Anaesthesia

Anaesthesia, the lack of all aesthetics. The problem isn't having bad taste. It's having no feeling. I look over my life, and my biggest mistakes were when I just didn't feel enough to correctly guide my actions.

My Father an electrical engineer, once told me that he considered metaphor basically a mistake. He was an analyst (and an excellent one I believe), but didn't like feeling things very much unless he'd had a drink. But feelings rising in him were almost always smothered by a rush of anger. For him anger was a circuit breaker for feelings.

I think my seeing this as a trait/strategy led me to want to find an alternative in metaphor. For this purpose, for me, metaphor works because it comprises a meaning that no longer exists when the components are split. The division kills the phenomenon. Metaphors, symbols and meaning float for me above their component atoms, like the cloud of percussion attack sounds float in the air above the pitches of Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments. And while analysis may stop the meaning, it does not prove that the meaning doesn't exist.

Once I understood this, I could make peace with my dad's analysis, and place it in relation to my Mother's art. And I made the choice to create meaning wherever and whenever I could, because it was as important as creating anything else in this real world.