https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0PYXIalJZKo
So, but about the participation thing that there’s a difference between, there are different types of participation. In sociology, they have a term communitas, right, which means, you know, when you go into a place and you feel like you’re together with everybody, everybody’s on the same page on the same wavelength, there’s this feeling of community that develops that suddenly spontaneously appears. It can go, it can be, there are different types and the type of communitas that I’ve experienced in religion, in my own religious practice, which is Catholic, but it’s obviously available in orthodoxy, but also in, I would argue, in Buddhism and Hinduism. What, what is that it gives you community, it’s a community of aloneness, as opposed to a Dionysiac fury, minad-like wild community of the pack of the herd. You know, the Greeks talked about the minads, which the women who followed Dionysus and who go into, we go into this nocturnal frenzy and like rampage through the woods and tear men to pieces if they found them, or animals, like just, yeah, right. So that’s communitas too, that’s a type of community. But, and the Greeks were willing to recognize that that existed, but of course there was always the, how do we try to contain this? A bit of a danger there. Yeah. So, so, so the, but the type of communitas I’ve felt in religion is very different. It’s not so much that I’m with everybody here, we’re all one tribe. It’s more like we’re together to the extent that at this moment we realize that we’re all kind of alone, facing this thing. And the call is being made to each individual and personally, and I try to argue in my book that art is similar to that. That Herman Melville didn’t write Moby Dick, despite what he thought, didn’t write Moby Dick for a mass of people. I think he sold like a couple of thousand copies in his lifetime and died very poor. He wrote it for one person. And I think that the proper way to approach a work of art is to assume, because your guess is as good as anybody else, assume that that person was you. Approach the book as though it was written for you. That’s, it was, with that attitude when I read the Bible, that I was finally able to understand what my religion had been trying to tell me all along. It’s not about judging other people. It’s about you. And you’re alone. And in the moment of communities, in a proper, I would argue in a proper art context, communities brings us back to our aloneness and it’s our aloneness that we share, not this kind of tribal nationalistic togetherness that absolves us of responsibilities as individuals. Yeah, well, I would say that the Christian idea of love, it does in fact try to balance out the two extremes, like the idea of a solipsism or this kind of just single, radical loneliness and the fusion, this tribal fusion that you talk about, you know, in the… Yeah, I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. Yeah, the Trinity. So in the Trinity, that seems to be what is expressed at the highest level. It’s like a radical, radical union with radical separation, right? So it’s like there’s no confusion between the persons, but they are completely one. And that seems to be what we’re called to do as Christians. And the way that it reveals itself to us or the way that it’s supposed to be lived is actually through self-sacrifice. Like the way that I’m not alone is the way that I love others. So it’s not so much the what I get from others that makes me not alone. It’s what I give and how I’m willing to kind of open and give myself to those around me. That is what connects me to them. And so it’s a weird, it’s like an inversion of the passionate party, like of the rave where everybody is all fused in the beat, but they’re all there to kind of get as much pleasure as they can in that moment. Right, right. No, that’s a very good point. I fully agree with that.