This post is more like a poem, with the protocol of the blog format as its limits, in the same way a haiku's constraints allow for a concentration of meaning. Let me break it down if I can so that maybe I will understand this novel approach to my own ideas better and so that if there is ever a reader of these posts they may understand better, where I am coming from.(time capsule should be an official form of literature, maybe message in a bottle pentameter?) This struck me as relevant to my interests concerning the other and the aesthetic and moral philosophical questions surrounding our perception of our selves and how we experience our own flesh. I suspect it is because of my most recent intensive encounter with a course in the field of aesthetics that has me arranging my thoughts(art speak-"couching my work") this way and in the manner of philosophers but I am finding the methods very useful if only as a key to interpret other artists and thinkers who have used these same keys and passages to construct this world view. The title is a composite of recent experiences. This would qualify the poem as a diary or journal entry. The composite consists of a conversation I had with a friend about how humans respond to cologne and perfume. She had recently purchased a shampoo that she thought smelled like old man, I believe it was Sandlewood. That would be the "Smell Without Taste". This phenomenon I find is also a product of commercial marketing and how an industry chooses to convey value without content. How do you make organic plastics smell and look like french fries but not have the actual cost of producing something from a potato? The Either/Or is a reference to a song by Elliot Smith and the title of first published work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. To quote the wikipedia page.
Appearing in two volumes in 1843 under the pseudonymous authorship of Victor Eremita (Latin for "victorious hermit") it outlines a theory of human development in which consciousness progresses from an essentially hedonistic, aesthetic mode to one characterized by ethical imperatives arising from the maturing of human conscience.
The picture of a boy with a sling shot used to market that specific brand. The brand name of that sling shot is called "The Wrist Rocket". I find the image iconic and nostalgic. The boy in that picture is probably in his eighties if he were still alive and yet it's is still used to market that product. I inherited my older brother's Wrist Rocket once he had died to his youth. This was about the time he inherited my mother's V8-Pontiac Le Mans. I think she moved on to an Olds mobile Omega. This calls to mind a story told to me by a close friend who had killed a bird with a blow dart gun he had bought at the Rosedale flea market. In his retelling of the story my friend conveyed his anguish as he realized what he had done, when his initial intent was to address the challenge not actually take a life. This in turn brings me back to the field of aesthetics and the concept of
Ekphrasis or ecphrasis, from the Greek description of a work of art, possibly imaginary, produced as a rhetorical exercise;[1] often used in adjectival form, ekphrastic. A graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art. In ancient times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.
My memories of the Wrist Rocket object and its entanglement with a moral tale is much the way Homer's use of ekphrasis when he is describing the shield of achilles. The poem The Shield of Achilles (1952) by W. H. Auden plays with Homer's description but uses the war torn 20th century to frame the work.
an anonymous, dispassionate army listens while a crowd of ordinary people watch passively. In the third scene a "ragged urchin" throws a stone at a bird; he takes it for granted "that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third," and "has never heard of any world where promises are kept / Or one could weep because another wept."
