Re-Visiting Morse Peckham

These kaleidoscopic times churn and turn up new/old insights.
I've been re-reading the rich works of cultural historian
Morse Peckham (1914-1993). 
Here are my notes and underlinings from one of his books:

Art and Pornography  (1969)       

Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world”

Anarchy is the mother of Order   Source of Tension:  Libido always trying to control the Ego which was trying to absorb the Libido.  Freud

Art offers not order but perceptual disorder or discontinuity,  contact with chaos

Art is rehearsal for the orientation that makes innovation possible

flickering between need for stability predictability control and innovation  risk  (free energy)

Story-Making 85 is a near instinctual activity forward, backwards, always adjusting     

All discourse is equally fictional. Putting changing, meaningless bits into a meaningful context Managing  multiple, shifting  social roles/personal (archetypal) needs Making meaningful organization of Materials via the Imagination     Contact with the Unpredictable

Porn is a Storyline, like political propaganda and religious art:   simplified view/fairy dust sacred

Human beings prefer stability to innovation… 99.9% of genetic variations are dysfunctional. Stick with ones that work  132 Human beings have two primary but divergent and irreconcilable interests. to stabilize the cognitive model;  the other is to compensate for the necessary inadequacy of the model correcting and improving through innovation

Exemplary thinking 156  is a relief from explanatory and theoretical thinking, so mediating non-verbal thinking is a further relief  157        

No aspect of the empirical world is meaningful until it elicits a behavioral response

Unreal = inability to organize it into an available belief system vs Rational/real  = cooperates with known belief system   165  Interest=activity that serves to smooth the adaptational process

Cognitive Overload 177 precedes powerful innovative thrusts/breakthroughs                                        

Need for Multiplicity of roles/models  179                     

Man is free and freedom threatens stability/predictability  two aspects of same thing: 181        

Paradise 189  = no disparity between cognitive and sensory data, (Ego and Libido)

Harmony between remembered, projected and perceived realities,  The Head, Hand, Heart

No social management necessary, futility of anarchy, trance, cult, religious deference of personal authority 192 “vacation from cognitive tension”  Issues of hierarchy, dominance, authority competition for scarce resources

NEED to disengage  from controlled society (stability/predictability) 298     

Beliefs in how much stability/Innovation is tolerable, or destructive Art-Making can effect that 300