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The theme for the MythBlast Series this month is The Message of the Myth: Art and Artists, so I’d like to take a look at transforming emotion into art, particularly those emotions we are reluctant to express or even acknowledge to ourselves, let alone to others. So let me first say this as unambiguously as I can, if you’re struggling with depression, reach out to your doctor, to a therapist, to a loved one who can support you to find the right treatment for your depression.
What I want to explore in this essay is what Sigmund Freud understood as common unhappiness; Fernando Pessoa called it disquiet; William Wordsworth heard the still, sad music of humanity. In his 1895 book, Studies on Hysteria, Freud wrote this:
When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: “Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?” And I have been able to make this reply: “No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.” (Studies on Hysteria, Vol. 2, 270)
Transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness is no small thing. What Freud called hysterical misery is a defensive response to the awareness, conscious or not, that there is so much life one cannot even begin to live it all. For the hysteric, life has become cumbersome, incomprehensible, and in some curious way, unspeakable; it’s impossible to talk about. The unwillingness to accept life on its own terms creates the intense psychological suffering Freud describes. Transforming such abject misery, becoming “better armed against that unhappiness” may be hard to imagine, but such a transformation is where the art comes in.
In King Lear, Shakespeare tells us that “When we are born, we cry that we have come to this great stage of fools” (Scene IV, Act 6). We cry because we have indeed come into this world of fools, and ourselves not least among them; we cry because we have won the role of a human being in the great play of life, and whether it is a tragedy or a farce is, it seems to me, entirely up to us.
Art as epiphany
In his late work “Art as Revelation,” a section in his unfinished magnum opus The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Campbell discusses the effects of “proper art” upon the individual: “One is held, on the contrary, in aesthetic arrest, a moment of sensational (aesthetic) contemplation, as before a recognized revelation, or in Joyce’s language, an ‘epiphany’” (p. 19). The key then, as I see it, is to approach our lives, all of our experiences no matter how prosaic or chaotic, all our fears, our griefs, our pain, as well our joys, as we would approach a great work of art.
Théodore Gericault’s painting, The Raft of Medusa, hangs in the Louvre Museum, and I admit I lingered looking at this painting for the better part of a morning. The Mona Lisa hangs in a room not far away, and laying eyes upon her requires patience, as great crowds fill the accordion-like rope lines in the room, cameras at the ready, straining to get a glimpse of this legendary woman before the allotted fifteen seconds or so of viewing time are up and docents move you along. She is beautiful enough, certainly, but she’s not the best painting in the museum; I don’t think she’s even the best Davinci in the Louvre, and like certain reality TV stars, she’s famous mostly for being famous, and no particular epiphany occurred from my encounter with her.
But that’s not the case with Gericault’s masterpiece, the epiphany accompanying it virtually reaches out and seizes one by the throat. First, it’s immense, at 16 feet by 23 feet, its figures are life-size, and the figures in the foreground are more than life-size. Because of its enormity, the detail the artist renders is astonishing; the fear, despair, starvation and suffering are viscerally recognizable, etched onto the life sized-faces of the literally overwhelmed, desperate, ship-wrecked survivors clinging to a makeshift raft, while the two men attending the dead reflect a dejected futility. Looking at this painting I immediately understood Joyce’s remarks about epiphany, gripped as I was by a profound, involuntary sense of pity.
James Joyce's theory of art
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce lays out his theory of art: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer” (Chapter 5). Pity is not an emotion of implicit superiority of the kind which Mr. T referenced when he uttered his catch phrase, “I pity the fool…” Rather, pity is a sympathetic sorrow evoked by the suffering of others. Pity is compassion, pity is empathy, pity is pathos—literally, what befalls one—that projects the observer into the world the art portrays. The Raft of Medusa certainly invites both pity and pathos—not just for the poor survivors on the raft who, by the way, apparently still hold out hope for rescue and try desperately to get the attention of some distant passing ship. One is moved to pity for the fact of human suffering itself, something each of us knows all too well in our own secret ways, precisely because we have come to this great stage of fools.
Joyce further proposes that “Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” (Ibid). The secret cause is one’s own fate, one’s own life exactly as one has lived it; the secret cause is ultimately one’s own death: cold, impassive, mortality. To experience the rapture of life we must consciously and intentionally move beyond the personalization of the epiphany, of which would be pity, to the universal human truth, the terror of the realization that we are mortal and we will die. That is the familiar psychic territory in which we encounter terror. If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, if we regard the circumstances of our lives as art (as though we ourselves were the pitiable crew of the Medusa), we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality, as well as the circumstances of our own lives exactly as they are. We make the surprising discovery that this life we live, life with all its abundant sufferings and barely sufficient joys, is heart-breakingly beautiful.
If we are able to encounter the terror of our own mortality the same way we encounter “proper art” that terrifies, we elicit the sublime epiphany that reconciles us with our own mortality.
Epiphanies are not states of being; we can’t occupy the sublime for very long at all until we’re thrown back into the problems of living. We return to them, not with dread nor with hysterical misery, but with that recurring melody of the still, sad, music of life playing in the background, evoking the vaguely dissatisfied, bittersweet sense of common unhappiness. Acknowledging the common unhappiness of life has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of the pain of living. Pierrot knows as much by the end of the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film, Pierrot Le Fou and reflects, rather wistfully, “Life is sometimes sad, but it’s always beautiful.” Beauty is the aesthetic epiphany Joyce refers to, and it functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like.
Beauty, because it is always too fleeting, because each encounter with it is thoroughly novel and personally reconfiguring, creates an aesthetic seizure that works on us consciously to a degree, but much more so unconsciously. What seizes us at first is a barely perceptible sensation of intimate strangeness, the paradoxical disclosure of terrible beauty adorning all life, the full realization of which depends more on mythos than logos. It is a potentially life changing validation of the perplexing nonpareil, the uncommon common life.
To feel beauty we must be willing to feel pity and pain, even terror. No pity, no terror, no beauty. For those willing to welcome beauty and its occasionally troublesome collaborators, life holds no misery. In a world that so often exposes us to catastrophes and terrible suffering, common unhappiness is an uncommon achievement.
If you have suicidal or other thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to professionals for help, or call 988, which is now the three-digit dialing code that routes callers to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Thanks for reading.
MythBlast authored by:
Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, as well as the Editor of the MythBlast Series and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olsonholds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com).
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss
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Dr. Reedy has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Brad has broadcast over 1,300 webinars on parenting since 2007, and hosts the podcast “Finding You” He is also the author of two books on parenting and self-discovery: The Journey of the Heroic Parent and The Audacity to Be You. Brad has developed an accessible and liberating approach to adolescents, young adults, and their parents. His powerful ability to use his own story and stories from the thousands of families he has treated, offers hope to families suffering from mental health, addiction, and stage-of-life issues. Brad is a co-founder and the Executive Clinical Director of Evoke Therapy Programs, which provides therapeutic services for adolescents, young adults, parents, families, and individuals looking to gain greater intimacy in their relationships. In the conversation, he and John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talk about Brad’s life and work, storytelling and its role in a therapeutic setting, how myths can be used in parenting, and how Campbell’s work has been an important guide in Brad’s life.
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I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
-- Joseph Campbell