tragedy

(loosely connected thoughts)

To be frustrated, angry, confused, this is nothing new in life. Yet these emotions continue to surprise us. And the potency of pain never wears away. It bites just as hard or harder each time. Thinking "Oh, I've felt this before..." does nothing to lessen the hit. Familiarity with feeling does not diminish its impact.

Yes, we can now take anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, what have you to block a good amount of the pain of feeling, at the expense of doing just that, severing yourself from your own emotions. People on meds do commonly report feeling numb and emotionless. "Chemical imbalance." What they're really saying is that you have a disposition, the tendency, to predominant unhappiness. Detrimental to yourself and others. So you must artificially check your emotional lows (and highs) and re-condition yourself to manageable (acceptable) levels. But you can never "re-condition" it away.

Of course, I'm aware that life can be overwhelmingly good, too. But my point is about fate. Necessity. Somehow, I think, we have to come to terms with the fact that we are all fated to go through pain, anger, confusion, frustration, sadness, i.e. formidable unpleasantness, over and over, again and again, that we do not have the control our realist, individualistic, classically liberal ideology says we have. In America, in general, we strongly recognize in ourselves, through the cultural mirror of ideology, the rational subject, unbridled autonomy ("Be anything you want to be!" / "Land of opportunity!" / "You have the power to change anything!"), individuality, independence, and unique identity. But this is a mis-recognition of what we really are, and of the real conditions of life and living. A set-up for disappointment and an impediment to understanding.

We cannot simply free ourselves of the bad, i.e. ugly emotions and life's tragedies. We cannot simply change our mind or alter our perceptions about life's tragedies. We cannot be consoled by reason either. In fact, we know that it is often useless to say/think "Well, if I had only done such and such, this wouldn't have happened. Next time, I'll avoid it all." It can frustrate us forever. We must often just accept it. And simply making ourselves feel better (or, not as bad) about tragedy through perceptual reconditioning only ever works, in my experience, to avoid bad feelings and never really helps one reach a better understanding. But the bad--pain and suffering--are just as much a part of living as the good, and will always be. Of necessity. Did you forget? We are all fated to die. And we must live with this knowledge, or be lucky enough not to think about it, or perhaps have the good fortune to understand something of death (though nothing of the power to change it). And so it's all very tragic, isn't it?

But tragedy, since the Ancient Greeks (see: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.), has also been a major source of enlightenment, wisdom, and meaning, in addition to distress.

There is something to the study of tragedy that I think can help me reach a meaningful understanding of the human condition and cope with life in a way that is not mere avoidance or false hope or quick and easy rationalization of life's tragedies, but an honest appraisal of them.

In my view, there is a challenge to not become so hardened and bitter towards life that you resign from creativity, and wonder, and from putting yourself out there to confront the world.

To live.

But this is all kind of bullshit isn't it? It's all just varying levels of sophisticated rationalization. What is not--poorly constructed or otherwise--a rationalization?

Tragic.