For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.
In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.
What are the physical sensations you associate with hunger? For most people, these sensations include stomach grumbling, headaches, light-headedness, irritability, fatigue and inability to focus.
It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work 'The Sensations of Tone.' As is well known, this was one of Helmholtz's masterpieces.
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
We are mindful of desire when we experience it with an embodied awareness, recognizing the sensations and thoughts of wanting as arising and passing phenomena. While this isn't easy, as we cultivate the clear seeing and compassion of Radical Acceptance, we discover we can open fully to this natural force, and remain free in its midst.
Feelings are at the basis of all ideas. First you have feelings, and then, through those sensations, it develops into ideas.
