Young Girl Freeing a Bird
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
Musée Fragonard (Grasse)
The poetry of pleasure and epicurean-like delights reject pain, only to save it; to perceive it anew and to transform it for the better. Paradoxical as it might seem, pleasure offers a clearer, and more productive, window onto pain than pain itself.
The Goddess Aurora triumphing over Night
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
Private Collection (Sotheby's $3,834,500; February 1, 2012; lot 84)
It is better to dine on an inspiring piece of creative expression than on the the bitter aspic of intractable actualities, better to reject pain in order to find and exist harmoniously with solace.
This defense of pleasure begs an important question, or perhaps a social hope, that self-serving actions can be heightened to a state whereby we serve ourselves a gourmand of aesthetic delights that require our conscious care to preserve and take delight or pleasure in.
Pieces en Trio, Musica Pacifica
Marin Marais
Pursuits of pleasure and truth, the abyss between desire and reality, are more pertinently recognized from that place within us that appropriates a natural order within the human psyche, namely that of mimicry.
What we read, think, view, and listen to ... all together become that which we experience. One cannot complain of ills without simultaneously experiencing them.
The Happy Lovers
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
Norton Simon Museum (USA)
To find love, one must feel love within and surround oneself with loving subjects and metaphors. To find happiness, joy, and levity, one must express happiness, joy, and levity. To entertain divinities, one must become the divine entertainer.
Love as Folly
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)
Unlike the convictions that insist human beings derive the meanings of their lives from the finite, mortal, contingently existing expression of life, where newer and better truths continually emerge, so long as one presses them into whatever evidence is available at any given moment, limiting descriptions of the world do not define it; they merely emerge from the limitations held hostage by the mind of the perceiver, locked away from that imaginative identifier that proposes education in the science of humanity to challenge an otherwise unimaginative perception of existence.
The Lock
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
Musée Louvre (Paris)
Pragmatism, the philosophical approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application, condemns us to live in consciousness, rather than from a place of heightened and meticulously sculpted intuitive judgment.
The essence of this blog is its high approbation for those experiences that render a person profoundly quiet with oneself, joyous in their dialects, impassioned in their pursuits, lighthearted in their judgements, and above all, not diminished in their awareness by the lack of awareness expressed by others.
Whether one's journey is met with good humor and grace, extensive investigations into unrestricted possibilities of mind or being, or the whimsical indulgences of sensory and cognitive pleasures, the connection between moral and aesthetic values one derives from an epicurean-like pursuit envelope humanity at its finest; from that place within from which the world is best appreciated.
Understanding is merely a measurement of something we already hold within, whereas appreciation encompasses all that is, was, and might become.
The Epicurean Triumph over pragmatism is as important as the noninclusive assessments people make to pragmatically perceive reality.
No justification of pleasure other than the experience of it is necessary.
Mother Kiss
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 - 1806)
Private Collection
Enwrapped in the baroque delights of Marin Marais I was taken away by these phrases forged of pure poetic expression falling into the experience of this piece a helpless gourmand.
ReplyDeleteTo find love… to find happiness… is at once both experience and expression. The science of humanity a key to the locks constraining the imagination which, once released, amplifies the perceptions of existence. Transcending the practical limits of consciousness to embrace a Rodinesque intuitive judgement.
This reading has left me in a state of profound quiet, and were I to be reading these words aloud the trembling would be audible for as indulgent as it may be I can't help but embrace these words as a personal gift, as an invitation to heighten my awareness and recognize that "Understanding is merely a measurement of something [I] already hold within, whereas appreciation encompasses all that is, was, and might become", and take intentional pleasure in this Epicurean Triumph.
Thank you, Soph Laugh, you have my sincere approbation.