First, I was reading this website yesterday: http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/?gclid=CNzym6nTsr0CFbBj7AodvRIAkQ
Their first recommendation is to “express your heart”. It occurs to me that is what I do here. The fundamental difference between my journal and this blog is that I am making things public, and that feels to some part of me much more like an intimate conversation. Yes, I likely share too much, but as I have said before, I also think our civilization is characterized by mass alienation, both from one another, and from our own feelings. I can claim to myself that I am setting an example, doing something useful.
And in any event the beauty of this is I have complete control. I am never interrupted, and I can go as deep and as long as I want. I do have friends I share things with, but no one who is willing to consistently go the places I go. My emotional pain tolerance is, I think, quite extraordinary. My practice–my Shugyo, to use the Japanese word for asceticism that I have always liked, and as I tend to call it for myself–would I think be much too much for many. No one comforts me. I have no one to run to with a complete expectation of openness. I am subject to constant psychological attack. And yet I go on.
Sometimes I think of the Tibetan Buddhists who spend as I understand it 3 years, 3 months and 3 days in solitary meditation. Think of all the things that come up: every fear, every worry, every imaginable demon. And yet they go on, and are cleansed at the end.
I used to be completely and utterly serious all the time. I had no sense of humor. I never laughed. I didn’t wear a trenchcoat and boots, but if I have felt more able to express myself, I might have. I felt no freedom to express anything. I spent most of my time more or less wanting to shrink into a hole, EVEN THOUGH, and this is an interesting point, I never would have admitted it. I had no idea WHAT I was feeling, because I was able to live in my head, in both ideas and fantasy.
I did learn to laugh, but it has felt like I have two houses. I have the one I built for my children, which is well lit, orderly, happy, full of love; and another one, that is dark, filled with ruins, rain, wind, and dark clouds. It is not, by and large, angry, and I feel grateful for that at least, although I am at times also prone to bouts of inappropriate anger. I am trying to speak the truth, because I feel close to being able to do something about it.
The other idea which occurs to me is that writing and feeling are two different things. Writing about feelings is not feeling feelings. All art is like this.
Think of some angry art you have seen–Picasso, say, whose work in his best known period has always felt to me like a big Fuck You. How do artists remains in similar emotional places all their lives, when the idea is self expression? How is that H.R. Giger has apparently remained in much the same place for the last 30 years? Why is no happy stuff coming out (that I know of)?
Here is the thing, you can approach a feeling, interrogate it, take pictures from all angles, sculpt it, paint it, sing it, write poems about it, act it out in a drama, and put it into countless forms, and never process it if you never ENTER it fully, if you never allow it to possess you fully, to burn its fire within you.
In my view, only “primitive” art can be cathartic. My “poem” of the previous post was the level I am talking about. Nothing refined, nothing sophisticated, nothing that takes a lot of craft. Nothing, in short, that would get published or hung on a wall.
Can I perhaps redefine “good” art as that which promotes effective abreaction?
No. I would add a level of art that I will call “mythic”. This is art which pulls things out of people. like Giger, either negative things, or sublime things, which allows people to feel feelings that were there, but unnoticed, of a positive nature.
These things are complicated, and I feel like I am wandering, so I’ll leave it at that. I’m sure I will have more to say presently.