More Fetish:

"The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest them. Of course, it would be much better to see the sea itself rather than pictures of it; but when a good thing is not available, a man is satisfied with an inferior one. When the genuine article is not present, a substitute will do. Even the people who can admire the real sea cannot always do so when they want to, and so they call up memories of it. But man’s imagination is weak; it needs support and prompting. So to revive their memories of the sea, to see it more vividly in their imagination, they look at seascapes. This is the sole aim and object of very many (the majority of) works of art: to give those people who have not been able to enjoy beauty in reality the opportunity to acquaint themselves with it at least to some degree; to serve as a reminder, to prompt and revive memories of beauty in reality in the minds of those people who are acquainted with it by experience and love to recall it..."

– Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky
(but see Cool World, perhaps it's already here?)

Or perhaps a fetish is like an enzyme, literally, that walking, talking, smoking and drinking, live being which metamorphoses the sludge in the stomach vat into wonderful tidbitts for all the little people on the inside? Or is it, perhaps, whatever it is, that glint in the eye of a lizard which transmits letters of introduction to both fragrance and image, right there in the middle of the dance floor? Consciousness itself might just be a dance of metaphors. What's the matter, is it alive?

“A work of art strives for the harmony of idea and image” no more and no less than does the shoemaker’s craft, the jeweler’s craft, calligraphy, engineering, moral resolve. “All work should be done well” – such is the meaning of the phrase “harmony between idea and image." (ibid)

I would more rather say "harmonic" and even more importantly (especially for the enzyme), "generative". Without the ripples, the entendre itself disappears back into the pit. As they say, the more the merrier, and that creates movement, if only a lizard snapping at a fly. And what is a legless lizard anyway but a snake, and no gutless wonder at that! What is not beautiful is still natural, especially when it bites, and that's the beauty of it.

For Chernyshevsky, love is an enzyme – "the base to which everything else is tied with Gordian knots; without it everything loses coherence and meaning." I call it "Sativa". But without the occasional monster, we're reduced to a lump of romantics, and then, where's a movement to go but to the work camp or toilet? Sometimes the enzyme is just fun, and that can reproduce paisley, just for the hell of it. To capture an essence, one must always refer to the context, as there is no owning an object outside of hell – who'd want to? As commentaries and audience, the Doodles are the real artists in Cool World, which only goes to show, there's always a critic waiting to fall from the attic like a bank vault or attack in the Fall like a pen sucking ink.

On the other hand, there's Henry Thomas Buckle for a good game of chess.

And then there's Sergius Stepniak on Nihilism and Narodnichestvo,`
Stepniak's bio and Historical Nihilism.