I agree with Da Blob in part, but my thoughts are more complex:
(This is only a preliminary sketch.)
Catharsis now etiolates us.
In Greece, Catharsis acted as a counter-balance to excess: excess of life, abundance which if not mitigated was presenced as a frenzy which the structures of the city could not survive. Stories dormant within humans that needed some means of awakening into externality were given life primarily through individual experiences, but the tendency towards ecstasy, stronger than the balance and limitation necessarily implicit in lawful society, lived through collective tragedy. In this way, people remained whole and retained the experience of divine madness without recourse to destruction of transpersonal structures which were weaker than their latent furies and unbound longings.
In the modern Occident, and other social structures bearing equivalence to its own, the stories which formerly lived predominantly through the personal are no longer the province of individual humans, tribes, or groups. Whereas Aristotelian catharsis was formerly a means of lessening energies too strong for the social structures which their undirected expression would have impacted, a specific poison administered in small enough quantities that it functioned as a medicine, its tyrannical descendants are dedicated to extinguishing any fire within our hearts. Lest we burn the paper-world we live in. Not only our latent ecstasy but all of the stories which we bear within us and which we have for millennia been the actors in are outsourced to collective media. The energy that imbued our lives, and that once was a real threat to all that which would utilise us, is not permitted to us in any lifelike quantity; it is expended through our engagement with endless stories which originate from without of the personal relations and oscillations of our own lives, and which rob us of what was once our birthright. Those endless stories: news, centralised language, television, films, books, art, fashion, and other media. That birthright: the living of our own stories, through us and those immediately connected to, influenced by, and influential over us.
Intense experience is no longer for real people—it is for the characters that anybody may access by technology and informational networks, and its intrusion into our own authentic experience is understood to be pathology. Our emotional narratives are welcomed only by collective means of dissipation, and are consequently structured by mediums which do not facilitate personal growth and change, over years and in an extensionally unique way, as inherent-experiential-potential-made-immediately-extant did for our ancestors.
We are meek as no ancestral Christian was meek. Our inherent personal passion is anathema in social dynamics whose ideological and conceptual components are not directly accessible to, or influenced by, the individual people and minor geographical groupings that are subject to them. These dynamics operate on a vast, transpersonal scale; one which denies individuality of conception and interpretation of experience to the human vessels through which they exist.
That little which still is ostensibly our own– relationships, family, perceptions, thoughts—is, for most, largely determined by that which is broadcast and distributed to us, and the structure of which, by functioning as the mediums through which the most intimate and uninhibited in us is awoken to life in the world, is dominant over us. Rare depths of emotion, rare psychophysiological incompatibilities with the available consumable, and rare experiences whose intensity makes the common irrelevant, such as intense and prolonged suffering, are now prerequisites for some limited autonomy of identity. And even these experiential heresies seem rarely sufficient to compromise the integrity of prevailing dynamics; usually they just provoke a more refined and specific taste in the outsourcing of one’s own energies to distant media.
The norm today: a levelling down, a flattening of the rhythm of experience. The potential for intensity which formerly enriched individual social experience sacrificed, without hesitation, to the endless impersonality of the consumable-by-anyone.
What might a person who recognises the above do to take back their stories from the distant media which own them, and to experience their personal and organic unfoldment through their own experience? To choose not to be subjugated to the level of a replaceable component in structures far vaster than the scope of their own lives and individual experiences? To express that which is their own (stories; potential actualisation) through that which is their own (the immediate and personal), not through that which is immune from them? To withdraw their scattered selves into themselves, that they might imbue their own life with their all that they previously extended away from it?
Work it out for yourselves.
[Actually, I might make a thread out of that.]
, but i have been working on this part of me and one day hope to cross paths with a lady i can reward with the fruits of my labor.
