#beyond pleasure

[whisperthatruns]

Beyond Pleasure

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important (however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains. Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods, beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when he was writing on acid he was not writing about it. He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back to what he knew then. Poetry registers feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process. Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux to give us time to see each thing separate and enough. The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward to know its merit with attention.

Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

[peachpulpeuse]

What is really valuable in art has, paradoxically, little to do with the aesthetic pleasure we may derive from it… It is a difficult case to argue, but Lacan has a stab at it on several occasions. One memorable instances follows an account of a sort of reverie he experiences looking out of a hotel window over the city of Baltimore just before dawn. A neon sign flashes the change of time every minute as cars stream through the streets. He is struck first by the thoroughly man-made, artificial nature of the landscape and then by a sense of the spectator’s intermittence, or fading. He concludes, “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.” Lacan is pointing out that the unconscious is not some natural wellspring of desire. It is cultural (and indeed linguistic) through and through, a differential network of discontinuous and combinatory signifiers. The cityscape figures the unconscious as a field of flickering signifiers… I imagine Lacan briefly illuminated by neon signs or passing headlights and then adrift in a darkened, anonymous hotel room.

Margaret Iversen, "Encounter: Breton Meets Lacan" from Beyond Pleasure (2007)