It says at the end “she says she’s a good mother”. I think we are supposed to laugh at that, but I hope it is true. People who endure horrors, as she did, can grow beyond them.
But I had this odd buzz of images flowing through my head in my dreams last night, and when I woke up. Senseless, ridiculous, emotionally empty, absurd images.
And it struck me that much of the texture of human life is how we embrace absurdity. We are surrounded by it. Most of the rules we live by are fully contingent, but we act as if they are absolutely essential. It is absurd to get upset when your sports team loses, or excited when they win. You haven’t done a thing, and they don’t know you. It is absurd to get upset by many things.
But at the same time, emotions have a logic. When we see absurdity, what we need to do is look for the emotional logic underneath, and understand and embrace it. On another level, EVERYTHING has a purpose. Nobody ever does anything which doesn’t make sense to them.
The role of comedy is pointing out to us our own ridiculousness. We laugh, because we could also cry, in a great many cases, and both would be appropriate. I laughed at the I, Tonya movie, in part because it was sad and brutal. You laugh so you can both see, and not be hurt.
But the quality of your life is determined by whether you move towards absurdity, or away from it. Moving away from it is is constantly looking to find what is emotionally real for you, what your emotional logic is, and continually refining it so that you can seek out and enjoy lasting peace, joy, compassion, and love. This is the point of life. We so often miss it.
The opposite, however, is moving away from one’s authentic self, from one’s authentic emotions, and towards a taste for viewing everything both as absurd, and irredeemable. This is the person who laughs at everything, who is incapable of taking anything seriously, who seems incapable of tears.
I will offer Stephen Colbert as an example. His brand of comedy is almost pure cruelty. He is always laughing at what he claims is the stupidity of others. Sometimes he is right. Often he is right. But this smug, smarmy superficiality is at its core utterly vacuous. It is empty. He is not arguing FOR positive values of any sort. He merely mocks people who think differently, and makes a good living at it.
When I look in my heart at something like Satanism, the core belief is that nothing makes any sense, and nothing can be made to make any sense. There is no rest in this world or the next, no belonging, no joy. Everything is absurd and the world a cruel joke, and this faith a logical reaction to it.
If you think about it, the essence of the demonic is the formless. It is that which cannot manifest, because it cannot create a structure for itself. The essence of the angelic is beautiful and deep order. I view the crystal, as a material substance, as a good analogy. It conducts light, and in so doing transforms and channels it in particular ways.
The feeling is strong in what I am writing, but I am not quite sure I have captured it. My thinking perhaps remains a bit cloudy. Clouds do not conduct light well at all.
I will continue to ruminate.