![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
good lord! and potentiality
Dec. 22nd, 2020 03:23 pmI had remembered it was a long time since I posted here. I hadn't realized it had been nearly four years. The last year or so has felt like much more than four years in and of itself, so four *actual* years... whew.
What made me come over here was a desire to post a slighter long piece of writing than what I put on Facebook. I have my wargame blog, but that's for wargaming. I have my writing blog, but that is for (one day) actual writing. This is more in the way of being sort of a rambling but short essay.
Mostly to say that I've come to realise that a lot of the pleasures I pursue centre around potentiality. Games or videos or music that I buy, books that I purchase, miniatures that I order all sit delightfully where I store them, waiting to be turned into experience. I can open a game, take out the rules and flip through them, look over the brightly coloured counters, lay out and trace over the maps, admiring their artistry and finding the familiar places on them. But until I actually lay out the game and play it, it's a bubble of delightful potential. Once I've played it, it may still be delightful, in a different way. I may love the experience of playing the game, or I may hate it, or find it indifferent pleasing. But it will never have that same sort of feeling, of a field of fresh snow before you walk on it.
And I am coming to realise, that is a good deal of the value that I get when I purchase something--the feeling of anticipation of enjoying an experience yet to come. John Hurt, playing Stephen Ward in the 1989 film "Scandal" (about the 1961 Profumo affair, an incredibly tame scandal by todays standards), has speech I recall the sense of, about how sometimes his character finds the anticipation of sexual pleasure greater than the act itself. There's something of that here. A new book by a favourite author or a new recording by a favourite musician may not quite live up to their past standards. Wargame figures, when I paint them, will inevitably fall short of the beauty of the finished pieces turned out by more skillful (and more patient) painters. But while they're there, bare metal or plastic in my hands, I can imagine their finished beauty.
That's part of how I can buy something and never "use it properly" for years, but still "enjoy" it. Whenever I go to our storage unit (which has half to three-quarters of my gaming collection in it, because we accidentally bought a house much smaller than we meant to), I have a feeling of great pleasure opening the hatch and looking at all the game boxes lined up on shelves there like old friends, waiting one day to be played.
Pleasure deferred, not denied. Anticipation. Potentiality.
What made me come over here was a desire to post a slighter long piece of writing than what I put on Facebook. I have my wargame blog, but that's for wargaming. I have my writing blog, but that is for (one day) actual writing. This is more in the way of being sort of a rambling but short essay.
Mostly to say that I've come to realise that a lot of the pleasures I pursue centre around potentiality. Games or videos or music that I buy, books that I purchase, miniatures that I order all sit delightfully where I store them, waiting to be turned into experience. I can open a game, take out the rules and flip through them, look over the brightly coloured counters, lay out and trace over the maps, admiring their artistry and finding the familiar places on them. But until I actually lay out the game and play it, it's a bubble of delightful potential. Once I've played it, it may still be delightful, in a different way. I may love the experience of playing the game, or I may hate it, or find it indifferent pleasing. But it will never have that same sort of feeling, of a field of fresh snow before you walk on it.
And I am coming to realise, that is a good deal of the value that I get when I purchase something--the feeling of anticipation of enjoying an experience yet to come. John Hurt, playing Stephen Ward in the 1989 film "Scandal" (about the 1961 Profumo affair, an incredibly tame scandal by todays standards), has speech I recall the sense of, about how sometimes his character finds the anticipation of sexual pleasure greater than the act itself. There's something of that here. A new book by a favourite author or a new recording by a favourite musician may not quite live up to their past standards. Wargame figures, when I paint them, will inevitably fall short of the beauty of the finished pieces turned out by more skillful (and more patient) painters. But while they're there, bare metal or plastic in my hands, I can imagine their finished beauty.
That's part of how I can buy something and never "use it properly" for years, but still "enjoy" it. Whenever I go to our storage unit (which has half to three-quarters of my gaming collection in it, because we accidentally bought a house much smaller than we meant to), I have a feeling of great pleasure opening the hatch and looking at all the game boxes lined up on shelves there like old friends, waiting one day to be played.
Pleasure deferred, not denied. Anticipation. Potentiality.
