The pursuit of pleasure is fraught
business. Unlike work, pleasure allows
little resort to edit or restart. Of unsuccessful first tries. False starts
rarely afford pleasurably cathartic outcomes.
Because of its convulsively short and/or
zipless long-form character – the release of laughter, a good nights sleep, the
poor man’s opera of sex – the pursuit of pleasure is unforgiving. To
repeat, to try again, is to eat the bitter pill of diminishing returns.
The phenomenon of diminishing return is the
surest evidence of the unlikelihood of intelligent design, or compelling testament
to universal governance by malignant demiurge. Take for example pain relief or intoxication. And for example opiates – which fills both bills. Remedy for real somatic
agony and relief from the existential pain of intolerably persistent consciousness. In
both cases the more one doses the less effective the anodyne.
The solo pursuit of pleasure presents less
risk than dyadic attempts. No witnessed doubling down on dumb or disappointment
shared in lone failure. Disappointment squared is more than twice the sum of its perceptual
parts and twice the moral stupefaction. The pursuit of delight in groups is mostly outside my experience … but I would imagine, with groups, that joy and
disappointment are both dilute.
Work, brought to the party in the first
paragraph is, to my mind, the more reliable vehicle (with its historically
generous accommodation of false start and edit) of temporal gratification – of compensation
for our subjection to time-bound existence. As in anticipation of pleasure one
doesn’t so much long for work itself as much as pine for labor’s reliable production
of contemplative time - time-suspension, engendered by work’s absorptive
possibility. Granting probation from the bondage of self – a concordant
precinct of pleasure - and the near-miraculous millisecond of gratification
upon work’s provisionally successful completion.
Unlike our organism, our self’s, incessant
longing, demand, for pleasure … with its commensurate program of waning yields … the desire to work (when pursued
with something less than obsession and something more than moderation) is positively
diametrical to the parlous Fata Morgana of pleasure seeking.
I do realize that I habitually contradict
myself and talk shite in these, my serial blog-ditherings. But some
Bizarro-World Hercules has got to shovel still-steaming bullshit (or is it horseshit?) into the Internet’s cavernous Augean Stables. And
I’m just the redemption-through-work, recovering-Calvinist, for the anti-heroic
job. Amen, and pass the mixed metaphor ammunition.
