21 Our pleasure and our pain, our happiness and our envy, tell us each hour whether we balance or we fall. We live in the best of all possible worlds for mankind because we have been so adapted and developed that this world cannot be anything else to us; we are best and happiest in a tensional, tightrope situation, but one in which we can gain increasing skill as we go higher. Height in this situation is principally definable by our ability to destroy ourselves. The higher we go, the steadier – and what is steadiness if not a form of equality? – we must become. Or we fall.
THE MECHANISM OF THE TENSION
22 The fundamental tension is between pleasure and pain; and the three chief fields in which pleasure-pain operates are in the subsidiary tensions formed by good-evil, beauty-ugliness and security-insecurity. The fundamental truth about all these tensions is that their ‘good’ poles are totally dependent for their ‘goodness’ – their value to us – on their ‘bad’ counterpoles. We all know this: that too much beauty can become ugliness, pain can become a profound pleasure… and so with all the rest.
23 Beauty-ugliness may serve as a model for the mechanism of the other tensions. Just as there are two modes of pleasure, intended and fortuitous, so are there two similar modes in our apprehension of beauty: objective and actual The objective beauty of an object or experience is immutable, in parenthesis from all the subjective reactions and feelings of the experiencer. The actual beauty is what I happen to feel on a given occasion; it is the effect of the object or experience on my being at that moment.
24 We are taught as children to think about great art (and indeed many other things, such as religion) in the objective way, as if every actual experience of a great painting should produce the same effect on us. We see the results of this in any famous art gallery during the holiday season: the gaping, wooden-faced crowds who stare at great art and cannot understand why they are not having great-art reactions, because they have been so conditioned that they cannot accept that in actuality a Coca-Cola advertisement may be more beautiful than the sublimest Michelangelo.
25 Objective beauty is, of course, a myth – a very convenient myth, without which education in art and the ‘science’ of artistic appreciation would be impossible, and also a very human myth, since to search for the objective beauty in an object is to attempt to see it with the finer feelings of one’s fellow-men. All great works of art are secular ikons; and seeing them objectively is a secular act of communion.
26 But the objective beauty has two great enemies: reality and familiarity. The total reality of an aesthetic experience is what we actually feel both in and out of the parenthesis. Familiarity breeds contempt, that is, boredom with the parenthesis. Seeing the objective beauty becomes a duty, and we all know that the concepts of duty and pleasure are rarely sympathetic; the second visit to a gallery is also a visit to the first visit. This is not to say that all repetitions of beautiful experiences diminish the original beauty. It is often not true of art, and is certainly not generally true of many other activities – such as lovemaking. Nonetheless, there is a deep and archetypal hatred of routine in man, caused by the demands of survival (survival is the correct performance of drills, whether they be the hunting-planting drills of primitive man or the wage-seeking labour drills of industrial man). Pleasure is associated strongly with the unexpected (the fortuitous mode) and the fresh, or previously unexperienced, beauty.
27 It is of course possible to experience this beauty, which I will call virgin, in familiar objects, just as a metaphorical virginity can be found in a lover long after the literal virginity has passed. Such virgin beauty is commonly felt by almost all children, by poets and artists, and sometimes as an effect of certain drugs, like alcohol and lysergic acid. But to the vast majority of adults it can be found only in the new experience.
28 It is true that we find substitutes for the loss of the virgin beauty of an object. This picture is beautiful because it is mine; because I own it, or remember it, or understand its secrets. The thing becomes my thing; not the thing in itself. Experience cedes to possession.
29 The whole trend of modern society is to force the objective beauty down our throats. It is this beauty that concerns critics; and we are an age of critics. It is this beauty that concerns commerce. Mass communications, vulgarizing techniques, the substitution of twentieth-century didactic culture for nineteenth-century didactic morality as a proof that the propagating organ ‘serves’ the public, the spread of museums and art galleries, the flood of books of information – all these things force us, fundamentally actual beings, to see the world in a parenthetically objective way.
30 The great contemporary attraction of the drugs and philosophies – such as Zen Buddhism – that facilitate the discovery of virgin beauty in familiar objects is explicable by our resentment of this pressure modern society puts on us. There are genuine and important uses for the objective beauty; but sometimes we want less of names, less of labels, less of analysis and historical placing – in a word, less ‘culture’. We want nothing to stand between the object or experience now and the mind and senses now. We want the thing in itself.
31 In wanting this, and in being forced to search for the previously unexperienced, we put ourselves in the same situation as Midas. Everything he touched turned to gold, and from then on became useless to him. We crave the virgin beauty, but as soon as we experience it, it turns to gold… or boredom. We have to move on. The satisfaction of the desire is the creation of a new desire.
32 But there is of course a further element in our pursuit of the virgin experience of beauty. Even the most unobservant must have noticed that the same inexorable law applies here as applies with hunger: the evil or apparently hostile state is necessary for our enjoyment of the good or ‘friendly’ one.
33
34 The same is true of all the other great tensions. A pleasure is all the more pleasurable for coming after a period of pain. Security, for following insecurity. Good, for following evil. It is true that we may not actively seek the ‘bad’ counterpoles and our swing away from the ‘good’ ones may be characterized more by apathy than by actually inflicting pain on ourselves, or risking our lives meaninglessly, or engaging in crime. Nevertheless we cannot do without the alternation of these opposed states, and we will encourage the alternation to the extent that we feel deprived, by the defects of society and education, by the unnecessary inequality in our world, of the virgin experiences we need.
35 In our present unhappy stage of civilization – come so far, so little learned – it is natural that many should regard the essential thing to be the virgin experience, whether it occurs among the socially ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poles. They will find a justification for crime (a case brilliantly put by Jean Genet), for non-criminal evil (persistent adultery, ruthless commercial practice and so on) and for insecurity (the pursuit of dangerous interests and professions, such as mountaineering and car-racing).
36 Even those who try to find their pleasures in the ‘good’ poles will just as much need, even if they do not actively seek experience in, the ‘bad’ poles.
37 Now it may seem at first sight that this alternating mechanism reaches so deep into our innermost beings, and into the innermost being of our societies, that we can do nothing about it. But this is to say that reason and science can do nothing against the pleasure principle and our addiction to the virgin experience; that we can never control the violent effects that these tensions at present exert on each of us and the societies we live in. I reject totally this pessimistic and fatalistic view of human destiny, and I want to suggest the model and method we should examine for a solution.
THE MANIPULATION OF THE TENSIONS
38 The model is marriage; the method is transposition; and what we hope to achieve is not of course the abolition of all tension, but the avoidance of wasted energy, pointless battle and unnecessary suffering. It is necessary to drink water; but it should not be necessary to drink polluted water.
39 Joining is a first principle; the proton joins the electron, the atoms by joining grow in complicacy, make molecules by joining, amoeba joins amoeba, male joins female, mind mind, country country: existence is being joined. Being is joining, and the higher the being the more the joining.
