you're getting high?

"You know, it's kind of like -- for example -- you don't like the Beatles."
"I like the Beatles!"
"Yes -- but not enough."
------------------ When I heard the above dialogue on "Mad About You" (situation comedy in the 90s) I laughed and always remembered it, because -- that is SO how it is, when you experience some type of art and then you want someone else to be "feelin' it" with you, or -- exactly, precisely the same way you feel it.

And it's impossible. And it's so frustrating.
The artistic thing -- the story, or movie, or song, or performance is so exhilarating because you love it so much,
and then exhilaration is followed by frustration because you can't communicate the feeling exactly how you want to and you find that it isn't possible to love the song, or artist's body of work, or whatever, together with another person in the same way.

On that episode of "Mad About You" the husband and wife, Paul and Jamie, are discussing the things they don't have in common -- not arguing, just having a conversation. Like -- "you prefer this restaurant, I like that other one better" or whatever -- and then he gets into the "you don't like the Beatles" statement.
(She's instantly a little indignant, setting the record [no pun intended] straight: "I like the Beatles!")

You can imagine them listening to a Beatles album, and Paul is -- INTO it, and Jamie is -- doing things around the house while the music is on -- and he's thinking she's not experiencing the Music with the same intensity that he is, and there's a sort of "let-down" there -- or, a feeling that he still has a job to do -- he has to show her, communicate to her, how Good that Music feels To Him.

Can't be done.
It's one of the un-solvable issues of humanity.
It's because I experience a song through my frame of reference -- my life experience -- and other people experience it through their frame of reference; it partly depends on where you "were at" as a person when you were introduced to that particular song, or type of music. The music means one thing to me, and something else to another person.

And -- (and) -- our Way Of Enjoying Something is individual to each person. At a Bob Dylan concert (outdoors at a horse-race track) I took out paper and pen and started listing the songs as he played them so that I could remember later and -- I don't know -- savor the experience. Nearby me in the standing-crowd in front of stage, a blonde guy was smoking a joint. It crossed my mind -- Why would he want to dull the experience, or distract himself??
And just as I'm thinking that, he looks over at me and says, sort of dubiously, like he thought it was weird, "You're writing down the songs?" ...
("You're getting high?!")...
The individuality of the experience and the Way Of Experiencing It cannot be bridged.


--------------------------------
"You don't like the Beatles."
"I like the Beatles!"
"Yes, but not enough."

-30-