When literature speaks for my life

"All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me." - The Bell Jar

Well, a terrible cough and sore throat could. Be back later.

Fieldnotes

I have an impossibly strong curiosity about football players.

I attribute this to my having attended an all-girls high school where field hockey and softball were the big sports and the players wore skirts or basketball shorts instead of those sexy tight white tights.

Because of this curiosity, I spend many a cafeteria-hour observing these big beefy guys interact with one another. I consider myself an undercover anthropologist studying a culture foreign to me. I'm not sure that what I've unearthed so far would rock anyone's world but I find it curious.

Today, for instance, I found myself sitting with a bunch of them. One of them pointed at a woman who works in the cafeteria and said to his teammates how one of their buddies said to her "Bet you never had a man shove you up against a wall and fuck you" or something equally vulgar. They all kind of laughed.

I turned from my copy of The Bell Jar and asked if all football players talk like that, and shared with them an incident when, again I had been sitting near a group of them, and two white boys asked a black boy when he would take them to a party so they could get some black chicks. The one kept saying he wanted to fuck a black girl.

They laughed at this. I told them I understand boys will be boys but jeez! And one of them said, "We don't all talk like that." And another said something about the effects of testosterone.

Then most of these boys rose from the table and their seats were taken by other football players. One of these, a gorgeous white boy whose identity I can't figure out, asked his teammate who sat next to me -- who is pretty gorgeous himself -- if he was going to the women's basketball game on Saturday. Apparently it's mandatory but the white boy's birthday is this weekend and he had plans with his family (I know, I too was swooning just a little).

Once they'd discussed this, the white boy talked about how at a charity date auction, he was almost bought by a man. This apparently scarred him. Just a tiny bit. Another teammate was in fact bought by a man and this, the white boy said, had Coach "G" cracking up.

Oh, and he pointed out to his teammates that the team's kicker, a sexy freshman, was bought for only $15.

I'm only upset I hadn't known about this auction.

During most of this conversation, I listened and occasionally watched and the white boy looked at me a few times but never said anything... Same for most of the guys he sat with. They glanced at me but no one said anything.

I wonder if football players wait for girls to approach them...

Another thing I've learned about these attractive young men: The few that have girlfriends don't really advertise it on their Facebooks; most of their profiles say they're single.

I know because I've met some of their girlfriends. At the bowl game (the EagleBank Bowl), I sat in front of a group of football players' girlfriends.

The most interesting thing they unveiled while enjoying the evening? Most of them have a hard time getting their boys to go down on them and threaten no sex until they do so...

I want to know more. (Oh, and my favorite football player was nowhere to be seen.)

Rasa

I have been reading about this viewer-response theory of art called rasa in Vidya Dehejia's Indian Art book and I find it so fascinating. According to Dehejia, the concept originated some 1,500 years ago and was written in Bharata's work titled Natya shastra (which means "Science of Dance"). Basically, when it comes to art, "aesthetic experience rests not with the work of art, nor with the artist who created it, but with the viewer." The responsive viewer is called rasika.

Dehejia goes on and says, "Literally, rasa means the juice or extract of a fruit or vegetable; it implies the best or finest part of a thing. In the aesthetic context, rasa refers to a state of heightened awareness evoked by the contemplation of a work of art, drama, poetry, music or dance. A performance is criticized as ni-rasa (without rasa) or praised as rasavat (imbued with rasa)."

Further on: "The erotic sentiment of shringara, described as king of rasas, has a high visibility in the fine arts. The other eight rasas are the comic or hasya, the pathetic or karuna, the furious or raudra, the heroic or vira, the terrible or bhayanaka, the odious or bibhatasa, the wondrous or adbhuta and the quiescent or shanta."

In the context of Indian history, Dehejia writes, "The cultivation of rasa seems to have been an intellectual and emotional experience that was completely available to only the sophisticated segment of the population."

It occurs to me that most people today have the opportunity to experience this heightened awareness just by reading a book or watching a play or staring at a piece of art and so many do not appear to take advantage of it. I wonder if so many of the people who appear to me to be very shallow and unquestioning, even sometimes unfeeling, could really be so. If fewer people than I think are really so shallow, unquestioning, and unfeeling, then too often people put on unbecoming charades.

I wish I knew more people who are forthright about their appreciation for thought-provoking art and who could shed some light on their own awareness of life and the world. Am I really so different a kind of creature that few others feel the way I do?

Sometimes I am tempted to say, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Autobiography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe I am not made like anyone existing. If I am not better, at least I am quite different. Whether Nature has done well or ill in breaking the mould she cast me in, can be determined only after having read me." Yet, I do not think I could say this with a conscience, because my sole proof for saying it would be, as it appears Rousseau's sole proof was, that I have not met anyone quite like myself. Just because there is no proof that something exists, whether it be another being like myself or something else, does not ergo mean that it does not exist.

Back to the subject of rasa, I find it intriguing to try applying the concept to life in general. The aesthetic experience of life really rests in the person taking action and living that life not the person watching this other life. Then, again, who is to say that the beauty of one life does not lie in another's perception of it? Hmm...