Catharsis
It came as a bit of a shock to most of the people that know me to hear that I'm taking a break from LD debate. I'm so obsessed with it that it hardly seems possible that I'd quit. It's serious stuff, it's like SUICIDE (*/drama). I like to think that I'm just arguing a different way, because I haven't quit entirely- I've just decided to do Oratory instead.
What I like about Oratory is that it's basically a ten-minute-long speech about anything you want to rant about. The only requirements are that it would be well-put-together rhetorically and be memorized. (We'll have to work on the memorization part.) The very first thing I did upon making that decision was to sit down and make a gargantuan list of all the interesting stuff I might like to rant about for ten minutes straight. Most of it was a little cliché: assimilation, stereotypes, nature vs. nurture... yeah. (If you've read more than a hundred words of this blog, you've probably figured out what I think of clichés.) Eventually, I settled on the idea of Catharsis.
The word Catharsis is another word I picked out of my ninth grade vocabulary list and stuck in my "cool words" folder. It promptly got used to title a song. The idea fascinates me- that pain could deliberately be used to heal. No doubt I have used it as an excuse for indulgence before- indulgence and unhealthy obsession. It's a very personal intellectual struggle for me, so it didn't end up working out to make a speech of it. I've decided instead to make my would-be speech a blog and my would-be blog a speech- so, hopefully, now it all works.
I don't know if the idea resonates with you. I don't even know if I've understood the concept as it is generally understood. It's a vastly-studied idea, and I have not even learned my way through the tip of the iceberg. But what I have learned from studying it makes a damn lot of sense- if catharsis is the name of that damn lot of sense, then that's what I'm writing about.
Catharsis is a moment of exhilarating enjoyment in the midst of something that, at a more rational level, you might find repulsive. It's that moment in Crime and Punishment when Raskolnikov comes back from the murder and starts trying to hide the evidence. That moment in scenes like the "Why didn't you write me?" and "What do you want?" scenes from The Notebook. That moment when the bridge in This Is How I Disappear resolves. It's that moment when your eyes grow wide and you feel the realization drop into your gut that there's something big and inherently human about the thing you're experiencing. Catharsis is way darkness reverberates through every heart that feels, reminding them what it means to live, to be broken and healed. It accentuates joy and deepens sorrow, it brakes the dam between tension and resolution. It's the feeling that there are no internal membranes in your gut, or that maybe your guts are connected to the artist's. It's a commonality that goes beyond self-pity or mutual association, through to the greatest dilemas and values and glory humanity can experience.
Catharsis is in good dance. You can feel it in Latin or Hip Hop when it's like the bodies are part of the floor, or the sky, or some current in the air, and they don't actually move themselves anymore. It's been in a bunch of routines on So You Think You Can Dance- like Party People, I Can Transform Ya, "The Clown Piece,", or My Chick Bad. Catharsis is most vivid, I think, when it's achieved in several mediums at once: Like 96,000 from the play In The Heights. They dance from their guts, they sing from their guts, they speak from their guts, and- most crucially- their guts are all connected by some magical electricity binding it all together.
That electricity is what makes art YUMMY. You know, when you feel like you've just dived into a piece of art and licked it clean from the inside out? When it's just so good that you can't help but laugh of delight and shudder at the genius of it all? That's when you've channeled the electricity I'm talking about, that's when you've felt the catharsis. I don't believe it a stretch to say that God might be involved with that electricity. It's no new idea that we can move closer to God through our art.
But here's the issue: time and time again, I have gone looking for healthy catharsis and found plain darkness, without the electricity. It confused me so much how foolproof the cathartic process seemed in one area, and how damaging in another. As much sense as artistic catharsis made to me, I didn't understand how to reconcile that with, say, indulgence in media violence, or indulgence in porn, or in vulgarity. In one instance, you take something dark and common and focus on it and it fills you with energy and life and healing- in the other instance, it drags you down in an addictive cycle of suffering and dispair. And after a good deal of thinking and talking and writing, I think I've come to some sort of a conclusion.
I think of it this way: that there are two types of characteristics we can take on. The first kind we own, and the second we just adopt- the first is deep-set character, the second is reaction to experience. The difference is nicely expressed in Spanish. You can say someone "es feliz"- is happy, but inherently so, meaning that someone is a happy person- or "está feliz"- is happy, but temporarily so, meaning that someone feels happy. There are lots of different emotions a fundamentally happy (perhaps we'd call that "joyful") person can feel, from pride to depression to anger. That doesn't change the fact that they experience it all with a joyful default. It can also go the other way around. I can "ser enojada"- be an angry person- but at times experience happiness or peace.
These levels of character include more than just happiness or sadness or angriness, though. They can contain problems we encounter or temptations we're vulnerable to, as well. If I have a problem with violence, it would be in the first file of characteristics, the ones I own. If I do not have a problem with violence but feel violent toward someone, it doesn't make the violence right, but it means I'm not as easily tempted by the idea. It's not a part of the foundation I'm standing on. In that case, it might help me to rant about my violent feelings, or hit my pillow, or write about it, or play about it, just out with it and be done. But if I've made violence a part of who I am, anything that might stimulate a destructive attitude like that would simply help it grow and destroy me, like roots cracking the foundation of a building.
I've talked to several people who have had problems with violent patterns of thought, and music like the My Chemical Romance song that I referenced earlier had horrible effects on them. The angriness of the sound would tap into something animalistic and let out something savage instead of killing it on the spot. Obviously, that ain't helpful. Exactly the opposite is necessary here: maybe, totally ignoring the thoughts. Listening to quiet, calming music. Cooking. The most counter-intuitive thing you can think up. Those tend to be the things that provide a true cleansing, a true catharsis. Because even if it doesn't give the same electrifying, unifying feeling artistic catharsis might, you can't expect to feel unified when you're broken under the surface. You've got to fight out of that trough first and weed the vice out of the first file. Catharsis can only work once the issue is temporary again. If you're facing temptation instead of sin, art can be used to purify again.
What I like about Oratory is that it's basically a ten-minute-long speech about anything you want to rant about. The only requirements are that it would be well-put-together rhetorically and be memorized. (We'll have to work on the memorization part.) The very first thing I did upon making that decision was to sit down and make a gargantuan list of all the interesting stuff I might like to rant about for ten minutes straight. Most of it was a little cliché: assimilation, stereotypes, nature vs. nurture... yeah. (If you've read more than a hundred words of this blog, you've probably figured out what I think of clichés.) Eventually, I settled on the idea of Catharsis.
The word Catharsis is another word I picked out of my ninth grade vocabulary list and stuck in my "cool words" folder. It promptly got used to title a song. The idea fascinates me- that pain could deliberately be used to heal. No doubt I have used it as an excuse for indulgence before- indulgence and unhealthy obsession. It's a very personal intellectual struggle for me, so it didn't end up working out to make a speech of it. I've decided instead to make my would-be speech a blog and my would-be blog a speech- so, hopefully, now it all works.
I don't know if the idea resonates with you. I don't even know if I've understood the concept as it is generally understood. It's a vastly-studied idea, and I have not even learned my way through the tip of the iceberg. But what I have learned from studying it makes a damn lot of sense- if catharsis is the name of that damn lot of sense, then that's what I'm writing about.
Catharsis is a moment of exhilarating enjoyment in the midst of something that, at a more rational level, you might find repulsive. It's that moment in Crime and Punishment when Raskolnikov comes back from the murder and starts trying to hide the evidence. That moment in scenes like the "Why didn't you write me?" and "What do you want?" scenes from The Notebook. That moment when the bridge in This Is How I Disappear resolves. It's that moment when your eyes grow wide and you feel the realization drop into your gut that there's something big and inherently human about the thing you're experiencing. Catharsis is way darkness reverberates through every heart that feels, reminding them what it means to live, to be broken and healed. It accentuates joy and deepens sorrow, it brakes the dam between tension and resolution. It's the feeling that there are no internal membranes in your gut, or that maybe your guts are connected to the artist's. It's a commonality that goes beyond self-pity or mutual association, through to the greatest dilemas and values and glory humanity can experience.
Catharsis is in good dance. You can feel it in Latin or Hip Hop when it's like the bodies are part of the floor, or the sky, or some current in the air, and they don't actually move themselves anymore. It's been in a bunch of routines on So You Think You Can Dance- like Party People, I Can Transform Ya, "The Clown Piece,", or My Chick Bad. Catharsis is most vivid, I think, when it's achieved in several mediums at once: Like 96,000 from the play In The Heights. They dance from their guts, they sing from their guts, they speak from their guts, and- most crucially- their guts are all connected by some magical electricity binding it all together.
That electricity is what makes art YUMMY. You know, when you feel like you've just dived into a piece of art and licked it clean from the inside out? When it's just so good that you can't help but laugh of delight and shudder at the genius of it all? That's when you've channeled the electricity I'm talking about, that's when you've felt the catharsis. I don't believe it a stretch to say that God might be involved with that electricity. It's no new idea that we can move closer to God through our art.
But here's the issue: time and time again, I have gone looking for healthy catharsis and found plain darkness, without the electricity. It confused me so much how foolproof the cathartic process seemed in one area, and how damaging in another. As much sense as artistic catharsis made to me, I didn't understand how to reconcile that with, say, indulgence in media violence, or indulgence in porn, or in vulgarity. In one instance, you take something dark and common and focus on it and it fills you with energy and life and healing- in the other instance, it drags you down in an addictive cycle of suffering and dispair. And after a good deal of thinking and talking and writing, I think I've come to some sort of a conclusion.
I think of it this way: that there are two types of characteristics we can take on. The first kind we own, and the second we just adopt- the first is deep-set character, the second is reaction to experience. The difference is nicely expressed in Spanish. You can say someone "es feliz"- is happy, but inherently so, meaning that someone is a happy person- or "está feliz"- is happy, but temporarily so, meaning that someone feels happy. There are lots of different emotions a fundamentally happy (perhaps we'd call that "joyful") person can feel, from pride to depression to anger. That doesn't change the fact that they experience it all with a joyful default. It can also go the other way around. I can "ser enojada"- be an angry person- but at times experience happiness or peace.
These levels of character include more than just happiness or sadness or angriness, though. They can contain problems we encounter or temptations we're vulnerable to, as well. If I have a problem with violence, it would be in the first file of characteristics, the ones I own. If I do not have a problem with violence but feel violent toward someone, it doesn't make the violence right, but it means I'm not as easily tempted by the idea. It's not a part of the foundation I'm standing on. In that case, it might help me to rant about my violent feelings, or hit my pillow, or write about it, or play about it, just out with it and be done. But if I've made violence a part of who I am, anything that might stimulate a destructive attitude like that would simply help it grow and destroy me, like roots cracking the foundation of a building.
I've talked to several people who have had problems with violent patterns of thought, and music like the My Chemical Romance song that I referenced earlier had horrible effects on them. The angriness of the sound would tap into something animalistic and let out something savage instead of killing it on the spot. Obviously, that ain't helpful. Exactly the opposite is necessary here: maybe, totally ignoring the thoughts. Listening to quiet, calming music. Cooking. The most counter-intuitive thing you can think up. Those tend to be the things that provide a true cleansing, a true catharsis. Because even if it doesn't give the same electrifying, unifying feeling artistic catharsis might, you can't expect to feel unified when you're broken under the surface. You've got to fight out of that trough first and weed the vice out of the first file. Catharsis can only work once the issue is temporary again. If you're facing temptation instead of sin, art can be used to purify again.
Unrelated to the actual subject, but I do know more memorization strategies than I can count if you want 'em.
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