The Importance of Being Earnest

"Remember those Attic stelae, how amazed you were at the caution
of human gestures; at the way love and parting were
so lightly laid on their shoulders, as if made of other stuff" 

(Rilke, from the Duino Elegies)

I have been meaning to write this for a while. Today it became necessary. The supermoon demanded it! And so also my heart has demanded it (and I'm not entirely convinced that they're not one and the same).

I was talking with a good friend yesterday about the difficulty of the singularity of minds. The idea that you can never really "know" someone because you can never see through their eyes or know their thoughts. This is not a radical concept, we've all thought about it, and a lot of cultural and social behavior is predicated on the addressing this conundrum. Humans, for whatever reason, have a deep desire to communicate their thoughts and ideas to others. We highly value the ability to communicate: the novelist, the artist, the politician, the poet, the musician—all are valued. Their job is to tell us something from inside themselves that we can't see or hear or know for ourself. We see a Platonic cave-shadow of it in their creations and their words. And that comforts us, somehow making us feel less alone... because we have those same thoughts and feelings. We love things because we identify with them.

Recently I have been frustrated with the seeming reticence to share these feelings suddenly and earnestly, and I was struck with a profoundly disturbing thought—maybe even more disturbing than the original solipsistic realization: what is the point of withholding true admissions of experience?

This might sound needlessly philosophical... let me try to put it into more colloquial terms. How many times have you looked at a tree in a certain light and just wanted to cry? How many times have you heard a song and actually cried but told no one? How many times have you wanted to tell someone how much you wanted/liked/loved them but held back because social convention taught you that you shouldn't (and later cried)? Tears are wordless admissions of overwhelming experience. And we systematically hide them.

Two pet peeves come to mind. The first is when people say that they don't "get" poetry or modern art because they don't understand it or it's "over their head." This is a profound fallacy because poetry and art are evocative. They are not, at their core, meant to be dissected in some kind of academic or learned way (if a piece is designed with this in mind, I argue that the artist is doing it wrong, but that's another topic for another day/year/lifetime). The point of E.E. Cummings is to simply wash over you and soak every inch of your soul until you explode/faint/die. The point of Rothko is not to make you understand ratios or colors. Rothko himself said,

"[My interest is] only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. ...[I]f you [...] are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

This is not to say that a depth of context cannot or does not enhance the experiential phenomenon of communicative arts. Knowing Bach's religious ideals can certainly enhance the theological appeal of his cantatas, but I am not fully convinced that it enhances their aesthetic value. The point of a poem or a painting or a tree is not to educate you—education, after all, is nothing more than amassing knowledge (i.e. contrived names and descriptions) that make you feel more comfortable about how or why a thing exists. Education doesn't abate the astonishment of existence itself. Instead, the point is to simply be changed by the thing. To interact with it. To be destroyed and remade made by it in an instant. People tend to understand this better with music and less with poems and least of all with people.

Here's the actual thing, and it brings me to my second big pet peeve: why is it that saying "I love you" is such a huge deal? Why do people freak out if someone says it and it's "too soon"? How can it ever be too soon to love? What exactly are you waiting for? Heck, I fell in love with the moon last night. And there's a good chance that I might at any given time be in love with four people that I've never met. And yet, I hardly ever admit it. I keep it to myself and I fault others when they won't say it. On the few occasions when I do decide to share my explosive feelings (a certain episode comes to mind involving birds which may or may not still be happening) I am often greeted with "calm down," or "don't be so bombastic."

Birds are the doom of golden twilight.
Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.

How can I not!? Birds are LIVING CREATURES THAT FLY INTO THE SKY AND ARE BEAUTIFUL AND OH ALSO THEY SING. WHAT. EVEN.

And how can I not fall in love with you? Have you ever stopped to think about what you are? The need to communicate this is simultaneously overwhelming and stifling... Rilke says,

"Lovers, if they only understood, might speak wondrously
in the night air. For everything, it seems,
seeks to conceal us. Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we
pass it all by, like a rush of air."

And why? Why?? I'm serious, what are we protecting? Our hearts? Protecting them from what? I honestly earnestly can't think of a single thing, not even to sarcastically supplant here. Don't tell me we're guarding it from rejection or pain or sorrow. We will feel that regardless of admission. We're human.

I had a conversation with one of my best friends about a year ago. In it we bemoaned how everyone thinks we're stoic and unfeeling when in fact we are daily overwhelmed by everything small and strange. "If you or I acted the way we felt every day, everyone would think we were insane. We'd be crying on street-corners. We have to hide our feelings because no one would understand us if we didn't." I think, now, that that choice was deeply misguided. Leading my friends to think that I am unsympathetic to emotion because of my deep-seated rational nature only invalidates the many feelings we share. Worse still, it further isolates us from one another. It is denial, and it can't be good for our hearts. I cannot do it anymore.

In her luminous novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson writes, 

"I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."

Perhaps we are doing great harm by denying ourselves the freedom to honestly disclose when we love or when our ineffable experience leaves us fainthearted and wordless. One last thought from Rilke:

"slowly one becomes unaccustomed to earthly things,
in the gentle way one leaves a mother's breast. But we, who need
such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress
springs from grief—: could we exist without them?"

No, I don't believe we could. And why would we want to? Let's not become unaccustomed to earthly things. Let's be continually astonished by their always mystery and never admonish one another when we admit it.