diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | aesthetics.txt | 52 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unused.txt | 2 |
2 files changed, 54 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/aesthetics.txt b/aesthetics.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..429a0ce --- /dev/null +++ b/aesthetics.txt @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +I tore the rear air conditioning unit off the back of the bus today. It [joins the front unit](/jrnl/2015/09/progress) in the growing pile of bus trash at the side of our house. + +I've been thinking about the feeling I got after I was done and I stood back and looked at the Travco, the way those lines and curves all came back together, sliding smooth and unbroken down the back until they dip back under and forward again, unified, the way the designers intended them. The big blue bus looked whole again. + +It gave me a feeling somewhere between the satisfaction of thinking that perhaps, amidst the insanity, you've made some tiny thing right in the world, and the joy eating dark chocolate. The aesthetic perfection of hundred percent dark chocolate. + +I feel like maybe this is not coming out right. Probably I should read Kant or someone with something serious to say about aesthetics, but then it all gets very technical and is predicated on the belief that there is an absolute sense of "good" and "bad" to aesthetics. Maybe metaphors about dark chocolate are good enough. If the dark chocolate is good enough. + +I don't know if it would make Kant proud or angry that I tore out an object of convenience and comfort because apparently I value aesthetic integrity and beauty more than personal comfort. + +He might think I was an idiot to forego the comfort of a magical thing beyond his imagining. The problem is I've never been able to get through more than a few pages of <cite>Critique of Judgment</cite> without being overcome with a desire to reach back through time and give the man a hug[^1] and say, relax, it's all going to be okay. + +Aesthetics have always seemed pretty simple to me. There is stuff in the world that makes you feel delight. So when you discover this beauty and delight in the world around you, you embrace it and do what you can in service of it[^2]. Like removing ugly air conditioners. + +Consider dark chocolate. I'd never really had any until I started dating my wife. I thought chocolate was something that skins a cheap candy bar full of nougat and indecipherable ingredients. The first time my wife gave me a bit of real chocolate was revelatory. The possibilities of life expanded, I had discovered more joy and beauty. Aesthetic progress you might say. + +I think coming up with a personal philosophy of aesthetics is very important. It's also a life long process, aesthetics are always in flux, that's part of what drives us all to want to know what's around the next corner, over the next hill. As naturalist and herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy writes, "I believe that this endless search for beauty in surroundings, in people and one's personal life, is the headstone of travel." + +Otherwise why go? Adventure? That's part of it too I suppose, though there's precious little real adventure left in the world. There are other reasons, like getting outside your own culture, your own reality tunnel, but for me at least a big part of it is that search for beauty. + +My own aesthetics are like yours I imagine, complicated and often contradictory, nothing so firmly delineated as to please Kant. But one thing I have figured out is that comfort is transitory, while the aesthetic, what is beautiful, is not[^3]. + + + +aesthetics and emotion are tied together. + + +Which is to say, removing the air conditioner might mean that I end up hot, sweating and unable to sleep, but this too, as they say, shall pass. I won't *always* be hot sweaty and unable to sleep. I will always have to look at the air conditioning wart that used to be on top of the bus. Comfort must be chased; beauty exists. + +Comfort is not just a fleeting thing you have to chase though. Our definition of comfort is relative and ever-changing as well. Like most things comfort is highly relative. Worse, we're quite often mistaken about what actually makes us comfortable, especially in the long run. + +I thought about this a lot when I was [in Seam Reap](/jrnl/2006/03/angkor-wat). It was hot, hotter than anything I have experienced before or since. Hotter than [Death Valley](/jrnl/2010/04/death-valley). I was traveling with Matt and Debi at the time and somehow we convinced ourselves that we didn't need air conditioning. To be honest I think it was Matt that convinced Debi and I. But he was right. + +During the day we spent our time outside exploring Angkor Wat in the heat of the day, when the rest of the tourists were passing the time in air conditioned cafés). We went out in the heat of the day precisely because it was hot, because hardly any other tourists did. We had Angkor Wat to ourselves. + +We could have returned home to a nice air conditioned room. But if you do that you never adapt. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable machine over the long run. You get used to the heat. This never happens if you retreat to air conditioning at every opportunity. + +At night we would crank the ceiling fan to 11 and then, one after the other, take the coldest shower we could get, which was just below scalding because the water tank was in the sun all day, and then dive in our respective beds in hopes that we'd would fall asleep before the real sweating started. + +What does this slightly masochistic experiment have to do with aesthetics? Nothing directly, but I came away with from that experience knowing that comfort is relative, both psychologically and physiologically. If you're going to be spending a lot of time in the heat it makes more sense to push through a bit of discomfort until you start to adapt to it than it does to hide out in air conditioning all the time. + +By the same token it makes more sense to tear out aesthetically unpleasant air conditioning units than it does to keep them. Comfort is transitory, aesthetics are not. + +That said, I am not the only one living in the Travco. Also, I do like to have my dark chocolate and eat it too. Also, would I subject my kids to Seam Reap without air conditioning? No. Children are physiologically different, their bodies aren't as good at cooling themselves. + +That's why I took the now useless 110V wire from the roof air conditioner, extended it with some new wire and rerouted it behind the closet and down to where the refrigerator used to be, where there is now plenty of room for a window air unit, which will serve as our new air conditioner and heater. We'll never be able to run the air for long off the batteries, but we should be able to run it enough to cool things off in the evening before bed (and we can run it as much as we like if there's shore power around). + +If it does get so hot that no one in my family is happy, or god forbid, our dark chocolate starts to melt, we'll do what people with movable homes have done for millennia -- go somewhere else. + +[^1]: And Schopenhauer, that man really needed a hug. Actually most white male philosophers in European history seem like they would have benefited from more hugs. +[^2]: If you don't embrace your own aesthetics, capitalism is always there to provide simpler, numeric terms by which to define value. Choose wisely. +[^3]: There is of course fleeting beauty, e.g. sunsets. The shortness of some beautiful natural phenomena do not, however, effect our judgment of them as beautiful. It just means we only have a limited amount of time to enjoy them. @@ -1,4 +1,6 @@ +Beauty is subjective though. Maybe you don't see the beauty in the Travco, maybe you see a petroleum guzzling ecological disaster on wheels, air conditioning or no. Fair enough, though I would strongly suggest looking into one's own energy before passing judgment on another[^2]. +[^2]: You can calculate your rough carbon footprint over at tk, though do consider the backstory -- the average house [weighs 500,000 pounds](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/asktheexpert/2002122968_homehay19.html), much of it wood that had to be clear cut and hauled around. I don't know the footprint of building a Travco, but I do know it only weighs about 5000 pounds. Then there's a coal we don't have to burn to generate electricity... Check out Bob's rather lengthy post on this topic over at [CheapRVLiving.com](http://www.cheaprvliving.com/blog/proof-that-off-grid-vandwelling-is-greener-than-housedwelling/). I don't know precisely how to articulate it, but I can say this, |