Delight

Originally Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I've been thinking about the kind of writing I can do here.  I can report on something that I think might go unnoticed.  I can analyze a thing that everyone knows about, or I can editorialize. . . that is, opine.  Or I can tell a story.  In Ars Poetica, Horace says that the object of art is to instruct and delight.  Maybe he said to instruct or delight.  And I think he was talking about plays.  And maybe he was full of it, but still, his maxim has been handed down through the centuries as a result of the misreading of European critics.  Any way it shakes out. . . I'd rather delight. 

Being pedantic has never worked for me.  I am very open minded, and I can learn from anyone, even people who bore me or piss me off.  It is because, I think, I have the "learning gene."  I swear there must be one.  I take great pride in being able to learn from the most hated of men or women.  With a wave of the hand, my friends will dismiss someone who they find an incredible bore, someone with whom they disagree.  I am usually much the opposite.  I pay less attention to those who are saying the same thing as I.  I like to be surprised by things. 

For all of it, though, I know I've never changed anyone's mind through argument.  I am too cold and ruthless and mocking.  It is not that I feel I win every argument, but I am surprised when someone best's me, and both delighted and embarrassed.  And when I win. . . I am usually sad because I am less liked than I was before.  It never pays to show people you are right unless it is in a court of law. 

And so I seek to entertain in some way and thus to flirt someone down the path to enlightenment.  I don't want to take them screaming and kicking.  If they laugh and clap and follow me down whatever hideous path I am on. . . well, that's just good company. 

And now that I've written this (because I had no story to tell), I wonder into which of the categories I have offered it falls?  I cannot tell.  And perhaps that is just as well.  I like things that fall between the gaps, into the chiasma between categories, places where assumptions are shown to be false constructs of a conforming mind. 

I'm sure Horace was alright, a bright guy and all of that.  But Diogenes. . . now there was a fearsome fellow.