Monoaesthetic Mixtures

Aesthetic phenomena can be organized into lists that reflect their structure as mixtures of primitive perceptual opposites, demonstrate aesthetic indifference and show that large numbers of individual aesthetic events can be explained by a relatively small set of biases in their favor.

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

— Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Bartlett 2022)

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.

— William of Occam, Quodlibeta Septem (Bartlett 2022)

Monoaesthetics

The lists in the following sections contain thousands of examples of aesthetic phenomena that match the structure of perceptual and conceptual mixtures of more and less exciting opposites such as those in lists 3, 4 and 5, including, among other things, popular expressions, lines of poetry, the names of characters, poems, books, paintings, songs, albums, bands and movies, the contents of stories such as myths, folklore and fairy tales, the motion and form of objects and players in games and sports, the contents of artwork, dreams and hallucinations, and the shape, color and orientation of sexually selected traits in animals.

All the phenomena given after a particular aesthetic structure in the following lists are assumed to be monoaesthetic, meaning they came into existence as the result of a single, universal bias in the animal mind, with the bias having the same structure as the phenomena listed. The mixture of hot and cold in the expression “a cold day in hell” satisfies a human bias favoring such juxtapositions, and so does the title “Fire and Ice.” Although the phrase and the title originated independently, they have a single cause. It’s desirable to offset coldness with heat or heat with coldness in aesthetic affairs, just as it’s always been desirable for living things to do so physically for comfort and survival. The bias has been in place since the capacity to tell hot from cold evolved, and it’s centered on moderate temperature.

A single bias for the mixture bright~dark can be considered responsible for every instance of mate choice-based contrasting bright and dark coloration (e.g., black and white), rather than each case having its own, independent cause, and the same bias in humans can be applied to explain ornamental bright and dark colors in culture. This extends to mixtures of warmer and cooler colors: red with blue, yellow with green, orange with purple and so on, all of which are like bright~dark in terms of differential excitement, cultural popularity and their evident usefulness in winning mates.

All the occurrences of mixed higher and lower pitch as a musical element can be considered the consequence of a single bias for the mixture, and the same goes for sound versus silence. Monoaesthetics explains why we recognize and enjoy the songs of birds as songs even though they didn’t evolve for our sake. Songs in general, biologically or culturally, evolve to satisfy biases for mixtures of primitive auditory opposites that exist in all animals. The same sort of argument applies to dance, with motion, stillness, speed, slowness, roundness, length, spikiness, order, disorder, regularity, randomness, outwardness, inwardness, upwardness, downwardness, left, right, familiarity and novelty among the qualities being juxtaposed.

Ultimately, aesthetic things as a whole tend to be monoaesthetic with each other by way of an extremely general structure: more exciting~less exciting. The single concept of a bias in the animal brain for the perceptual effect of differential excitement makes sense of previously mysterious or misunderstood phenomenal in the areas of linguistics, behavior, art, philosophy, mythology and religion culture, as well as sexual selection in biology.

Because all the otherwise independent instances of a particular mixture can be put in a group and thought of as effects of a single, causal bias, monoaesthetics represents a significant reduction in the number of independent events that would be necessary to explain the existence of aesthetic things. Aesthetic indifference, meanwhile, works in the opposite direction by allowing for a great deal of diversity. Since mixtures are derived from any possible pair of oppositely exciting qualities, there are at least as many aesthetic biases in the mind as there are ways to pair more and less exciting psychological opposites.

Descriptions of Lists

Each mixture list is preceded by a general aesthetic structure, in bold, that matches the relatively specific structure of the examples. “The quick and the dead,” for instance, with the specific structure quick~dead, is one of a large number of popular idiomatic expressions with the more general structure dynamic~static.

“Going steady,” with a different specific structure than “quick and dead” but the same general structure, is generally monoaesthetic with both, with the expressions “fast asleep,” “suspended animation,” “hurry up and wait,” “it's a waiting game,” “the unmoved mover” and “playing dead,” and with dozens of other popular expressions:

Dynamic~static: kill switch, the ride or die, fast asleep, go to sleep, jet lag, the calm before the storm, death march, dead man walking, wake the dead, spinning in the grave, dancing on someone's grave, go in for the kill, death spiral, slow your roll, still life, still alive, a matter of life and death, live free or die, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting something, the king is dead long live the king, ready steady go, slow and steady wins the race, steady as she goes, going nowhere fast, asleep at the wheel, change is the only constant, steadfast, bedswerver, live by the sword die by the sword, live dog is better than a dead lion, wake up and die right, festina lente (make haste slowly).

This is the same as the structure of the Emily Dickinson poem titles “A Death blow is a Life blow to Some,” “The Stimulus, beyond the Grave,” “She died at play,” “We do not play on Graves” and “Because I could not stop for Death.” In the latter poem, in the fifth line, haste is juxtaposed to slowness, and the seventh line mixes labor with leisure (mixtures are shown in brackets):

Because I could not stop for Death – [dynamic~death]
He kindly stopped for me – [male~static]
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste [fast~slow]
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too, [dynamic~static]
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring – [dynamic~round]
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun – [bright~down]

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill – [fluid/dynamic~cold]
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground – [big~solid]
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground – [up~down]

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day [bright~short]
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Every line of “A Death blow is a Life blow to Some” mixes death with life, one of the most common specific forms of the mixture dynamic~static:

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some [static~dynamic]
Who till they died, did not alive become —[static~dynamic]
Who had they lived, had died but when [dynamic~static]
They died, Vitality begun. [static~dynamic]

In “She died at play,” the girl becomes a softly strolling ghost, a mixture of both death with dynamism and motion with slowness:

She died at play, [static~dynamic]
Gambolled away
Her lease of spotted hours,
Then sank as gaily as a Turn [dynamic~down]
Upon a Couch of flowers.

Her ghost strolled softly o'er the hill [dynamic~slow/dead]
Yesterday, and Today,
Her vestments as the silver fleece—
Her countenance as spray.

The mixture dynamic~static recurs at high rates throughout poetry going back to its origins, and seemingly in every other type of aesthetic material that can incorporate it. In all cases, we can assume they exist due to aesthetic selection based a the single bias with the same structure.

Due to the unconscious association of dynamism with disorder, replacing the former with the later in the direct mixture dynamic~static leads to another popular mixture: disorder~static, which describes idioms such as the following:

Disorder~static: death spiral, a disaster waiting to happen, no rest for the wicked, get up on the wrong side of the bed, strange bedfellows, couldn't lie straight in bed (humorous), sleeping rough, dead broke, die of a broken heart, the calm before the storm.

Because stasis is related to order in the mind, replacing static in dynamic~static with order generates the popular mixture dynamic~order, which also corresponds to the structure of numerous English idioms:

Dynamic~order: play it straight, play it square, play fair, go in peace, go back to square one, steer clear, smooth move, keep calm and carry on, marching orders, level playing field, right quick, game plan, go figure, transfigure, go pear shaped, a fair shake, a balancing act.

One can go on this way, replacing qualities with others in the same mental category to derive dozens of mixtures with the structure of aesthetic phenomena, to an extent that the pattern demands an explanation involving some sort of universal psychological model.

Importantly, the expressions listed are mostly figurative, often almost entirely nonsensical, and therefore they can’t be understood based on utility or experience. No one actually means it’s going to be a cold day in hell when they use the phrase. They mean the situation is unusual, like coldness in hell. There are plenty of rare situations one could cite metaphorically to indicate something being unlikely, especially if they can draw the metaphor from either reality or realms of human imagination. The reason we choose to repeat the idea of a cold day in hell is not that it’s a uniquely suitable way to get at the idea of scarcity. It’s because we’re amused by the mixture hot~cold.

Cultural examples of mixtures outnumber those of popular expressions, probably because an expression can be used over and over and will still be thought of as singular, while each name or title is counted as unique.

The lists show at least eight popular expressions that mix the opposites hot and cold, and at least 53 cultural examples of the mixture that can be collected with little effort. There are 24 or more expressions mixing up with down, some of which are single words (overlay, layover, eavesdropping), and about 50 aesthetic cultural instances of the mixture. Many~few describes 39 or more expressions, with ~44 cultural examples, and so on.

One could consider each time a phrase is used in conversation or writing to be independent, in which case mixtures in expressions might outnumber the cultural ones.

In any case, the fact that mixtures appear repeatedly in purely aesthetic cultural contexts points to an aesthetic origin for those occurring in linguistic contexts. The fact that “One in a Million” has been used at least 25 times by different artists as the name of a song, explicitly for amusement rather than information, is reason to believe our normal use of the phrase in conversation is also for our amusement.

Other phrases with a similar meaning such as “a diamond in the rough,” mixing order with disorder, and “few and far between” mixing small numbers with large distances, are also amusing. “One in a Million” is a member of a large group of idioms known as adynata, which characterize something as improbable to the point of near impossibility. These also tend to have the structure of aesthetic mixtures:

Adynata: when Hell freezes over (hot~cold/solid), when the sky falls (up~down), don’t hold your breath (fluid~in), like squeezing blood from a stone, (fluid~solid), when pigs fly (up~round), when two Sundays come together (bright~in), a needle in a haystack (spiky~in).

Each adynaton can be found in the mixture lists with several expressions having the same structure, along with numerous monoaesthetic cultural examples that indicate we use the phrase for amusement. For instance, per Wikipedia, falling skies feature in the names of 13 songs, three albums, eight books or novels, a book series, and three films including the James Bond movie “Skyfall.” The idea is also immortalized in the European folktale Henny Penny (2006) by Chicken Licken:

So Gander-lander turned back, and met Turkey-lurkey. “Well, Turkey-lurkey, where are you going?” and Turkey-lurkey said, “I’m going to the wood for some meat.” Then Gander-lander said “Oh, Turkey-lurkey, don't go, for I was going, and I met Goosey-loosey, and Goosey-loosey met Draky-laky, and Draky-laky met Ducky-lucky, and Ducky-lucky met Cocky-locky, and Cocky-locky met Henny-penny, and Henny-penny met Chicken-licken, and Chicken-licken had been at the wood, and the sky had fallen on her poor bald pate, and we are going to tell the king.

In the lists that follow the more exciting quality in a duality or mixture is usually given to the left of a tilde, and the less exciting quality to the right, as in “hot~cold,” “fast~slow” or “evil~good,” with the number of expressions matching each structure indicated in parentheses. Nonlinguistic cultural and biological examples are given in separate lists below the linguistic examples.

Some of the lists refer to the number of fictional books, films, songs, albums or other aesthetic phenomena with names that fit the mixtures given on Wikipedia disambiguation or “topics referred to by the same term” pages, which serve as a convenient way to get a sense of popularity. Mixtures with large numbers of entries on disambiguation pages have been chosen, at least semi-independently, by equally large numbers of artists or creators as titles, and subsequently enjoyed by audiences, most obviously because people repeatedly find them amusing.

Some mixture lists are followed by paintings, photos, song lyrics, lines of poetry, popular quotes or dream descriptions containing instances of the same mixture, which could be counted as additional instances of cultural examples. Links in the headings of the lists lead to visual examples of the mixture, mostly of animals that express it as a sexually selected trait.