Proustian Imagination, Beauty, and Hash

 

When Proust says that imagination is his sole organ for the enjoyment of beauty, he means that imagination is the faculty through which reality reveals its deepest nature.  Proustian imagination is not escapism, fantasy, or a function of wish-fulfilling. With no imagination, you have only sensory experience. But when imagination, through involuntary memory,  is liberated from the law that it can only apply to what is absent, it reaches reality in its full depth, timelessness, or time in a pure state. Because of involuntary memory, the madeleine offers, for a flash, presence and imagination simultaneously.

However, what one sees directly present, with no help of involuntary memory. The harsh law that limits the applying of imagination can be suspended, I find, with no help from involuntary memory.  In the perception of beauty, surprise is the crucial element, not only when breaking what was expected by imagination,  but by exceeding our usual mediocrity of expectation, our habit of only seeing unremarkable things or people. By breaking the limits of expectation, the sight of beauty is felt as an excellence, an extreme generosity. It has the structure of a gift precisely because it wasn't owed or prepared for; it couldn't be anticipated. 

The average owes you nothing and delivers accordingly. Beauty gives you what nobody asked for and nobody could, for one can only ask for what one previously imagined. Thus, present beauty arrives from outside the possible, it stuns rather than simply pleases. Having received something that exceeds its categories and preparations,  the mind, through imagination, builds a world large enough to illustrate what it just encountered. I guess this is why beauty generates narrative, it tells us stories. 

Beauty strips the coating of habit away, forcefully, by the sheer excess of what arrives relative to the frame that was supposed to contain and process it. The frame breaks because beauty is too large for it, and this is why the moments when it occurs is frightening alongside being wonderful. The frame, however deadening, is also protective. What one sees is too much and exactly right at the same time. Being stunned by the experience instead of simply delighted carries the awe and the fascination, like with Otto's "Tremendum et Fascinans". It is the numinous breaking through the crust of habit.

By removing the taking-for-grantedness of habit, by removing the dust of repetition from everything, Marijuana reveals beauty as the purification of the visible element. It shines through as its rebirth, its becoming new or, in a way, as the act of its creation. 

I guess this is why Huxley, who saw everything in a new light under mescaline,  described it as a sacramental view of reality.