There was a passage in The Last of the Mohicans that stayed with me in how profound and solemn and almost transcendent it was. The young Mohican Uncas, upon observing the Munro sisters shed tears of joy after a harrowing escape, is moved by this display of emotion he has never seen before. He is described as elevated, advanced emotionally centuries ahead of the rest of his tribe. I wished I could isolate the scene from the Eurocentrism, since it was beautiful how comprehension of emotion was described as an intellectual step instead of hysteria in nineteenth-century literature—when often, reason and emotion are posed as opposites.
In a world today that acknowledges thousands of emotions, I wonder if there is such a thing as a healthy limit to feeling emotion. Though it wouldn’t be very stimulating to spend your days in middling contentment, it must be exhausting to be in the depths or at the peak all the time. And unpleasant for the people around you, no doubt. I wonder about the monks and nomads who withdraw from society to contemplate nature in isolation, hoping to unlock a higher realm of the mind. How do they do it without humans beside them to cry, laugh, and argue with? Since if emotion sanctifies and elevates as according to Cooper, you must have fellow humans alongside you to spark some. Not that you can’t feel emotions alone, of course, but certain ones are hard to spark on your own. And without the whole array of emotion, wouldn’t some steps be missing from the staircase you’re supposed to take to reach that high place?
What’s the use of reaching that realm anyway, if by the time you’ve arrived at the blue celestial lands, you’ve become a happily empty-eyed creature who can’t be angry or sarcastic to save your life? I’m all for self-growth in solitude but surely there’s such a thing as too much. Surely you need to keep some tie to earthy, fleshy emotion. At least some sparks of temper or selfishness to keep you tethered down. If you give it all up, you’ll become far too light and float up to the sky, at which point I suppose you’re not human any longer. But then what are you? You aren’t God. Just a mildly smiling, soulless imitation of a buddha, smiling indulgently at a world that wages war and clashes below in a roiling mess. You hover above it all, like a hot-air balloon. It sounds nice in a way, I guess, but wouldn’t it get boring after awhile? Cold winds will chap your smiling lips.
Down here, meanwhile, we’re tied together and held down by emotion. Ankles are bound to each other so that we can’t fly away. We’re hopelessly and endlessly tangled. When we try and cast off this net we find that we’re inextricable from it and fall back toward earth.
But as you know our bodies are full of tangles inside. Sinews creep through muscle tissue, twisting like vines. Hairs cascade in roils from the scalp, and beneath the epidermis is a woven mat of tendons. Creases on our skin resemble a tangle of rivers. Imagine the universe of knots, crisscrosses, and capillaries inside of us—is it any wonder we find ourselves so in real life, tangled and intertwined?
We might as well be part of one great body—operating organisms beneath one massive epidermis. I don’t actually know what this means, even as I write it myself, but one thing I know is that the more knots we extricate ourselves from, the more connections we sever, and we become more detached from this large body. Until we end up hovering over the great wilderness with an empty smile, as aforesaid, like a departed hot-air balloon. Surely it can’t be very much pleasanter up there than down here. Especially after a while. How do you stop? There aren’t any systems controlling your balloon. How do you land, when there’s nothing anchoring you back to earth? Will you hover forever, just outside the world?
Maybe, buried alone in the great blue, a tear will spring to your eye, the way it hasn’t in awhile. You may not know it, but it’s the sign of systems coming alive in you again. Hello, they’re waking up from a long sleep. Heartstrings are tugged, nerves stimulated, tears ducts activated. When that tear creeps down your cheek, you may find yourself hovering over a spot, held down by a tiny strand of spider-web extending down to the person you thought of. It’ll only hold for a second, then snap—unless, of course, you decide to send another one down.
Soon you may be in the thick of interconnected webs once more, wondering when you can next leave. But for now you’re happy despite the chaos. It may be a while before you decide to leave again.
This has been more of a piece written for myself, this semester when I’ve constantly wanted to detach and spend hours in isolation, overwhelmed by the closeness of the city. I’ve taken lots of such excursions (mentally, of course), and each time I find myself coming back. It’s taken me a long time, plus Mohicans, to realize this—that emotion elevates, and “emotional ties” is a literal term.
