"This is the definition of art that has always most excited me: the feeling of being taken to the boundary of the universe, then beyond that boundary..."

"... into the surrounding darkness, and you’re the first person to ever be there. It’s not an experience that happens very often, but I’m willing to wait. I’ve never been someone who’s enjoyed music in general, or contemporary fiction in general, or films in general, or theater in general. I feel I’m standing on the runway waiting for the next big one to come in, carrying some of that outer darkness with it."

Said the writer Mark Haddon, commenting on the liner notes to the Miles Davis album "Bitches Brew," which read: "it’s not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before."

Haddon (the author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time") is quoted in "Art Should Be Uncomfortable/For the writer Mark Haddon, Miles Davis’s seminal jazz album Bitches Brew is a reminder of the beauty and power of challenging works" (The Atlantic, May 2016). The liner notes were written by Ralph J. Gleason.

I'm reading that article after googling "art should make you uncomfortable" — which is a phrase I wrote at the end of the post "The brown spot." I was moved to google my own words because my statement was challenged — "So that is a crucial component of art: making the viewer uncomfortable?" — and because I didn't think what I was saying was at all original. Perhaps I thought I could find some authority to back me up.

My challeger, the commenter Loren W Laurent, added "A conveyance of joy is thus outside of what art should do?" I answered: "Joy should make you uncomfortable. After a short while, you need to come down and want to move back to normal. If your brain doesn't work like that, you have a problem. You can't go about your life in a state of ecstasy."

Additional "comfortableness" topics I just got into a long conversation about:

1. Comedy. Should comedy make us uncomfortable? Doesn't the best comedy comedy make us uncomfortable? One criticism I have of the Kathy Griffin concert I saw in Chicago last Thursday is that the audience was treated as an in group, with shared values, and Griffin never challenged them. She only attacked people out there beyond the enclave of the theater. She had been exiled, so I understand her motivation, but she asked nothing from the audience except that they commit to her and be on her side, against those others out there. The audience adulated her, and she dished adulation back at them. It was a rally. I thought it was ironic: She hates Trump, but her show was like the stereotype of a Trump rally (more than an actual Trump rally is like that stereotype). I prefer comedians who makes their own fans uncomfortable. Andy Kaufman. Lenny Bruce. Etc.

2. Religion. I thought of Jesus:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

3. Politics.

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.