specialness was, ahem, 'caused by' the number of times it would pop up in my future.
But anyway: one summer day in the late 1960s or very early 1970s I was walking in Kent, somewhere south of Canterbury, in an area I wasn't particularly familiar with, no idea now where I started out, where I was headed. I just know that I came to a major road, probabnly the A2, that I had to cross, and on the other side, there was a stall, or a farm shop, or something - it was right in the countryside, no shops and few buildings - and they were selling peaches. I was thirsty - it was a really hot day, cloudless and largely windless - so I bought one, shoved it in my bag, and walked on for a little bit before settling down in a field in the shade of a hedge with a view of rolling green ahead of me: I took out the peach, appreciating the heft of it, it's golden, downy glow and its warmth, raised it to my mouth inhaled its subtle and lovely fragrance and bit into it. Oh Dog what a rush, skin resisting teeth for a nanosecond, then yielding, then a gush and dribble of juice, nectarous perfection, the velvet fuzz texture of the skin on the roof of my mouth: it was just astonishing. The intensity of flavour (nb, this is before nectarines came on the market), pure essence of peachinesse that followed was unprecedented (fresh peaches were a seasonal rarity at this time in Britain, or at least in my experience of them, and were more usually encountered tinned in 'syrup').
I looked for that flavour again, but didn't find it. Now of course, I realise that this was because the essence of that flavour, that experience was that it was The First Time (and all the context thereof, although I have genuinely forgotten all of that - how I was feeling, why I was there). Subsequent peaches were compared to my astonished memory, whereas the experience I (re)wrote into that memory was comparing it to sugary stuff in tins served with condensed milk. Which illustrates the great fallacy behind the thought 'repeat the behaviour, repeat the feeling' which, as well as being the heart of many peoples' addictions, is implicit in the idea of the bucket list.
I've had a fair few of what I think of as momentary random epiphanies (as opposed to the genuinely human emotional peak experiences around new life, death, love, loss, triumph, fear, the usual bedraggled crew –not that havent had a fair few of those, too) through my life, from long since before I even knew what psychedelic meant, and they are something that happens to me, not something that I can program by taking a drug (it's a different and similar experience) or pressing a trigger. Joy is where it finds you.
