I have a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness

Very random thoughts . . .

Is Walker Percy on to something? Can a cure for depression be found or at least mitigated by his idea?: a depressed person being affected by the depression of others in and through the medium of art. Affected for the better. What happens in the psychology there? It’s in an essay called The Man on the Train. He’s aliened, not depressed. He’s reading a Kafka book about an aliened man: in the book, the alienated man is ‘re-presented’ to the alienated reader. Now, think of alienation in terms of a category. It’s a category of human existence. The alienated reader, therefore, falls into it. But when he reads the Kafka book, this same category is ‘represented’; and because it’s ‘represented’ to an already alienated reader, the category undergoes a transformation: it is reversed! The reader has a label for what he feels. He’s happy because Kafka knew enough about what he’s going through to write about it rightly. So, you have a triple alliance: the reader, the character, and the author! It’s another question what alienation itself is.

Kierkegaard was also on to something. He wrote - under the pseudonym ‘A‘ - about what art does to us. Or, what it shows us about who we are, or who we may be. Really quick: I’m just reminded about what Schelling said about art: that the morning-gate of beauty leads to the land of knowledge. If the art is beautiful, we can know things about whatever the art is trying to tell us, even if it’s about ourselves. Anyway, back to Kierkegaard. Art is supposed to develop our personality. Why is it that - for the most part - when we’re young, we’re ‘enthralled by the theater’? Yes, there’s still theater, but the modern counterpart for us would be the movies. There’s a correlation there. If we’re adults and we still love movies, it started when we were kids. There’s a magic about it. One of the main things we have to do when we ‘grow up‘ is find out who we are. We have so many possibilities to pick from. But the movies were for us where the possibilities came from. In the movies, we see a whole bunch of personalities: a Daniel Plainview here, a John Milton (Devil’s Advocate) there. And we don’t have to pick the whole personality; we can pick parts or aspects we like. We even do it with the friends we meet. But in the movies, we aren’t burdened with having to have a relationship with the personalities. Where is it in us that the movies affect us? Where is that Archimedean point where the movie ends and I begin? The spark that the movies ignite is the imagination. That’s where it all happens. It’s an inter-mingling of me, the movie, and my imagination, where ‘me’ includes all the other stuff that makes me ‘me’: reason, emotions, affections, desires, etc. So, let me ask you to do something. Personify ‘imagination’ for a minute. In watching a movie, the imagination ‘dreams’ about ‘the personality’ (who we are) and how all the ‘possibilities’ are open to it. The personality doesn’t have a set shape; it’s shifting and unstable and indistinct. So, it casts all sorts of shadows. Each shadow - just for a second - is just like the personality and you can look at the shadow - for just that second - and see ‘in a twinkling of an eye’ who you are, your self. But then it’s immediately gone and the shadow isn’t who you are anymore. All this happens really quickly in your consciousness; but what the movies allow you to do is set out all this stuff before us using images. The images can concretely represent the shadows; and when a part of the movie emotionally affects you, you see and feel on the screen and in your heart your personality, your self, your identity. The movies are a visual representation - those parts that you relate to, that make you laugh or cry, that affect you, that make you feel anything - of the personality, which is the dream of your imagination.

More correlations: Again, Walker Percy describes the alienated man. It’s strange. We’d all think a nuclear bomb going off in the middle of a major city would be something we wouldn’t want to happen. And we don’t want it to happen. What’s good about tens of thousands of deaths? But what about the authentic thrill that it could happen? The alienated man’s anxiety gets worse if he wonders what his life is going to be like if the bomb doesn’t fall. So, Percy says: “ . . . the heart’s desire of the alienated man is vines sprouting through the masonry.” But Tyler Durden in Fight Club says something eerily similar: “"Imagine stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.  Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles." Tyler Durden: the personification of alienation. Look at the correlation! Vines sprouting through the masonry: you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Very interesting.