In truly good books, not infrequently I find some feeling within me expressed that I had not known so well before as I do after. Since there is a lot of latent grief in me, I find situations filled with pathos very moving, and find myself crying. But it is salutary, even if difficult.
I would draw an analogy between emotional and physical wounds. Physical therapy following, say, knee or hip or shoulder surgery, can be very painful, but that is the only way you get as much movement back as you are going to get.
And with emotions, of course, they are more subtle, and there is no Physical Therapist with a clear, if difficult, plan.
Participating vicariously in the feelings of others, through art, is a sort of therapy, if you give yourself up to it. I suppose that is why I have read little literature these many years. I like Doris Lessing a lot, but most likely because she is intellectual, and does not stir up the same feelings in me that this current book is. She is clinical, observational, and extremely trenchant in her observations, but it seems likely she moved on to the next world with many things unfelt within her.
Or I could compare it to a large selection of essential oils. You sniff one bottle, and that’s not it. Nor is the next. But the third brings out a lot. It’s a frequency, a tone, a gestalt that is not a form at all, but which has a recognizable presence all the same.
Most people spend their lives in a very small range of permissible emotions, and certainly the American obsession with work does much to both support and further this. As we lose touch with our feelings, we redouble what is causing this fracture. We learn to walk on broken legs, to swim with broken arms.
And then we wonder why sad music makes us so sad, and why life seems tedious and pointless after a time. Why life seems like WORK, rather than play.
We have done much with science, but in the process most of us have lost much of our humanity.
And it is my personal challenge that most of the people who are most open to ideas of this sort tend to be naive enough to believe silly political lies, such that where I might otherwise be able to find community is largely closed to me.
But every day I feel the energy in my belly lessening just a bit, and I am getting fractions of a second of peace, such that I know it is possible even for me.