Steve_Bamlett_blog

Describe one habit that brings you joy.

A habit, when it isn’t an item of clothing, is usually an action or sequence of actions that is repeated subconsciously because it has been overlearned. Repeated and without variation such sequences are thought to be stored in the cerebellum and are easily accessible without much consciousness that they’re required or applied. Some people we are told drive like that, often finding themselves in a place they cannot remember setting out to. It is thought that conscious attention may be brought back in driving by an out of order or unexpected event, but clearly the prevalence of some inexplicable road traffic incidents suggests that is not the case.

Of course, sometimes it refers to driven behaviour that is equally repetitive but not necessarily done without some consciousness though even those behaviours, such as masturbation, are capable of being subconsciously called forth, if learned restraints are temporarily deactivated. In such events joy and pleasure varies enormously between different individuals and sometimes this may be a matter of the application of technique that is more conscious. It is why I think masturbation survives as an activity in dyads or larger groups. But I do not intend to discuss this, since ‘joy’ feels to me to be so much more than this, though it is comprehended in the term ‘jouissance’ as Roland Barthes used it in The Pleasure of the Text.

Because an action is repetitive it usually lacks obvious ongoing intentionality and control and I think, beyond the issue of jouissance, such control and intention is necessary for me to feel joy. The control may be minimal. It may involve just regulation of the relationship and varying intensity of a stimulus and response to it, but it needs to be there.

In sexual terms joy has greater relation to foreplay rather than than the sexual act. And controlled release of response is how Freud described foreplay in using it to describe the aesthetic response to both jokes, in ‘Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious’ and the process leading to the denouement of a great tragic play like ‘Oedipus the King’ and ‘Hamlet’. And for most regulated release is the essence of joy not the flooding of emotion and energy, which often equates with exhaustion and sometimes relief that a thing is over and done.

The ‘Ode to Joy’ is a case in point. Listen to how Beethoven plays with the words of the poem – holding back, slow releasing and then letting go, for a short period, in order to describe the ecstasy in musical terms. It can’t be described fully and it lies behind the appeal of metrical pattern and rhythm in verse, even ‘free verse’, if it is truly verse. D. H. Lawrence could engineer this in both prose and verse but not, I think, in his painting.

So I may call reading a ‘habit’ and it truly gives me joy but the joy is not always fully to be accounted for, but you do know when a drama achieved that effect for one feels manipulated as if from within one’s very core. People used to say, as Housman did, that this effect was like having the hair stand up on the back of one’s head. I have never found that analogy useful, for the way I am touched by art gird deeper and wider, across a more extensive surface and to a greater feeling of having been penetrated, like St. Theresa in Bernini’s great religio-erotic sculpture.

So I cannot name a habit in answering this , though I can instance joy whose extent of visceral, sensational, emotional, cognitive and behavioural effects are integrated and might be described as ‘joy’. I think habit and joy part company where we recognised that the habitual is that which is joyless in life. Such joylessness may be painless and subconscious but that is not always the case. Browning points to it for Andrea del Sarto and his wife in his great monologue of that name. Have you ever come across a poem opening with such lack of joy..

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I’ll work then for your friend’s friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I’ll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through,

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-sarto

Love

Steve