Healthy obsessions

Some people are obsessed with physical pain: fight fans, some sports fans in general, some video game players, and so on. The people who seek out the visceral thrill of seeing blood and bruises and another person's body go limp. Maybe it's about power, maybe it's about stress, maybe it's just about a fondness for red. Whatever it is, we condemn them, or at least tolerate them, but never encourage them. It's wrong to enjoy another person's pain.

But in the same stroke as we dismiss such inclinations as sadistic we embrace their mental counterpart as high art. What is the catharsis of tragedy but obsessing over and, to a greater or lesser extent, enjoying emotional pain? It's not enjoyment, we may say; but it satisfies some craving, does it not? It makes us feel something that we want to feel. How is that different from the "sadists"?

I suppose the answer could be that real art is about overcoming emotional pain -- in a way that violence is not about overcoming physical pain. Of course, a lot of supposed art gleefully wallows in its portrayal of pain. But that's a distinction, as interesting as it may or may not be, I'm not going to go into. Because my question is deeper. Whether we enjoy it or not, we are obsessed with pain, physical or emotional. Why? What does that mean for us?

Since pleasure means nothing without pain, perhaps it is simply satiating a need for alternatives, a way for us to appreciate what we have by understanding how it could be worse. That explanation can't go very far, of course -- then we'd all be more concerned with being thankful what we watch/read/play isn't our own situations. We're not.

But I think there is something to be said here for vicariousness -- the living of the life we cannot through artistic mediums. It's almost a transference, in a way, a communication of the deepest, most instinctual kind: an artist creates in the hope of emptying his/her own pain onto the canvas (whatever kind), and the audience takes it in. It doesn't work that way, of course -- artists rarely actually exorcise any pain through their art, hence the preoccupation with drugs, and audiences almost always purge whatever inevitably miscommunicated feelings they gleaned from the art soon after (catharsis, after all, refers originally to the purging of the bowels).

I'm not really sure what my point is here. I just realized how obsessed I am with emotional pain, how I act just like any sadist when I gleefully laugh and smile at the variously horrible situations of the characters of Battlestar, for example, and others are (justifiably) horrified themselves of this response. I feel for the characters, too, as our response to art is "supposed" to be; but I laugh and grin and clap nonetheless, and that's wrong, isn't it?

How can we reconcile that glee and empathic pain? And how do we know we won't respond the same way to a real tragedy? When it's real it's different; you can laugh at fiction because you appreciate the dramatic skill of crafting the horror. Bullshit. It's no different. We're all monsters at heart.

(Except we're all we have. As pleasure is meaningless without pain, so "we" are meaningless without a contrast. We can't all be monsters; we can't all be anything.)

At least, I'm a monster. I'm so in tune to the dramatic structures of our world that I intuitively, instinctually, against my wishes, recognize the ironies and appreciate the horrors with the same glee that I do with fiction. But humor is the brain's response to uncomfortable situations, laugh so that you don't cry, a biological, evolutionary imperative. Also bullshit.

We enjoy pain. We elevate it to the status of worship. (What else is the Passion? And perhaps therein is an answer. Christ's suffering is horrible and beautiful, like the best art. Is it wrong to "enjoy"/appreciate that?)

God, I sound like somebody who's ready to slit their wrists. Pain makes me feel good, man. Physical pain is brutality, there is no doubt there. Emotional pain is, too -- but perhaps it is necessary where physical pain is not. The rich can escape any physical ailments, but money can't buy happiness, right? Even when the body suffers not, the spirit will. That is nature? Emotional pain, the universal equalizer?

Maybe this is a good place to stop. Maybe there is something useful in here, somewhere. I think the former is likely, and the latter, tenuous at best.