EthicalDative

Sontag: “When suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be intense.” [Porno]
Excessive susceptibility to the visual; is this the most “intellectual” of the senses?
Ortega: “La dirección en que el ver va diferenciándose del palpar consiste en estas dos notas: el alejamiento progresivo del objeto que hiere el sentido y el irse convirtiendo ese objeto en puro color… En rigor, las cosas que hay detrás de los colores no le interesan.”
The need for visual stimulus denotes inhibitedness or deficient sensuality (defective sexuality).
The imagination: porno = fairytale. Healthy realization of fantasies.
Datum: It’s more fun to watch than to do the acts portrayed.
Datum: It’s hard to envisage exotic sex with persons one knows fairly well (and likes?).

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Written in the 70s, 70s-8. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

… We’ll have sex if you love me. Or: We’ve had sex; how can you not love me? Or: We love each other; let’s marry so we can close the deal in bed. Or: My self-respect is so down; I can’t risk having sex and then your pulling out.
My verse failed insofar as it tried to “express” me and my personal history. The advice: “Get more emotion!” was non-productive or even obstructive, maybe because of the false way I understood and tried to implement it. It caused me to delve into the past and try to
locate things I could feel strongly about; then to try to construct poems around those feelings. I was dead to the past.
Sontag’s emphasis on form as content, source of emotional power, seems more pertinent. *Essay on Bresson.*

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Written in the 70s, 70s-7a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Written in the 70s, 70s-7. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Abstraction: flight from interpretation: return the sensual to art (music as well).
The person who violently and persistently jars his senses with drugs, sex, food, is the opposite of voluptuous; he is frigid. The capacity for sensuality is in inverse proportion to the power of the stimuli needed to experience pleasure. The sybarite is impotent, the ascetic a voluptuary.
A negative effect of graduate school was disenchantment with critical thought. The effort to write engendered a silly disdain of ideas and analytical process.
How easily he surrenders to games. Ambition retires to the courts.
The insertion of beads…
Sex is the currency of exchange in most sentimental transactions: I love you;