Warning:

What I am about to write will be sure to garner for me the label of nerd. I accept such a label gladly, and dont really mind being, or even being seen as, an academic. This said, I'd like to announce that I had a breakthrough in understanding Aristotle today. You see, in his poetics, he spends alot of time on tragedy and its elements and effects. He says that tragedy promotes katharsis in the viewer, that is, an experiencing and processing of their own fear and pain through the experince of the events of the play. Such an experience is cleansing and helpful for the playgoer. There is, I think, such power in dramatic catharsis that a play or movie that depicts pain, fear, and sorrow well can be one of the most helpful and real expeirences of our lives. There is pain below the grinning surface of the world, that we all seem to know below our smiles.

And so stories are judged, which tragedy as touching something of the wide and lonesome reality in which we live. Comedy is the facade, the clever mask that grins a fauxing grin. Comedy is the escape to smallness, the escape to an ordered, sense driven universe where falling off cliffs wont kill you and there is always a wedding at the end. Such things, I think, we take as true, and so, perhaps did Aristotle, for we dont find a treatment of comedy in the Poetics, and surely not a concept or power as great as catharsis that cemedy might do unto the human soul.

But today John-Mark suggested something insane: that the katharsis of comedy is that great force which stirs in you, if only for a moment, a recalling of a mirth filled self, the true and sinless self, a god-made self beyond the stars, or perhaps properly in the stars, dancing and twirling with pirhouettes of laughter. What if comedy was not a mask, but seeker of the truth deeper than our shame, our fear, or pain, a seeker of the inmost mirth of man? Then what would we believe about the world––that at its base and structure there is only pain? No, for that would be to mistake a thing for its parts, for it is pain that rips the canvas so that the stars shine through, and only by stripes are we healed.