In the event of a maddening circumstance everyone tries to hunker down, it is the logical proposition that makes sense in a mad, mad world. If feelings are on a rampage, when emotions decide to override the limits of reality, that is when you break your arm against the wall in a display of fury, you forgot the wall was solid, you forgot that your calcium fertilized bones are no match for cement, you dislocated your reality, you wanted to feel the pain and reality, the construct that is interminably solid in the present, though in ruins over time like the Roman empire, you forgot that reality largely a mental construct acquires a life of its own that suffers a resistance against you and against change and thus it normalizes you, it calms you down, it submits your dynamic to a proposition of stillness.
Sentient beings react only to emotion and build the logical world from the extreme reaction. A violent reaction to feelings is logic, and logical constructs are defined as we well know by now, as the straight jacket that one puts on one’s emotions when they become intolerable. No one feels more than a logician. No one is more warm than a cold hearted individual. They both of course represent the horror of emotions. This is very difficult to say, that a pragmatist or a puritan is a highly reactive and emotional construct gone to the extreme of horrors due to their ability to feel. While calmer mild artists that are not as obviously afraid to express their emotions are in fact the dull side of the world of feelings.
How can that be so? Are we not used to the cold blooded general, the heartless torturer, the fascist dictator, the rational philosopher are we not used to them being the unfeeling great. Well yes, but that doesn’t presuppose the concept to be right, most people think that anyone that doesn’t respond to them is a cold person. Yet this is probably not a sincere judgment, and no greater truth could make it more obvious than the fact that any, any type of greatness requires a gauntlet of emotions. You just can’t be Cesar the Great, Heinous Kung, Attila de Hun or Mussolini without suffering from intense emotional passions.
The locked up dictator is powered by lust and passion, both of which are mutually recyclable. An artist or a poet are quick to cry, they are quick to injure, they are quick to take offense, this is not because they are more sensitive but rather because they are more insensitive. That is they feel that they are the only ones that truly feel and suffer and that because of that they might have to burden the rest of us with their sad poetry, with their twisted love songs, with their allegories on the insensitivity possessed by the rest of us and the cruel world included. The reality is a little different, the artist is a cry baby. Artist want the world to listen to them and to save them and to understand them, but they themselves do not want to understand the world. It takes no great amount of perseverance to write a melancholic love song, or a dark hearted poem, or to wit-out all the nonsense of the social world in a novel, painting or sculpture. It requires a little more passion however to confront that world, to make it apart of the self, and to challenge it to change instead of towards humility and compassionate adventure and a suicide of happiness.
But if the mostly not so great are weak of feeling, then what are we to make of the fantastic rituals that are amassed in the mass. That is the glory of it, it is precisely in combined stagnant forces where one finds the continuity created by rituals which don’t change through the ages. There is the symbolic expression of the mass, there they are genuine icons of the word and the world, expressed in their most amazing, the power of the descriptive, the detail of the ritual.
Here is where you find the church of amazement, how the mass emotion repeats itself and hails down upon the unwilling by monumental representation that can only be represented through the agglomeration of the ages. A catholic church is a beating heart of repetition, the culture of a captive audience, held together by their non-thinking, resting propositions, there is no floundering here, when you step into the catholic mass you have come upon something so divinely eonic, some marvelously repetitive, and the minute hand, the grain of sand of this ticking cultural clock is a human being, and another and more until you have the aggregate of all the Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims that have through the ages kneeled to pray for their god to own them, sung to love their god, stood for their god to witness, glorifying the immensity of their cultural continuity that is based on witnessing the ages by acting them out in a recalcitrant judgment of the denial of change. We are closer to the Jews in Bethlehem because the ordained reactionary ritual refuses all change and adds the continuity from which all change can be perceived without adulterated mangling emotions.
The more emotional the harness the more it will be perceived as relentlessly unfeeling; there is nothing more beautiful and no better place to rest than in the continuity caused by dogmatic culture.
