Passion, Part II

My greatest moments of passion--which is to say, the most memorable moments of my life--have been filled with glorious discomfort and freeing mindlessness.

I've concluded comfort is the enemy of passion, and to achieve passion, one must, if only for a short time, give his mind away.

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The word "passion" came from the Late Latin meaning, "the suffering that comes from being acted upon by external agents or forces." During the Middle Ages, the word became linked with the suffering of Christ on the Cross, and it became capitalized: Passion. Over time Passion came to mean not just a strong sense of suffering, but a strong sense of any feeling, an "overmastering" feeling, a feeling from outside forces, a feeling that opposes another capitalized notion: Reason. In a contemporary thesaurus, synonyms for passion include "affection, devotion, love."

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True passion is a stoic act. Latin had it right: it's as if others are acting upon you, the Hera's and the Zeus's (to allude to the previous entry) are in control, not your self. Actually, there is no self. In my travels in Latin America, the selflessness of many people there astonishes me. They themselves don't act, they would argue; they are the living actions of God. When I sat and chatted with a Catholic in Morelia or Valparaiso, a Christian in Nicaragua, I always came away with the sense that we were alien to each other. We did not see the world the same. They think something controls them; I think I control myself. They see fate; I see free will.

I've always been impressed with emotions in Latin America. Love, guilt, indignation, pride, self-disgust, fear, paranoia, lust, violence. It all comes so easily! There is less Self to get in the way of Feeling. You don't know why your body's doing it; it's just happening!

In Mexico, adults find delight in children to a degree I can't even fathom. "Look what God has brought us! Look what we've made through Him and for Him!" I love Mexican kids; they have an independence and selflessness and humility most American kids never demonstrate. The adults there deeply love the children but don't frantically try preserve and develop them because, as they feel, the world will do what it does; external forces control what happens to them; God acts in mysterious ways. If you want to see beautiful love for children, sit in a zocalo in any Mexican city for an hour and enjoy as best you can, lose yourself in all the balloons and little rental go-carts and beautifully obnoxious hurdy-gurdys. Reason--my beast that complicates, never simplifies--mandates I don't see just a cute baby or a child. I also see Carbon Footprint; I see poop; I see a ball and chain to freedom; I see Irony.

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We, the Committed, believe our joys and rages and fears are ours alone, ours individually. I have my heartbreak, my missed loved one, my amazing sexual experience, and I set to express it uniquely. In Flamenco guitar--and I would argue Mexican rancheras, too--there are no individual songs. There are forms and each form sets to express a shared feeling, a feeling all humans have. Tientos, a Flamenco form, isn't played to express my yearning; it's to express the human feeling we all have of yearning. Alegrias isn't for me to express my joy; it's to express human joy. Yearning and joy, according to Flamenco, are the same feelings from human to human; they're communal. Out in the galaxy, there's a big pool of Yearning and a big pool of Joy, and each of us at times in our lives scoops from them and drinks from them. As I see it, the purpose of Flamenco isn't to express but to induce. The purpose of Flamenco is to the be an external agent that causes Passion.

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Physical activity induces strong feeling in me. Ascending the 15-grade Dalmatian Mountains in 95 degree weather on my bicycle; running and diving side to side on the baseline as Erica makes me work; jogging on Beacon, my Asics kicking up the autumn leaves: a certain discomfort arises from exertion that beats back Reason and allows my body to give away its mind for a short time. Art, a vehicle of distilled and fermented emotion, can also induce strong feeling, feelings real life cannot. A tragedy in a good film generally triggers something stronger in me than tragedy in real life. Somehow Art feels more real than reality, an idea Derrida (I think it was him) described lamentably.

Human relationships, at their best, trigger a symbiotic mindlessness, a shared feeling that reminds one of gorgeous coincidence and luck and miracle in this humbling vast universe, and the most passionate relationships (and thus the most memorable) are not the ones that are always comfortable, but the ones that deny comfort, the relationships that pulse with human drama, the ones where lovers and friends can abandon reason at the blink of a Greek god's eye and lose the Self and become a universal, can become Rage or Lust or Jealousy or Joy or Grief personified.

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It's not just that a life unexamined isn't worthy living. It's also that a life unfelt isn't worth living. And I promise myself to resist the automation of existence. I promise to resist excessive comfort. I permit this world to act upon me, to induce the sensations of my youth, to induce the critical feeling of being temporary, lucky, chosen, here. I permit you, World, to give me Passion.