Hello friends,
Following my desire to write richer pieces in which my thoughts are informed by a choir of references, this edition of 5, 6, 7, 8 is the result of research about catharsis. Following one’s desire is a political trajectory because it produces friction with a world dominated by the idea that pain = gain. Funnily enough, pain=gain is, loosely, what catharsis is. My desire has thus led me to write about catharsis in the least cathartic way possible – or has it?
Engaging with other people’s ideas is challenging, especially when those people are Aristotle and Tobi Haslett. I was reminded of some dangers. 1) Having a destination is a great way to wind up elsewhere. 2) If I hold on to my ideas too hard, everything I read confirms what I already know. 3) If I don’t hold on to my ideas hard enough, I come down with a case of everything-is-connected. And, well, everything is connected, but not if I want to be rigorous and stay relatable. In any case, if you think my interpretation of any of these texts is off, please drop me a line. Also, this was a lot of work! Have you considered upgrading to paid?
I wanted to write about catharsis because I enjoy experiencing it in the theater and in movies. It is one of those uncool and un-contemporary theatrical events that I like because it gives me pleasure and relief. Beware, catharsis is often used in place of ‘transcendence’, but they are not the same. Catharsis is, according to Aristotle, the dramaturgical arousal of negative emotions as a way to purge the audience of their negative emotions - it’s a cleanse. To me, catharsis produces a tangible mood shift that amplifies my sense that the audience is having a shared experience. When everyone is having their own ambiguous and ambivalent experience, it just… doesn’t hit as hard as when a show shoves us off a cliff only to deftly put us back together.
However, in these times of fascism, I must be warier. Catharsis is the dramaturgical equivalent of a guilty pleasure, in the sense that in order to enjoy it, I must ignore that it is a western canonical dramatic arc that glorifies and normalized hardship. Plato claimed that a cathartic purge “elevates the mind and creates distinction and peaceful coexistence by eliminating the passions,” which sounds cute, but the implication is that catharsis can quell revolutionary fervor. Like anyone who has seen a good Disney movies would know, catharsis appeases the masses and dilutes our desire for revolt.
But what does catharsis even mean? In ancient Greece, it was a medical term to describe the purification of blood through blood. In the Illiad, Achilles wrongly kills Thersites, and is sent to Lesbos for a purification ritual called Kathairein and is washed of guilt with the blood of a piglet. At the time, to need healing from a physical or mental injury may have been synonymous with needing atonement. Ritual washing of blood-guilt through the Kathairein achieved both things. The underlying belief was that blood washes blood. It makes sense that Aristotle applied the same principle to the arousal of negative emotions as a way to purge negative emotions in the theater. It wasn’t until later that Plato spun the idea into a form of crowd control.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a group of early Christians in southern France called the Cathars. They may have been named from the Greek root Katharoi/Katharos — the pure ones. They may also have gotten their name from the French word for cat, thanks to Alain de Lille and a smear campaign that painted them as heretics. Cathars “kiss the posterior of the cat, in whose form, as they say, Lucifer appears to them,” de Lille lied. “Cathar” was not the name they used to refer to themselves – they preferred Bons Chrétiens and called each other bon homme, bonne femme.
The Bons Chrétiens were dualists, which means that they believed in a good God of Heaven and an evil God of Earth, named Satan. Satan, also known as Lucifer (of the cat’s butt), created matter, which is why the Bons Chrétiens believed that all matter is evil. One way they lived that belief was by being pescatarians, because cheese, eggs, meat, or milk were by-products of sexual intercourse, but fish, they thought, were produced by spontaneous generation.
Part of their dualism was the concept of an ongoing holy war between the two gods, between good and evil. Fallen angels joined Satan’s rebellion, aided by the giants born of copulation between Eve’s daughters and evil demons. The angels that did not fall, who collectively were known as the Holy Spirit, were the heavenly god’s army.
Bons Chrétiens believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of Satan. They believed in reincarnation, and that you could be reincarnated into a man or a woman, so women were held in relative gender parity. Many women converted because higher roles were available to them than in Catholicism. Hildegard von Bingen was a notable exception, pronouncing God’s eternal damnation on the Bons Chrétiens.
The Bons Chrétiens were considered heretics because of gender parity of course, but also because they denied transubstantiation, purgatory, prayers to the dead and to saints, and read scriptures in vernacular (scholars claim that this group pre-figured Protestantism). Like the cat butt slur, there were several campaigns to wipe them out. Tens of thousands of Bons Chrétiens, regardless of age, would be burned at the stake or hung over the two centuries it took to wipe them out. The Albigensian Crusade, in which Bons Chrétiens were made to wear yellow crosses on their arms before being slaughtered, is, according to Raphael Lemkin who coined the word genocide in the 20th century, “one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history.” Although it is debated, many agree that this mass murder formed a precedent for the Holocaust.
Why did I get so deep into the Bons Chrétiens? I guess it was just an etymological wormhole I fell into. And I am trying to figure out what it is about the cultural history of this place I write in, Europe, that has predisposed me to finding pleasure in catharsis. It doesn’t seem that the Bons Chrétiens were predisposed to catharsis, despite how their famous sacrament, the Consolamentum, is a purification ritual.
However, learning about the way this aesthetically demure, widely popular, non-violent, group of peasants and artisans who believed in gender parity were totally erased reminded me of something Valentina Desideri told me. She said that what Europe did to the rest of the world during colonialism was only possible because it had done it to itself first.
It felt apt to research the Bons Chrétiens because two other writers I read, Tobi Haslett and Danny Hayward, referenced social catharses in a medieval context, articulating how festivities and fooling turn social order upside down. They also write about laughter and play, and how lying and pretending allow us to see the world differently, if we are willing to look.
Tobi Haslett names the ridiculousness of this moment and the political uses of laughter in this must-read article. He says, “it matters who’s laughing at what, at whom. Who gets to say what’s not serious or isn’t there.” Later, he says, “laughter is always dancing on the knife’s edge, winking between worlds.” The protective function, or border-guard aspect here reminds me of Melanie Jame Wolf’s line “’I was only joking’ is the first line of defense for bigots and creeps. It is a defense for not being funny at all.” Think of insecure, nervous laughter, protecting against something on the other side, collective laughter, able to overthrow the status quo or confirm it, and humiliating laughter, laughter that cuts you out.
Laughter seems to point at a boundary of sorts, at the space between worlds, the potential of a shift. This political moment is unlike any other I have experienced in my life; things are changing dramatically and at lightning speed. This moment is, as Haslett writes, an irreversible moment of rupture. We are moving from one world into another. It makes me wonder what a world even is. It makes me ponder why humans imagine other worlds, heavens, holy wars, and what it says about what we desire, what we fear. How does our imagination make us act and plot to change worlds? And are we talking for real, or for fun?
Danny Hayward, in his essay “No But Genoa,” says we desire catharsis in a similar way to desiring innocence. He writes about play and Johan Huizinga’s magic circle. Huizinga says that within the magic circle is poesis, where things are not what they seem, and are not bound by logic and causality. When we enter a game, we step into a magic circle; we shift worlds.
Thanks to Nikima Jagudajev’s work, Basically, I have been aware of this magic circle for some years and understand it as a dramaturgical device. After entering the work, visitors eventually notice that the space follows slightly different social and behavioral norms. Performers are vaguely silly, doing dance phrases for inordinate amounts of time, and suddenly dropping to the ground for a nap. It is world-building less like sci-fi and more like altered socializing, in a just-off, awkward, angular, specifically aestheticized, and strangely libidinal kind of way.
Unlike Huizinga, who thinks that one leaves everything behind when one enters the circle, and Hayward, for whom the circle is surrounded by citadels of criticality, and whose desire, in the essay, is for us to see both our willingness and our capacity to lie, Nikima understands the circle as having a very blurry threshold. For Nikima, when we cross into a play space, we are accompanied by the reverberations of the social structures in which we grew up, and the ones that affect us as adults.
In any case, how to cross over? By finding ways to turn the ordinary upside down. And why is it of political importance? Because it helps, says Hayward, “to acknowledge that it may no longer be useful to talk about how you ‘really do’ think, argue, or feel, and also to accept that in order to say or understand something new, it is sometimes necessary to lie, just as in certain situations it might be necessary to lie in order to participate in a game.” He wants us to embrace a willingness, rather than an ability, to imagine what is inside the circle, so that we might do so systematically.
Some helpful context: Hayward tells how the medieval fool was a so-called ‘witless man,’ who was protected by the church because, through his witlessness, he was thought innocent, thought to be closer to God, and could not be held responsible for his actions. Seeing the safe and glamorous life that came with the church’s protection, a host of impostors arose. They had, if I follow Hayward correctly, embraced a willingness to exist inside a magic circle of sorts. When they changed their worlds, they flipped the social order.
In this way, the purging, or catharsis, of oneself that the impostor-fools took on came from a desire to be innocent – innocent of low birth, unable to be held responsible for who they were and the life of labor they were destined for.
There is this distinction that Hayward makes in the essay that I really loved. There is a difference between being able to “art” your way out of responsibility through craft and reason, and being willing to throw yourself into the magic circle, bringing with you as many others as possible. Friedrich Schiller said that the poet should rid himself of “anything that recalls an artificial world,” so that the poet can be innocent of poetry’s origins in class rule-breaking. This attitude is everywhere, says Hayward, and poets and artists are so burdened with a responsibility to tell the truth that poetry has become “a means of individualized self-harm, of purgation as auto-annulment.” Of a poem called “Sandra Bland” by Ariana Reines, Hayward says he is sick of seeing people he cares for metaphorically eradicate themselves, rather than describing how we are going to get into the magic circle. What if innocence was not a “pure” that arrived after enough “bad” has been ejected from the mind, but a game?
We need artists and fools to show ways into the circle, rather than be so convinced of our responsibility, our “own desire to say the truth as we feel and perceive it,” that we resort to a sort of emotional purge that prevents us from playing, desiring, being willing.
In this dawn of spring (the most unpleasant seasonal shift) and lent (the ultimate cathartic build-up to Easter) let us pay attention to how we behave in proximity to other worlds, and what stops us from being willing to enter them. It seems that, on many levels, we are sailing somewhere else. Let this be a reminder that checking out is not an option.
Thanks for reading,
Louise
Thank you to Soph Kahlau for the read-through, and for pointing out that the Bons Chrétiens should be called by their chosen name.
Notes on the research: The stuff about the greeks I got from Wikipedia. I read “History of the Cathars” by Sean Martin, which is I bought at ivallan’s books. For more background info about the cathars and the Albigenesian Crusade, I also read wikipedia. Tobi Haslett I linked to in the text, and Danny Heyward’s essay was from his book, “Training Exercises.” What I know about Johan Huizinga’s work and the magic circle, I learned from Nikima, Danny Heyward, and Wikipedia. More writing from/about Nikima Jagudajev can be found here, here, and here.
Speaking of which, a plug:
If you liked hearing about Nikima’s work, come see Basically in Münster this month! We will be running at the Westfällische Kunstverein for two months, and I am performing there during opening hours march 21st-April 18th. Extra exciting is that ~ Nikima and I are giving a talk on the 27th about friendship. ~
