BNW with Sir Ken!

Okay, so here I am, staying up very, very late to do this blog. Honestly, I did not really know what to write at the start. I just opened up a bunch of other people’s blogs to see what they wrote. From doing so, I saw that the majority basically pointed out the same stuff, quoting similar lines from both resources. Well… now that I have read a bunch, I do not have a “want” to write toward those ideas; I feel as though if I did, I would just be repeating what other’s have already said. And so, in order to get something to spark in my head with what Sir Ken Robinson said, I watched the video over and over dozens of times; and I might say so myself that I fell asleep at certain parts (that is partly why I had to watch it over). Well now, after all the hard work, I have found something!

From watching the video and listening to Robinson, I have found a parallel to add to the list. Y’alls remember when he was going on about ADHD and how it “increases as you travel east across the country”? Well, a bit after, he says that the Arts “are the victims of this mentality,” and he goes on to explain the meanings of being aesthetic and anaesthetic. Well, thinking of BNW, don’t these definitions apply to the differences between the savages and the people of London? As Robinson was saying, “an aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak,” “when [one is] fully alive.” There are many incidents among the savages, including John, when one can see this effect. For one, I can recall back to when Bernard and Lenina visited Malpais; there, they saw “two young women giving breast to their babies” (Huxley 111). Here, the women surely feel “alive” for they can feed their children; they, unlike the citizens of London, are alive with feelings of love for their child. Through that bond, both the mother and child are dependent upon each other for happiness, and is it not out of love that the mother looks for food for the children? However, in that same scene, you can see Lenina on the side with her face blushing and “turned away… She had never seen anything so indecent” (111). Although no soma is mentioned here, one can imagine her crave for it as it, like the definition of an anaesthetic, “[shuts] your senses off and [deadens] yourself to what’s happening.”

Of course throughout the book, there are many more examples to which one could match with the aesthetic effect; for example, whenever John cries or goes in an outrage, or when Mitsima teaches John the “work of clay,” but one can especially relate an aesthetic effect to John when he so fluidly repeats Shakespeare by memory. As he does so, his emotions surges forward and because he cannot express it physically, he does so with words. Furthermore, whenever his emotions flows out of him in these forms of either rage, tears, or words, he finds himself distanced even more as the people of London look at him with distaste; but remember, they themselves are examples of the anaesthetic.

Yup. I want to get into more detail, but as you can see, it is already… FIVE! Holy monkey! Gotta go!