We live in a world today where “cruelty has a human heart, and Jealousy a human face; Terror the human form divine, and Secrecy the human dress” (Blake X146). In such a caustic society, there is a very limited amount of room for us to give in to these deadly sins, and by surpassing our desires we believe that is what it means to be human. In Morality and Politics, with Devin Stauffer, we have been discussing the The Politics of Aristotle, and have explored the definition Aristotle gives to being human. He says that by nature we are animals, and taken out of civilized society we would not be able to call ourselves anything other than that. BUT what we do posses is the ability to reason and to state and abide by our own individualized moral codes.
While that is all fine and nice, I wonder at what point we detach ourselves from the basic foundations of humanity and become pharmaceutical beings with justification for our every move, becoming the snapper in Harrigan’s story who “lack[s in personality” and is the expectation of “someone you’d meet in a Casino in Vegas” (160).We had a discussion before about the robotic appearance of today’s culture, and how we have almost become unaware of our own emotions. Personally, I find this very appropriate. Sunday night I was in the room with a friend when she received a phone call from her mom and dad telling her that her uncle had just died unexpectedly from heart failure. Her emotions were hysterical, and though I tried to console her in her frantic state, I found there were few words one can articulate that have any significant affect. I returned to two summers ago, and found myself battling to figure out when it was that I last experienced such an emotional outpouring, and was unable to identify with a particular occasion. Given the things that I went through, have I become a product of modern society?
Back to Lent. My goal is to regain emotional control, and by that I do not mean numbing myself to the events of the day, rather balancing each emotion with another: if I feel like crying, why should I not let it out? If I feel like screaming, why not scream (of course in a controlled environment, but the point of the matter is to not let myself bottle everything up for that one instance that something does happen, and I am forced to release and explore the endless frustration of deriving why it is I feel that way. Hopkins beautifully explains this in his poem The Sea and the Skylark:
We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime (X165).
This year has opened my eyes to what one can assert their evaluation of aesthetically appealing, and have found that the view of perfection that I once myself had striven so badly for has almost depleted, and have found more beauty in the rawness of life. In the account of the attack on a zoo-keeper in the Houston zoo, Harrigan talks about his awe-provoking encounter with the beast himself. He says, “The tiger was majestic and unknowable, a beast of such seeming invulnerability that it was possible to believe that he alone had called the world into being, and that a given life could end at his whim.” (X155) I propose that we once again look back into ourselves and find the tiger within us, and acknowledge that unharnessed splendor of the imperfection. Once we are able to get back in touch to “weep and know why” we will understand the grandeur of a sacrifice (X167).
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