is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself.
There was no human pyramid at last night�s party, but there was dancing, and raucous hilarity, and some lovely conversing. A good number of people showed up, and it just was a lot of fun to be wearing a foxy gown and throwing a party. I am seriously in love with my own dress! I made four cakes, and one of them I just made up the recipe for yesterday: a jasmine green tea chocolate cake. It�s GOOD. I also made the famous white spice cake, a butter cake with bittersweet chocolate ganache, and a banana cake with toasted coconut and almonds in it. And of course some mulled wine. It was a good party and a lovely evening and has left me with a very happy feeling, even as I spent hours washing dishes today.
Right now I am thankful for the leftover butter cake with ganache. It�s like a moist yellow cake coated with a soft high-quality chocolate bar. In my mouth.
After round two of endless dishwashing I settled in on the couch with a blanket and attempted to watch television. I couldn't find anything I wanted to stick with. I thought of watching Spirited Away to see my boyfriend who is sometimes a dragon but also secretly the river who saved me from drowning as a child. But I wasn�t sure I was up to its demands. Anyway, so what did I do in my hungover but happy state? I read me some Levinas. Not exactly what you�d expect on a hangover day, but there it is.
[Last night David K., Gus, and I were trying to determine whether I have any lowbrow tastes in reading. They like sci fi of the middlebrow kind and I couldn�t think of anything in my life that parallels that. I mean, I read Nietzsche when I go hiking and George Eliot or Austen or a Bronte when I want to escape. But today I realized that my lowbrow reading is actually the lowest of the low: trashy magazines like Us Weekly whenever I go somewhere on a train or a plane.]
So I was reading this Levinas essay called �On Escape� (a favorite of mine, the essay and, I suppose, also, the escape), and I realized that this is some of the sexy philosophy of which I spoke recently when I was making fun of Sartre�s unsexiness. So here:
�Pleasure appears as it develops. It is neither there as a whole, nor does it happen all at once. And furthermore, it will never be whole or integral. Progressive movement is a characteristic trait of this phenomenon, which is by no means a simple state. This is a movement that does not tend toward a goal, for it has no end. It exists wholly in the enlargement of its own amplitude, which is like the rarefaction of our existence, or its swooning. In the very depths of incipient pleasure there opens something like abysses, ever deeper, into which our existence, no longer resisting, hurls itself. There is something dizzying to pleasure�s unfolding�.�
Yeah, I know. Maybe philosophy isn�t sexy. You can think that if you want. But I�m a philosopher. And I�m bringing sexy back.
But when I go to job interviews, I leave sexy at home.
The point is: pleasure isn�t the result of a decision I made to be pleased. To think of pleasure that way is to misunderstand how it works: it �works� prior to or even despite the ability the mind has to conceive of everything that happens to one�s body as the content of a thought. But pleasure is not the content of a thought. And that�s why it�s sexy. It�s an escape, if only temporary, from the weight of existence. And it is a real way of relating to another person that is not the content of a thought. Its affectivity�the fact that it is something we undergo, something that affects us rather than something we master or think our way through�that is its power. And its affectivity is not the sign of escape nor the thought of escape but the escape itself.
Of course, the means by which we escape is the same as that by which we come to know that existence is a weight: the body. So the escape is temporary. We�re always brought back to existence. But that doesn�t render escape unimportant, my friend, not at all.
9:25 p.m. - December 17, 2006
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