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Carnival
barkers lure the crowd into the sideshows depicted on these
posters from an old carnival of shadowy emotions.
Emotions
or passions of the soul have been studied by Plato, Agrippa,
Descartes, Darwin, and Freud, yet no universally accepted
theory of emotion exists.
To understand
something, one must be able to make a model of it.
Try making
a model of Proust's "oceanic joy."
According
to Plato, wonder is the prime emotion. All others are nuances
of a color wheel, spinning off French ennui, German schadenfreude,
Norwegian Forelsket.
Albrecht
Dürer depicted Melancholy as an introspective winged
genius accompanied by an emaciated dog. The caricature of
the artist as melancholic, mad genius, driven by emotion,
has been reinforced by the story of Van Gogh and exaggerated
in a doggedly pragmatic American culture.
In a culture
that has a basic distrust of emotion and introspection, artists,
musicians and poets are allowed, even expected, to express
emotion in their work, though they may still be looked at
askance, like the townsfolk might look at a carnie.
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