From Equus:
" 'Worship isn't destructive. I know that.'
'I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. He lives one hour every week - howling in the mist. And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee worship!...Many men have less vital with their wives."
"'I mean he's in pain. He's been in pain for most of his life.'
'Possibly.'
'Possibly?! . . . That cut-off little figure you just described must have been in pain for years.'
'Possibly'
'And you can take it away.'
...
'Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'...He's done that. All right, he's sick. He's full of misery and fear. He was dangerous, and be again, though I doubt it. But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it.'"
. . .
"'All right! I'll take it away! He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! . . . My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! . . . Let me tell you exactly what I'm going to do him!
I'll heal the rash on his body, I'll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that's done, I'll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are tethered all their lives in dim light, just to feed it! I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads! I'll take away his field of Ha Ha and give him Normal places for his ecstasy - multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor.'"
I've been living in Arcade Fire, wondering in reflection of these words that resonate with something all too deep and real inside of me, how much it requires 'insanity' to truly not only feel passion, but to live in it wholly. Some lifestyles, some professions allow for it - but most, I believe, do not. At least in the Western world, the only world I really know, where just as I find myself settling for a work life that not only leaves me passionless, but what is so much worse, robs me of time to even indulge in the things that bring about the sensation of passion, and make life worth living; I still abhor the idea of it.
I wish I really could deny the laws of physics and the chemistry of my own body to throw everything in gestures of feeling and devotion. But I participate in a society (Sartre would not allow me to escape saying that I actively choose it) which puts limits on my ability to completely listen to my heart, and demands unnatural things of my body. I find myself in this place where the more effort and energy I put into cultivating the self that gives me heart, energy, vitality to be, the more I take away from the self that sustains me insofar as my job is concerned, because that second self is one that buckles under. I want to be able to rush to your aid, but I was defeated before I walked through the door.
And, as soon as I closed up this post, I opened up Paul Tillich, and found these lines expressing what he has to say about grace:
"It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged."
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