Experiencing Aural Intercourse

I noticed today that among the music that I consider to be genuinely good, there are only certain albums that I find myself returning to over and over. Of course, there are albums that I listen to for weeks at a time after I first hear them, but this phase usually passes, and I may return to the album only rarely. For example, I think all four Coheed and Cambria albums are excellent, but whenever I scroll through my music to find something to listen to, the only Coheed albums that I really consider are the second and third (In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth, and Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One).

So how can I consider the other two albums to be genuinely good music if I almost never have any desire to listen to them? Clearly, we have at least two different processes at work. There are the set of albums that I consider to be good music and the set of albums that I desire to listen to. These two sets are distinct, but have some overlap. It then occurred to me that I don't seem to rewatch movies in the same way that I relisten to music. Why do I not have the same desire to simply watch some work of film art?

It is at this point that I had to introduce a distinction in order to make this strange situation make sense. On the one hand, the albums that I think are genuinely good are the albums that I think are good works of art. By "good work of art" I mean that the work accurately describes something about the world in a way that can only be described in the particular way that the work describes it. This means that a good work of art cannot be summarized without losing some content, and that there is no superfluity. Thus, each good work of art is indispensible to the entire canon of art, because it describes the world in a way that nothing else does.

On the other hand the albums that I desire to hear are aesthetically pleasing to me. What does this mean, though? Clearly, this description must exclude a concept of art, because then aesthetical pleasure would reduce to art, and we would lose our distinction. What is important about these albums that I desire to listen to is that when I listen I am actually captivated by the beauty of the music. These particular albums change my mood, they make me happier. In short, there is a kind of love at work. It is not exactly, love, though. It is eros. I don't mean eros in the sexual sense, but in the broader, Platonic sense. In his dialogue, Symposium, Plato's only female character describes eros as the love of beauty. And it is true, we don't just find these things beautiful, we desire them in a way that can only be compared to sexual desire. Any reader who has experienced the sheer pleasure that such an album can provide will know what I am talking about. But even if music does not produce this feeling, there are many people for whom other sensory inputs do produce this feeling. I imagine that painters find themselves in an awed state of ecstacy when they view certain paintings or certain other visual arts. Many people find the sunrise erotic in this way. The list goes on.

Returning to the subject of film: if my distinction between good art and aesthetic pleasure is accurate, then I must not find film, in general, aesthetically pleasing. And this is fine; I still have great appreciation for the artform (it is my third-favorite art-form, afterall), I just don't have an erotic desire for it. I then realized that I don't have any real erotic desire for any visual experience, save one. The only visual experience that I give me aesthetic pleasure is the female body. Now this seems like a trivial thing to say: I'm a heterosexual male, of course I find the female form erotic. But there is more going on here; another distinction needs to be made.

Sexual desire is not sensory. It is a deeper eros than that of sensory aesthetic pleasure. I do believe that it is aesthetic in just the same way that musical eros is aesthetic, but there is an important difference. Based on my experience, it seems to me that sexual desire is actually entity-oriented rather than experience oriented. This means that the intellect is involved. When I am having sexual intercourse, it is both the act and the partner that I desire; it is not simply the visual or kinesthetic experiences involved in sexual intercouse. The reason that many people believe that sexual intercouse is all about vision and touch is that visual and kinesthetic pleasure almost always accompany sexual pleasure. I do believe that there are many heterosexual males who do not find the female body to be visually erotic (when they see the figure, they imagine themselves having sex with the woman, which appeals to the sexual eros, not the visual eros). I, on the other hand, absolutely adore the sight of all beautiful women -- it is captivating.

Let us take this line of thought even further. If the albums for which I have an erotic desire simultaneously captivate me and bring me great pleasure, then it is not inappropriate to describe listening to them as a sort of aural intercourse. Similarly, allowing myself to be captivated by a female figure can be described as visual intercourse. This explains why so many people want to listen to their favorite albums during sexual intercourse: if one's partner is beautiful, then sexual intercourse becomes both sensory and sexual intercourse. How erotic!

-Priam's Pride