In a message dated 12/28/13 4:08:06 PM, [email protected] writes:
> might aesthetic reflection work better - and allow the ecstasy be > understood as affect > > For some it certainly may. For me it doesn't, because I see three different stages in the kind of aesthetic event I'm addressing. First, the raw-data encounter with the work -- seeing it, hearing it, reading it. Second, the almost immediate reaction -- the feeling I'm now calling aesthetic ecstasy. Third, any subsequent attempt to articulate what just happened, and how I felt, and (to the extent possible) why. I persist in feeling third stage amounts to my "reflections". They can go on for a long time after the ecstasy itself is over. If you go to GOOGLE and enter the two words "Reflections on" you see a large number of essays with titles that begin that way, and, for me, that period of reflection is, for me, unmistakably different from the ecstasy. (Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION runs to 98,000 words. In literature-appreciation, there have been "Reflections on" given short stories that are longer than the story itself, and they are cerebral events, not the "feeling" itself.) But exactly what I've been claiming is that individual "words" do not "have" "meanings". That second stage -- the "ecstasy" -- is emotional, a "feeling", and I personally think of "reflections" as something collected in tranquility. If I burn my hand by encountering flame at the stove, I wouldn't think of the pain as a reflection on the flame. But that's my own personal word-use. If a different use works for someone else, there's no way I can call them "wrong". At most I might claim their use will occasion an unwanted notion in many readers (I often did that as an editor), but I could be wrong about that.
