The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [154]
Participation in Greek festival was mandatory; and carnival was an obligatory part of the church calendar. We moderns have to do this work for ourselves; the culture no longer insists that we show up to such parties, and it no longer provides such gala opportunities for costume. That is often how it is for people who live in cosmopolitan times: having eroded traditional rules and scattered traditional order, we get to live more freely. With our inner rubber band stretched so gently, we don’t snap back into ecstatic (unless oppressed or a teenager). Today, for most of us, absurdity is the best we have, and most of it is contained in entertainment and art.
Get a good mask of whatever personally scares you and wear it out next Halloween. (Don’t do anything to scare others while in costume, though. Virtue remains mandatory, even when you are masked!) How would it feel—good man or woman that I trust you are—to go around town in a mask, disguised as what scares you? It might feel very good indeed. What scares you is probably in you. Just as good as hiding what is usually shown is showing what is usually hidden. Imagine yourself in a dimly lit ballroom with three hundred people who you know to varying degrees, and all of you are masked and disguised. There is music, and most people are dancing. Some attractive body parts are on rare display. Most identifying features are hidden, but you know your friends and acquaintances are there, somewhere. What would you be able to enjoy about the experience that you would not be able to at an unmasked party? In costume, the pressure to be you is lifted. We are each a flutter of well-intentioned lies and postures, not least the face we make when we are listening, and it is a relief to wear a mask. When the costume is fierce, you feel a little fierce. Relieved and fierce is a nice combination. If you are macho, it can be a pleasure to mince. The licentious may find it scintillating to button up and act the virgin. If everyone knows you as modest, it is gratifying to show them you know about enticement. The rowdy young man may grow sedate when costumed as a Supreme Court justice. Costume offers an implicit challenge to the idea that people’s daily roles are inherent to their nature. It also offers a confirmation of these roles when, at the end of the festival, having learned the weight of the robe, you are happy to cede it back to the judge.
19
Today’s News and Vigils
Similar to our political and social liberation, we have been liberated from nonsense. Again, our liberators left us in the lurch. Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed that rationalism and personal responsibility were better than obedience and wildness. It was almost immediately apparent to some that this would not do, and the artistic and social movement of Romanticism arose to celebrate the absurd and uncontrollable. For Romanticists, life was for passion and unpredictability, for tears and laughter, for believing crazy stories and submitting to love. Ours is a world keenly shaped by Enlightenment science, democracy, and decorum, but even in the world of the rational, scientific, and objective, we have found a way to tell ourselves the old stories.
Where, today, is the image of a crying woman searching for her abducted daughter, or the unexpectedly pregnant girl searching for a place to have her child? Where is the image of a sad young mother holding her son’s lifeless body? Where are the images of relief when the sobbing mother is reunited with her child, who shows up shockingly alive? The answer is the news. We let the news anchors tell us stories of rape, murder, fire, insane mothers, cruel nannies, sly seducers, and violent fathers. This litany sounds different every year, but it is also very much the same, told in a style particular enough to constitute a genre, or a suite of myths. When you use a tiny bit of a huge amount of information (all events, ideas, or observations on Earth), the fact that that something is a true story matters, but we are responsible