Information, Consciousness, Enjoyment

So I'm still thinking about my New York experience and how difficult it was for my "being" to bring about keen feelings of immediate pleasure at the moment of seeing (often great) scenes I've always heard about, read about or seen pictures of. Indeed, I often felt quite numb inside, as if I weren't quite there, like an awkward geek. Later, I thought perhaps it was a matter of too much information, like the physicist James Gleick talks about: information is everywhere, in a certain way it is what the world is made up of these days, we are all bashed up against it, inside and out, and it's hard to get away from it all, to become "innocent" again - - indeed, Yeats believed that it was important to remain innocent from too much experience in order that one could feel.

What would Yeats think now!

In his new book "Soul Dust", Nicholas Humphrey states his own belief that it is important that we are most vividly conscious of the unexpected, because consciousness is liked to curiosity and exploration. Seeing the Atlantic ocean, for instance, moved me more than the Metropolitan Museum, because I had no idea what the Atlantic Ocean looked like. I had seen so many pictures of the famous paintings in the Met - to be actually standing in front of a Van Gogh or a George O'Keefe or a Renoir or a Braque or (I'm just naming names who are popping into my head, not necessarily my favorites, just naming names) a Modigliani.....did not move me. They were not unexpected. The elderly European waiters in the delis were, for me, unexpected. I want the unexpected. I want the "je ne sais quoi" , alright, the magic of experience, but I want my experience to carry the magic of the unexpected.

Or, one could argue that my senses were simply on overload, that I'm a hopeless rube and that I was simply too numbed out, too much on overload, to be able to appreciate. But I DID appreciate the Schubert Theatre because I had never in my life imagined what the inside of the Schubert Theatre had ever looked like before. Same for Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Same for the show we saw, "Memphis". Same for hearing the licks played by the sixteen year old guitar player, Solomon Hicks. Same for Alan's Uncle Leo's sense of humor. I had no idea. That's what I thirst for.

That's why I read.

When I read a new (terrific) book, I am not a zombie. I am alive, lively, excited, filled with ideas. Or those (too few) times when I write a poem or create a piece of art - - these my consciousness becomes highly aroused because , even though the "doing" part comes from inside me, I have no idea what's going to occur, no idea about the finished state, and that's excitement, folks. At least for me. Writing anything carries that kind of color. It's something I've never seen before, even though I realize we all think approximately 98,000 thoughts a day and they pretty much duplicate each other day after day after day... still, there are always emergencies and accidents and chaos still strikes and chaos isn't always bad........

......anyway, I'm still just thinking. I don't KNOW anything, none of this is knowledge, it's all just thought, and not very deep thought, at that. Just random thinking. Oh, the allure of one's own mind, huh?

What a great place to come home to.