Catharsis I

Catharsis is an asymmetrical existential balancing act. It appears to be intimately linked with the act of art. Are catharsis and art inseparable?

“Catharsis” is an ancient Greek word. Like “parthenogenesis” *, which means virgin creation (parthenos = virgin, genesis = creation), a form of asexual reproduction, a lone birth. Catharsis means “purification” or “cleansing”. I’ve always associated the word with the act of emotional release in art. An artist’s emotional experience finding expression in a performance, for example, or the emotional release of an audience moved to laughter, anger, or tears. I wonder, is to practice (any) art, to swim in the unpredictable ocean of emotions? Or is art a way to tame feelings altogether? But can an ocean really be tamed?

Evolutionary art in the human body.

Can muscles move however they want, in theory? Or are they inherently encompassed by the shape they take? Can they conceptually move anyhow, or are they constricted by form? What has lead to specific anatomical formations to begin with? And where can they go from here? 

Asymmetrical Balancing Act
Malabarismo Asimétrico
Asymmetrischer Balanceakt

How many human and other organic experiences are embedded within an individual body? How many lives lived by countless ancestors? How many countless experiences lived by an individual body alive today? We carry the lessons of our forebears in our bodies. Of course, we also carry our own.  We are already all fathers, mothers and kin, gods and goddesses who exist in solidarity with the divine (a perpetually present beyond). Who exist within the limitations and possibilities given to a terrestrial species enwombed in a planet whose condition is a delicate cosmic balancing act of light, movement, darkness, and matter.

Countless? Not necessarily, according to ancestral mathematics. Have you seen the meme that reads as follows?

"Ancestral Mathematics

2 parents

4 grandparents

8 great-grandparents

16 second great-grandparents

32 third great-grandparents

64 fourth great-grandparents

128 fifth great-grandparents

256 sixth great-grandparents

512 seventh great-grandparents

1,024 eigth great-grandparents

2,048 ninth great-grandparents

For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total of 4, 094 ancestors over the last 400 years.

Think for a moment - How many struggles? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness? How much happiness? How many stories? How many expressions of hope for the future? - did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment..."

Misses and Mister Goenka meditating.

The calculation is only for 400 years. Imagine millions of years and more! Vipassana Meditation Master S.N. Goenka said, as did Gautama Buddha, that the likelihood of being reborn as a human is like popping out of a ring in the middle of the ocean. It is rare to become human. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to use the present life to seek enlightenment and achieve liberation through rigorous meditation. 

Techniques abound. Vipassana meditation, as the Gautama Buddha himself is said to have practiced it, is only one technique, albeit a very effective one. 

Master Thich Nhat Hanh revealed that meditation is possible in every moment, no matter how fleeting and benign. Because mediation is merely the ability to be consciously and completely present in the moment. In a world full of distractions (within and without), being completely present in a given moment is easier said than done. Being present involves the practice of becoming an ever more detached observer of life's flow without losing touch with it.

Besides life, we all share the phenomenon of death, which precedes and follows us as well. How many ancestors have died? All that lived. And they were released (temporarily) from the bonds of becoming (organic), except for the ties left in the progeny of the species, or variations thereof. Individual, idiosyncratic will does affect the collective. But to what extent can it be transformative of an entire species? What constitutes the will of a species? In the vast existential ocean of inter-being, who moves the tides of becoming?

Alone or not alone? To bear or not to bear? Who knows? Do you?

*Parthenogenesis

Human creature,
Give birth to yourself!
And breastfeed yourself!

Whose arms will catch you,
when you fall into the world,
who knows?

Whose hands will touch you,
when you slither onto X scene,
who knows?