Reblogged megafaunaofficial
There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.
Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; Tragedy: A Curious Art Form
#wait reblogging again because like...#the wording of this sparked something in me.#specifically: my religious trauma as a kid from the evangelical southeastern US#“they act for you. you sacrifice them to action.”#pair this with the relatively recent Brennan Lee Mulligan quote about whether we need every parable to be true or if we take something#from it and learn#and like... suddenly jesus makes a whole lot of other sense#the bible as a series of ancient tragedy plays...#wherein jesus is an actor sacrificed to action. to bear our suffering.#oh i need people smarter than me to articulate what i am saying. fuck. fucking... Christianity is a distortion...#of all these dramas... these lives wherein grief and hardship are recorded and shared... the dogma metastatized but the same fucking...#the same threads...#in all my shallow studies of religion the “golden rule” that survived in them was “treat others as you would want to be treated”#god does anyone else see what i am getting at. am i alone in the void of tumblr tags lmfao#jesus (actor) sacrificed (sacrificed) to save humanity from suffering (to the action)#carrying the burden of sin = carrying our grief with and for us#augh. anyway whatever i have a headache but fuuuuck i hope someone else Gets It and says it better than me