An Apologia for Sad Songs

This is a reply ... well, a tangential musing, on something Mikaela said in her post on Sad Songs vs. Happy Songs.

"Does the audience really need my help processing good emotions?" In other words, what is the purpose of writing happy songs?

Why does beauty bring a tear to the eye? It seems like beauty at its highest degree is too beautiful to say it inspires mere "happiness". Rather it seems to instill a type of wisdom, which transcends happiness. Similarly great suffering has the potential to instill a type of wisdom that transcends mere "sadness". In his creation myth at the beginning of the Silmarillion, Tolkien assigns to Nienor among all the Vala the unique combination of mourning and wisdom. As a personality of melancholic temperament, Tolkien had I think an insight into the connection between wisdom and sadness. And as a Catholic, he had access to that Faith's at-first odd combination of ultimate optimism and immediate resignation to suffering. John Paul II wrote of something similar in his letter on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, saying that there was a profound depth of meaning and wisdom to be found uniquely in profound suffering. There are always people embittered by the Problem of Pain. But the fact that there are some people like Immaculee Ilibagiza and Walter Ciszek show that such hard-earned wisdom is there to be found.

Also related to this probably is an essay Edgar Allen Poe wrote about The Raven (I read it a while ago and don't have it in front of me): Poe wanted his poem to invoke beauty, and he felt it was easier to invoke beauty from the context of tragedy: in the case of The Raven, a lost love.

All this is to say that I think Mikaela is on to something when she is at peace with the predominantly melancholic nature of her inspiration. "Even when I am offering something more positive," she says, "there is still an element of the bittersweet."

Art's object is beauty, and beauty and its attendant wisdom are usually appreciated better through suffering, when we have a chance to grow our souls, than in happiness, where we have no incentive to change. And suffering in general cuts deeper than happiness, reaching to parts of our soul that, being human, are destined for the divine, and for which nothing on this earth can ultimately suffice. So a certain restraint in happiness, a knowledge that no present happiness is truly enough, a certain "element of the bittersweet" is appropriate to beauty, and wisdom, and art. In the same way, a certain restraint is also required in sadness and mourning, due to the knowledge that no good thing is truly gone if we are destined for God, and no bad thing can ultimately conquer us if He be with us.

Despair, apart from its being psychologically damaging and generally unpleasant, is a factual error, since Forgiveness exists beyond our most awful capacity to sin or even dream of sinning. But while God wants us to be happy, He does not want us to be taken in by anything less than the Best, so programmed into us is a nagging melancholy, stronger in some of us than others, the slightest of twitches from our deepest depths, meant to recall to us that whatever makes us happy here, is not ultimately enough.

We have as humans an infinite capacity for happiness, and we seek pleasurable highs, mimics of real happiness, in all the most intense experiences in life: from sex to drugs to bungee-jumping to mathematics (or whatever floats your boat). But we only really do justice to this amazing human capacity when we temper each happiness and enjoyment with a reminder that there is always a Higher and a Greater, and what is more tragic than losing a great love and a great reward at the end of the road because we were distracted along the way by a shiny toy? It's so easy to be distracted by whatever plays the role of Shiny Toy at various stages in my life, but it seems that only true beauty, and art that is truly beautiful, manages to remind me of the Greater Beauty waiting for me.

Learning to Love the Watcher in the Water

"It is hard for one man to catch another's spirit and put into print the things that drive him on."

Fr. Ciszek said this about the challenge of communicating what was inside him to the priest that helped him write the book he really wanted to write. I don't know what book I really want to write, but I do know it is difficult to communicate deep realities inside oneself--whether you're communicating to others or just setting them out for your own understanding. There is such infinity and depth to what lies underneath the human person. Most of the time it lies undisturbed. Occasionally it is stirred and we would rather it had not been, for we do not know what to do with it once we have accustomed ourselves to living on the surface of things. Yet there is a watcher in the waters of our souls, and it does not have its origin in us. Not to say it is foreign to these waters, for it alone knows them thoroughly, and it is we that have our origin in It. So the Watcher stays beneath the depths, the powerful accepting a humble place in the soul of the weak; the expert letting the amateur sail the ship; and only occasionally does the Watcher stir the water so we can see ripples, but usually we think the ripples are from the winds above and outside, not thinking--not even daring to think--it could be something beneath. And surely never guessing that when the Winds are worst, the Watcher has begun to sail while we, cringing, would give up the ship.

We see what is outside ourselves, but we only understand with great difficulty, and then only by relating it to what we find already inside. Conversely, what is inside ourselves we cannot see, yet we have the capacity--oh the infinite, divine capacity, the highest of all that is human!--to understand without seeing. So we live for sight, clinging unnaturally to our eyes. But we die without understanding, cloven unnaturally from our minds. For our minds are a great and terrible thing, and incomplete without the heart.

The Watcher is the heart, or rather is closer to our heart than we are, we who live safely in our minds. We have sought the truth with our minds, but what we have found was not enough, because man does not live on truth alone. There are other categories that cannot be broken down, and we live on them all, and die a little when they are gone like a parent who sees their child leave them, or better, like a child who does not know he hurts himself when he seeks to hurt a loving parent.

So it is that I found truth, so much truth, but I could not make it make me good, for I still had fear, and fear is not the enemy of truth, but of love, and love I did not understand, and therefore thought I was not capable of it -- either of giving, or receiving, or meriting. And thus I was not the whole person I know God means me to be: one who is good as God is good, by knowing myself and knowing Him more like He knows me and knows Himself, and by loving in both what I know to be true).

And by serving, in love, the good I am granted to see in myself and in God, I understand truth all the better, and I love better, and become more good, more like God, and in being more divine, am most fully human.

But most of the journey toward this true, good, and beautiful wholeness of being, and of being human, we fear the Watcher, and the Winds, and anything that would stir the surface, for we do not easily grow up. And by grow up I mean growing altus, for altus means tall, but also deep, and a man may only truly stand tall if he is deep. So we do not see, from reading the ripples above, that what the Watcher actually traces in the water is our answer to the Winds. We wish for a change in the weather, to give us calm for one evanescent moment, or for a god that would control the chaos from outside. Instead we have a God that allows us to control the calm on the inside, but only if we are willing to duc in altum, to put out into the deep, and find that which makes all weather meaningless, because that which has true meaning, true Beauty, and unspeakable Goodness that we fear to dare we may taste, is already With Us.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I pray you all are granted the gift of seeing the extraordinary and poetic in what has become prosaic to us only because we have forgotten our sense of wonder, and what is closely akin to wonder: gratitude. Cheers!