Art Is Cinderella

“The world belongs to those who do not feel,” writes Fernando Pessoa. I know immediately what he means, but I need to explain it. It's a provocative phrase and can be answered multiple ways. The first question to ask is why would lack of feeling favor ownership of the world whereas depth or intensity of feeling would discourage possession of the world?

I’m not going to be very Buddhist about answering this. I’m going to be extremely judgmental.  People who do not feel are free to abuse, exploit, manipulate, mislead, seduce, lure, chisel and finesse their way to getting want they want. A clear benefit of lacking feeling is a wonderful freedom from remorse and its messy cousin, compassion. These people are called sociopaths. In order to coax some level of emotional excitement into their lives they have to do something cruel and sadistic. William Shakespeare wrote a good play about this behavior called Richard III. Other examples include the movie Wall Street, fashion guru Miranda Priestley (The Devil Wears Prada) and the current president of the United States.

And his entire cabinet. Whatever cabinet that happens to be this week.

Doesn’t matter. It’s not likely an altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing guy like Jimmy Stewart is going to show up any time soon and make an exception to my generalization. Power is a very large magnet for sociopaths. It draws everything from war criminals to real estate moguls.

People with feelings have a much harder time in this world. Not only do they not want to own the world, they want out of the world.

Feelings are big mushy things to carry around. They’re a burden. Sometimes you can deaden them with booze and/or oxycontin or jack them up into a nice euphoric blur with coke or meth, but mostly they just slop around in the brain reminding you what a self-occupied, narcissistic jerk you are.

Feelings are multi-layered. They’re onions. They keep peeling away until tears come and the eyes sting. Feelings aren’t blithe paper airplanes we can send shooting through the air. They come with complications. Ethical considerations. Moral dilemmas. Guilt. Remorse. That stuff.

“If man really felt,” Pessoa continues, “there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.”

If you want to avoid feeling get busy and do something. Wash the dishes. Mop the floor. Look for a job. And if you already have a job, work overtime. Throw yourself into it. And if you’re in the military, clean your gun. Play a card game. Montage your gear.

But if you’re curious about what’s in there, what’s lurking beneath your skin, whatever it is that makes your heart beat faster or clouds your brain with ugly black swirling clouds of despair, sit down in a chair and let it happen. Let it be. Let it emerge. Bubble up from the miasma.

Happiness? Sure. That happens occasionally. I don’t know what it is; a moment of well-being? I don’t know. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt a single feeling that wasn’t a blend, a mélange of contradictory ideas and attitudes.

Pessoa again: “Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy.”

Well, you argue, isn’t feeling happy a feeling? You could say that, yes. But it’s not what he means. Happiness is that delightfully buoyant feeling of not having any feeling. It’s helium, not water. Water coming out of a tap is one thing. Wading into the ocean is something else entirely.

Back in the day we used to say “heavy, man,” if somebody said something significant. Something significant generally sparked some deep feelings. Deep feelings are heavy.

Anger is an odd emotion. It feels more like energy than mass. Dark energy, to be sure, but accelerant, gasoline, diesel, kerosene, butane. Anger can get you into trouble really quick. It’s a mad brahma bull kicking at the chute.

Despair is a tough one. That one can swallow you whole. It’s a black ugly hole. Your best way out is to go all the way in. Lean into it. The more you allow it to come into being the easier it becomes to live with. But don’t listen to me. I’m not Eckhart Tolle or Pamela Chodron. I meant it when I said I’m not a Buddhist. I’m judgmental. Being judgmental is like washing a big piece of cake down with a vanilla shake when you’ve got diabetes.

So why do I do it? Don’t ask me. I just live here.

I like to put my fingers on the warm pages of a book and feel the world that way sometimes. Words have a greater presence when they’re tangible. Of course, it’s not the words that are tangible, the words are on the surface, ink, it’s the medium that has tangibility, the book, the magazine, the texture of a journal in the hands, the weight of an anthology. It’s the medium that makes the words seem palpable. Words on a computer screen are never anything but digits and algorithms, ghostly pixels in a world of electronic circuitry. The laptop on my legs right now is warm and tangible, but it does not have the feeling of a book. Why is that? Why should a book feel real and a computer feel…what? I don’t know what to call the feeling of the computer. It’s warm. I worry about the electromagnetic energy. I could say it’s got a pulse. It’s living. A book is a tree that once lived. But the book isn’t living. The computer is, in some way, actually living. I’m not being fair. Being judgmental has its hazards.

Why do we want things? Desire is the center around which everything turns. And is never satisfied. Never. The constant need for attention, the fear of seeing things decay, disappear, the continuous adjustments that must be made to adapt to a world in constant evolution, growth and decline, decline and growth. This is the fascination of the swamp. These places of teeming, fetid life, of drifting, miasmic odors where rare and delicate orchids grow. And the eye of an alligator appears on the surface of the water, infinitely watchful, infinitely alert.

The world belongs to no one. That’s the biggest mistake humans ever made. The notion that the world is there for our well-being, our kingdoms and odysseys, our pleasures and sports, our thoughts and speeches. Our thoughts are nothing. Our speeches are the chattering of birds.

But there is also the sublime. Let’s consider that. There are sensitivities that crave transcendence. That yearn for the ultimate well-being of non-being. That wrestle oblivion. That fear the abyss. That dare to walk on a rope across a canyon. That will spend a lifetime pursuing poetry in a society that cares only about money, that judges everything against the gauge of money, that sees everything as commodity, which is material that is bought and sold, which is amazing as paint, as millions for a painting, a Pollock for $140 million, bought by a Hollywood mogul. I find that baffling. And weirdly encouraging.