It just so happens that I am traveling to New Orleans this week, a city that exemplifies many of the ideas I put forward in my column every week. I often discuss the importance of experiential grounding for people and how, in general, it is something that has been lost today as a result of the takeover of our living environments by modern technology. One partial exception is the city of New Orleans. New Orleans is a city filled with complex organic stimuli and complex intimate experience, both of which lead to a good sense of grounding. Now, as a result of this flavor of organicity, people flock to New Orleans in order to partake of the stability that such an abundance of organic stimuli can confer. Paradoxically, this abundance of organic stimuli can become very destructive, and ungrounding experiences can occur, namely hurricanes. However, it is also, when conditions are stable, an exceedingly grounded place with good templates for bonding with other people, good opportunities for making, preserving and receiving imprints, good opportunities for developing good life narratives and good opportunities for creating more vibrant immediate life experiences.
So what is it that makes life experiences so exceedingly vibrant in New Orleans? For one thing,.there’s the number of elements of which the experiences in New Orleans are composed. Because experiences are composed of flowing blendable continual stimuli that tend to merge with one another, the possibility of new experiences is much greater than if the experiences were created from defined discrete stimuli which tend to juxtapose with one another rather than merge. The more organic stimuli involved in a stimulus merger, the greater variety of experiences that are possible. And in New Orleans, the stimulus mergers are very large and very complex. This is what makes them so very special and so very unique in New Orleans. Not only are they complex, but they are created in such a way as to be very sensorily appealing. In the French, Creole and Cajun cuisines, in the art and handicrafts, in the architecture in the French quarter and the Garden district, in the visual landscapes like the Mississippi River, in the jazz, blues, Cajun music and Zydeco. And let us not forget Carnival. New Orleans provides a whole sensory kaleidoscope of different phenomena.
All this organic stimuli provides a template for bonding which makes it easier to have more intimate enriching experiences of all kinds. This variety of organic experiences, which one might think was destabilizing, because so much change is involved in shifting from one experience to another, is actually very stabilizing because it generates so much organic traction that it holds a person close to the surface of his field of experience. It is when there is a dearth of organic stimuli, that a person sinks into an experiential vacuum. And it is at such moments that the numbness generated by the vacuum can cause a person to separate from his grounding and float off into psychological space.
What is special about New Orleans is that with all the organic stimuli in the city and the great variety of stimulus mergers, people not only gain enough organic traction to have a stable secure grounding in their fields of experience, but they can feel a real vibrancy in their lives that is not as readily available in other locales in the United States.
There is a different kind of intelligence at work in cultivating organic stimuli, stimulus mergers, and complex enriching intimate experiences than is involved in solving the problems of life through a more mechanistic analytical approach. In general, in the United States and in other modern technological societies, there is a much greater emphasis placed on dealing with situations through breaking them down into component parts using analysis, rather than in building up vibrant stimulus mergers through synthesis.
Through analysis, situations can be broken down into component parts, layer after layer, until nothing is left. In other words, too much analysis leads to a vacuum and numbness. A kind of lifelessness.
Nevertheless, a much greater value is placed on analysis than synthesis. Among the Nobel Prizes, only one, literature, is based firmly on synthesis.
And yet the mental activity of synthesis is very important as a life-giving mental activity. The people of New Orleans can tell you that. As can the people who flock there every year as tourists.