Plain Honey is a hive buzzing with essays, stories, and discussions. ____________ Click on each comb, About and Pollinators to find your way around.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.

– Faulkner, Light in August

The meddler has nothing to do, and an infinite amount of time to do it. When he is not acting he is waiting. He never gets bored or resorts to playing games with himself. He is vigilant and preternaturally patient. You don’t see him but he sees you.

Two readings have shunted me (it is not willful!) in the direction of this essay about online dating. (Though, in truth, this essay merely defends the ambiguous status of online dating and is by no means a phenomeno-cultural study.) The first is a passage written by Karl Marx in his now very much published “unpublished Manuscripts”

My Lover’s Gamble (… that is)

 

Do you love someone or do you love some-thing about someone?

Lately, the concept of “personhood” has seen a revival. In analytic philosophy in particular, “person” seems to have eclipsed its closest conceptual rivals, “human” and “subject.” And if the recent acclaimed work of Robert Chodat and Oren Izenberg (to take just a couple of examples) is any indication, the term has already begun to establish a central position in literary studies.

On April 19^th, 2004: I thought you had the greenest eyes and your skin battened so vibrantly all around them.

On July 3^rd, 2006: You had slimmed and that was miraculous and I wanted you more.

“Perhaps such experiences [ hallucinatory forms ] are at the root of our human obsession with pattern and the fact that geometrical patterns find their way into our decorative arts. As a child, I was fascinated by the patterns in our house–the square colored floor tiles on the front porch, the small hexagonal ones in the kitchen…These geometric and scrolling motifs seemed somehow familiar to me, though it did not dawn on me until years later that this was because I had seen them in my own head, that these patterns resonated with my own inner experience of the intricate tilings and swirls of migraine…Do the arabesques and hexagons in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of formal beauty? There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception–this is how seeing begins.”

– Oliver Sacks (from “Hallucinations”)

(Above Left: St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome / Above Right: MoMA in NYC)

While visiting MoMA last Sunday to convene with a small group of friends, I mused upon a recurring inquisition: has the contemporary art museum usurped the church’s position as a surrogate “place of worship”, at least for certain culture-craving demographics?

Aside from the palpable communitarian ethos at a popular museum on any given weekend, such as the Metropolitan, MoMA, or Guggenheim (to name but a few), I am always struck by the flocks who congregate amidst the hallowed halls, quite possibly in search of transcendence, if not the sublime.