Approximately 12,000 years ago our hunter-gatherer ancestors began, with the advent of farming, to make the gradual shift from nomadic populations to more permanent ones. It was these first farming communities that not only planted and cultivated the first fields but also erected the first cities--Jericho, Catal Hayuk--, cities whose populations, no longer beset with the daily and time consuming burden of scavenging for food and shelter, were granted the time to round out and embellish--both materially and ritualistically--many facets of their culture. In effect, this newfound temporal and spatial elbowroom, granted by city-life, stimulated an artistic inflation, and these ancient peoples were able to adorn their ceremonies with everything from food to music to headdresses and jewelries. Culture thrived.
As hardship was the general rule, many of these ceremonies revolved around the externalization of grief and sadness--for wilting crops, for the death of children and loved ones, for sadness proper. These rituals of sadness became, scholars suggest, the social and material commodity by and around which daily existence was formed and mediated. Sadness became at once an emotion and a thing that could be communally held. Or danced with. Or acted out in a play.
As Nietzsche points out, however, in The Birth of Tragedy, populations and therefore cities distended, and grief began to lose its universal appeal. Sadness was slowly winnowed down and cordoned off to the psychology of particular individuals rather than the heralded meetinghouse for entire societies. This attenuation was spurred on even more by the Industrial Revolution which saw the mass production of cultural materials designed solely for individual consumption . . . emotional and material culture got consigned to the living room.
The living rooms of today, unfortunately, are becoming less and less frequented. The pace of the 21st century is one that doesn't allow for the individualization of grief. (We don't even have time anymore to sit in our bedrooms and cry.) We've become, in essence, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors: too on-the-go to give sadness its due. Whereas they spent their days roaming prairies and forests and deserts for sustenance, we spend ours parked in cubicles at the top of high rises; and our nights and evenings are spent strolling the aisles of malls and SuperTargets, or sitting at a bar, or repeatedly scanning the channels on the tube. Anything to relieve our minds of the work (and then the inevitable death) that awaits us. Anything to make us “happy.”
But our environment, unlike theirs, is one that we, as a people, created ourselves. And unlike the inhabitants and developers of those first cities, who moved--literally and communally, materially and emotionally--in lock-step with the heartbeat of their own sadness and grief, our cities merely provide the material structures--the alleyways and the sidewalks and the doorways--for us to step on and through. These steps, whether taken through the doors of a Starbuck's or to the kitchen, have no emotive taproot. We've let our capitalistic culture overrun us and use us for its own dance and its own rituals. Though these rituals are performed by humans, they have no humanistic moorings.
Emile Durkheim wrote, “Sadness does not inhere in things, it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.” Such is no longer the case. Again, in our present cultural situation, we don't have time to even think about sadness; and yet we've become the physical manifestation of sadness. We've become, in essence, culture's ritualistic adornments.
We've become the product. We've become cloth.
The question, now, is: How to we retake sadness and make it our own again? How do we grant sadness its rightful (and superior) position among the fetid materialism of “happiness“? How do get to the point where we can walk out our apartment doors, look at our neighbor, smile, and say, “What a sad, sad day.”
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