Does an 'expression of joy' lead to (or come from) emancipatory / transgressive conduct or servile / debased conduct? Is it used for medicine or to poison? Maybe something along those lines ... — 180 Proof
:up:
I'm pretty sure I feel you here.
I may be be wrong ,but it feels like the subtext of what you're talking about is, at root, the joy of being
part of a real-life community sharing in something outside of yourself, sharing it with others. But then, as soon as that wouldn't-it-be-nice begins to come in, the spectre of 'but isn't that also how fascism works?' pops up. Not just fascism but any happy group thats happy through communally purging some scapegoat. If that's right, it's also a pattern of thought that I'm afflicted by.
I'm reading Walt Whitman's
Song of Myself*, for the first time, and it's mostly pure
ecstatic (with all the vibey
and etymological resonances of that word), which is how, by osmosis, we all think about Whitman.
But - & I didn't expect this - at one point, late in the poem ( & it's a very long poem) he begins to slip into darker territory; at first in his same joyous register, but slowly tending more and more morose and then:
Enough! Enough! Enough!
Some how I have been stunn'd. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuff'd head, slumbers, dreams
gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
bludgeons and hammers!
That i could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
bloody crowing!
I remember now — Whitman
A
lot follows, and it would be ridiculous to reduce it to any one thing, but a large part of what he does after that [event/trauma/breach] is to imaginatively work through a process of healing, defending, consoling and so forth - and it's all worked out, as is his fashion, in very concrete scenes of such processes taking place (enter the academic register: In this poem he always expresses an emotion or idea by providing a series of tableaux that exemplify it; so, here, he presents a succession of tableaux exemplifying the idea of the active protection and aiding of a convalescent)
Maybe there's something to that - being attuned enough to the joyous whole to share in it, but aware enough to say 'enough!' when it spills over into something sinister. He literally puts the poem on pause to help all the sufferers, before he will resume the joy
(even the antinatalists!
"Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt despair
and unbelief.
[...]
Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among
any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all precisely
the same.
I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.)
I do think that there is a point here where thought really can't have any purchase. There can't be any cognitive guarantee that a given, shared, joy is of the type that can be apodictically condoned - there has to be some intuition or art in figuring out if it's one or the other.
& I do also think happiness and tranquility have their place. There is an element to the encounter-with-the-outside in certain deleuzian strands that reminds me of doing the oregon trail at strenuous-pace-no-rations - a saint might handle it ( or not handle it, and die beautifullly worn-out) but there's something to be said for rejuvenation (to take another video game metaphor - if the world of capitalism is resident evil, you have to avail yourself of the soft music of the safe room, from time to time.)
----
*Song of hisself, yes, but he's clear he means (and the poem bears it out) that his 'self' is the shared experience of a collective