The Cathardic Writhe

The Cathartic Writhe

Samuel Bird

Another brash and nude piece of modern art, another social critique on a canvas, another celebration of excess in statue form, and they all seemed to miss the point, to me. Perhaps there was something about this that resonated with people, but something about me could not find it so. Nothing about these famous pieces of art grasped and framed some aspect of the human plight in a way that structured it for me. Perhaps it was not that these pieces had failed, but I had. The process of becoming fully human and flourishing with happiness had been one that I had failed, and it was on display to me what it would have been like if I could just not be so miserable. From the side, a voice. “Were you able to go to the Rodin musem yet?” “There is a museum for Rhodin here?” “Oh yes, and it is simply the most amazing.” I overheard these two couples talking to eachother with notes of pretension. “Yes, I loved it. Totally worth the stop. That one little exhibit was more powerful to me than this entire place.” The man said as he gestured to the entire Philidelpia museum of art. Their conversation moved to subtle references to the assets they had accumulated and and submilimnal case for why the other couple should like them. I found them to be pompous. Exclusion can be a means for setting one apart, and this couple knew that. Still, if there was something even perhaps worth seeing there, I wanted to see it. Many weeks of traveling through art museums with nothing more than my backpack and a whole in my soul had left me with nothing. That sense that I was barely that same species as these beings around me had grown more than ever. I was alien from myself and certainly without a guiding star. My whole life had been guided by one more hour worked or one more thought reasoned out to fill this while that was now comprising all I was. What was one more museum ticket? Surely at this rainbow’s meeting of the horizon I could find that wonderful fact to steal me into what I wanted and away from my misery. I finished the last of my viewership at the larger and more prominent museum before starting my many steps down to the street. Looking down the entirety of Philidelphia, I looked on a thousand faces and all were to me as real as a dream. They were an apparition come and gone with no proximity to myself. A couple passed holding hands and laughing at a joke I heard but didn’t find amusing at all. They were so happy. It was clear to me that they were not paying attention to the direness and contradiction our being was. This hole, did they not feel it too? Perhaps I was the only one with it, but it wasn’t just me that was troubled, but what I looked out on. A world ran on deprivation and desperation with minds torn to choose between the least of every possible evil. Coming up were some young evangalizers in bright clothing. They were laughing and smiling too. I greeted them in respect of their efforts, but it was clear they were missing something. The missing of it brought them joy, but they were failing to revel in what was the case. The cold air eased my feverish reasoning as I came to the surprisingly small building. It was clear their pretensions were severe as this was a small exhibit with more examples inside of what was around the yard. Many bronze statues of varying sorts littered the courtyard with piles of browned dead leafs built up around them. Plants were dead and springs were turned off, turning this eden into a frigid wasteland. I strolled inside and saw a professionally dressed young woman behind a desk. “Welcome to the Rodin museum. Just one?” I nodded and cleared my throat so I didn’t have to break my contemplative silence. “Perfect, welcome. We are closing in one hour and it typically takes longer than that to view everything. Would you like to come back tomorrow?” “No, I am leaving for New York tomorrow. I would still like to look around if I could.” “Certainly. Here is a map of the place. One ticket comes to... twenty-eight dollars.” I knew the answer before I looked, but wanted to have an action to give me an excuse. I pulled out my faded brown leather wallet and shuffled around thirty dollars as if there could have been more in there. “It looks like I won’t have enough to get to New York and eat tomorrow. Is there anyway I could get a discount for being here such a short time?” I asked, hoping for anything. “No, we have rules here.” She said sternly as I could tell she was frustrated with me. “Well, that is fine. I appreciate your time and hope you have a great day.” I went outside before catching my reflection and realizing why she was so quick to anger. I walked outside to figure out what I would do next, and stopped to look at my map in the cover of the building. I looked up from my map to say two doors. On the doors that went high above my head were seemingly hundreds of bronze figures in all sorts of positions. The doors loomed overhead dauntingly in such a way it called me from within myself. Each character was contorted and twisted from spastic muscles that had lost control from shear suffering. The brutality of their torment was past the light social pretensions I had seen over the last hour. These characters were nothing more than themselves in pain, and in this held a refreshing honesty. Each of these characters were rigidly twisted into new and more dramatic poses. My eyes raced from character to character until I saw something never before seen with my eyes. These characters were writhing. In their writhe, they were shearly and brutally nothing more than what they were. There was no place they were but their misery. In this, I found great honor in their writhing. Their twisted and tortured bodies caught the eye of a soul that was there with them. They were the truth that was being ignored by the passersby. Not because of their fortune, but the average of man turned away from this. All the political signaling and hedonistic slop was traded with a peak behind the eye into the seemingness of the soul. The suffering’s magnitude made sheer existence so cutting and real that there was nothing more than what one was. All the wretchedness and folly was present before oneself, and with it, something else. 

Atop the wall that held my souls kin was a familiar sight. Adorning my philosophy textbooks and frequently my familiar artifacts was a state of a man brooding with pensive brow with his knuckles on his chin and his elbow on his knee. This is where it came from? The great thinker statue that everyone celebrates and they forgets his great context? He was beholding the great and honorable writhe. And why shouldn’t he look on it and think? It is not homeostasis, satiation, and satisfaction that pulls man into that state of awareness that allows to break it apart. Many have incorrectly assumed the thinking makes one miserable, but it is instead the miserable who needs the thinking. He sat there taking in the most exact of existent experiences he could, and thought on it he did. This thinking was not a seperation and escape from his horrendous scene, but his incessant attachment to what and when he was. No lies, advertising, or posturing. This was the human experience. The great writhe, and something else. On the one side we have the fleeting happiness we could escape to. On the other we have the honest misery we can run into with gritted teeth and clenched eyelids. However, what lays beyond that world of miserable honesty? In that moment of writhing, these tortured souls were nothing more than what they were. They were nowhere but where they were at. Laid before them were all the horrors and the abyss at once. Writhing with them, was the rest of their soul in its partial entirety. There it was. Their soul. Not a whole soul, as if I knew what that was, but the tatters of one. That hole within me, not a fluke but a feature. Not an incident but the inevitable. I writhed in the absence of value, and in that I found value in that last great rebellion of the human mind. Take me to where all is stolen from me and I will conquer that land and win it all. The great and honorable writhe done to precision was the highest of values. Perhaps then I shouldn’t curse the means that brought me there, for my resigning to this fact made it all there was to me. If this is all I know, how can I compare it to some lie of grandeur? Before me was the experience of my species in bronze. I looked up to see three figures standing above. I tried to fit them into this model that came to, but had no guesses. It made me wish I took that brochure she offered me. Here I was, as miserable and bitter as I was before. It was not the filling of my soul’s chasm, but the realization that there is a chasm, and it is so. I had not failed at the pursuit of life, I was in the middle of it. I could never escape the hell between my ears, but that place I could never leave must then be my home. I would be doomed to spend the rest of my years in this incessantly waning and waxing suicidal delirium and that would still be a life lived right. The swallowing of only the bitter cup gave me a familiarity with it that asked for no cheap sweats. Let the writhe continue on for all the days that I lived. Let my life be a curse to me. Let me fight my fate and my nature until the moment they both let me down one last time. Let my efforts be in vain and my quest to belong for not, for I was doing the great writhe. Let there be tears in heaven for God to wipe away. In this moment came not happiness but a consequence. My life was of import from its exertions such that it gained newfound realness. Reveling in facts that hated me, I dispelled all light lies and with it, that nagging feeling that my happiness was unsubstantiated. In that moment I came to myself and was there with myself. I had not failed at my existence, because how can failure be the inevitable? For what was, I was there for it in all my grand inabilitys and failings. How then could a life like this not be brim with meaning? I was present, part of, and proactive with the wretched lack of value found in being. Perhaps a word to describe how I was relating to my existence? I was... I was... Engaged! “Hey! Why are you still here? You can’t just stand in front of our doorway forever, loitering. Get out of here!” The well-dressed lady shouted before I shyly nodded and made my way back down away from the side walk. My blood began to rush from her angry encounter which awoke old patterns of feeling and defense. I began to suffer, but in that moment as I strolled away, I became aware of that suffering. The game was won when I realized I was left to write its rules. Here I was, in the midst of the great writhe. There I went, in that path that, trodden well, led inevitably to the cathartic writhe.