Writers: Why We're Terrible People.

Perhaps the title should've been "Writers: why are we terrible people?" but, no matter. Today's blog is going to be about dark things and why we love them so much, though, I think I will refrain from using "we" as not to drag you into the caste of "terrible person."

As far as plays go, I've never been a fan of comedies (unless they be divine). No, no, I've always been a much bigger fan of tragedy, and, looking at the plays that history has remembered, I'd say that I'm in good company. Some of my favorite characters from drama are Edmund from King Lear, Livia from Women Beware Women, and Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi. What do they have in common? They are all complete bastards (and one of them quite literally). It is these characters that sink to the "bottom" of human nature and really screw things up for everyone else on the stage. In short, they are sowers of pain and discord, they make tragedies entertaining. So why are such acts so entertaining? Aristotle would argue it is to gain a catharsis of sorts, to bleed out these kinds of emotions, but I'm not so sure. If anything, I'd say that these kinds of performances excite these emotions in us. I think Thomas Kyd put it best in The Spanish Tragedy when the ghost of Andrea comments on the systematic murder of all of his friends and enemies by proclaiming "Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul" (4.5). Well, they pleased mine too. I don't think I'm alone in the masthead either, a while back Alli wrote a blog on why we have such a connection with reading sad poetry, check it out, she'll probably provide you with more answers than I can. http://afewlinesmagazine-theblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/art-of-absence-and-other-opinions.html

The idea for this blog spawned from a little writing collaboration that Jack and I are working on. Between me enjoying the bloodier things in life and Jack being a complete bastard, the project was pretty much damned (destined?) to being a tragedy from birth. During one of these writing sessions the conversation turned to Kafka and how depressed he must have been in order to produce such nightmarish stories. In a surprising turn of events, Jack brought up David Foster Wallace who once commented that Kafka laughed so hard while he wrote that he kept his neighbors up at night. My first thought was "Well, that makes sense, Kafka was fucking nuts." But I don't think that tells the whole story. In a bit of self reflection, I noticed that the times that Jack and I laughed the hardest were when we wrote something incredibly tragic. Causing methodical, poetic, and visceral pain to something you created just causes laughter, a hard laughter, but laughter none the less (Yes, it was at this point that I found out that I should never be a dad). So I ask, why do writers of tragedy do it? Why subject your own creations to a level of pain that you would never want to actually experience? And damn it, why do we want to be a part of it at all?

In retrospect, the blog title really should have been "Writers: Why We're Bastards,"

-Rainamoinen