MACARONI # 62     Spring 2004		films
		int'l festiva
		restaurant

on being moved

The world you have a presentiment of, when you are full of a new sorrow, or when you are moved by great music, or when you are struck by the beauty of a verse, or when you see a miracle in the misty dawn, tells you that you are a stranger on this earth.

—Martin Hansen: The Liar

And yet I was moved to ask myself, during that sluggish, somnambulant   interval, What does it mean, then, to be moved? And I came to a number of conclusions, which, following the current fashion, I thought I might as well make into a list.

1) Being moved is a good thing, rather than a bad thing.

Of course we're sometimes moved in a bad way, but when such an event takes place we refer to it differently, saying, for example, that we're “appalled” or “disgusted.”

2) Being moved implies a degree of depth.

It never happens that we're “superficially” moved. When such cases do arise we say, rather, that we've been manipulated.

3) Being moved entails a degree of passivity.

We can't will ourselves to be moved. It's something that happens to us, rather than something we do. On the other hand, the experience has nothing of the indignity associated with being re-moved, as, for example, when the drunken football fan is forcibly removed from the stadium. The difference lies in the fact that although being moved suggests a degree of passivity, we also willfully enter into it, because the experience engages and quickens important parts of us.

5) The experience of being moved is self-contained.

In this it differs from the experience of being inspired, for example, which impels us to attempt some remarkable creative act.

6) When we're moved, we're always moved by something .

In this way being moved distinguishes itself from, say, being in a good mood.

7) The experience of being moved is by nature intuitive, rather than conceptual.

We may be moved by the sight of a beatnik helping a nun across the street, but we will never be moved by the logical elegance of an economic treatise. Inspired? yes. Exhilarated? Perhaps. Moved? Not really.

8) The experience of being moved is fleeting.

It's too bad, I suppose. On the other hand, being moved often shifts our perspective, so that for a time everything we experience is given added luster, like the countryside after a rain, and in any case—

9) One's capacity for being moved is limited.

Repeated exposure to a particular thing that moves us will result in a jaded disconnect, which is undesirable and distressing.

10) Being moved elevates us.

Countless works have been written over the centuries about Aristotle's theory of catharsis. He defines   tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious and also complete in itself...with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” It seems to me, however, that when we're actually moved by something, we're not merely cleaned or purged or wrung out—we're also brought to a new level of awareness, or fitness.

It isn't an awareness that we can readily describe: “Now I see what I never saw before, namely....” but the effect is real none the less, and it differs dramatically from the one we get during a roller-coaster ride, for example, or while watching a scary movie.

------------------------------------------------------

Attempts have been made, over the centuries, to create a more or less standard process by which we can effectively induce the experience of being moved, and prime the pump of human emotion, as it were. This, for example, is what the passion of Christ is all about. During the period of Lent we're enjoined to deprive ourselves of things, and also to burrow inside ourselves in a continuing act of self-examination and contrition. The Lenten ceremonies, and especially the last few days, further intensify this period of harshness, negativity, and self-laceration. On Easter Sunday we return to light, to colored eggs, bunnies, green grass, and a risen Christ. Our spirits have been challenged, stirred, moved, and refreshed, in pace with the season. Whether, in fact, we'll live forever may well remain a matter of conjecture, but it would seem that at least we've learned how to live again.

The word “passion” is itself somewhat curious. Although in common speech it has come, in our day, to mean “intensity of feeling” it derives from the same root as the words “passive” and “patient,” and it's perhaps a little odd that a being whom many revere as divine should be best known, not for what he did, but for what was done to him. On the other hand, no amount of beatific sloganeering, no catalog of miracle cures that have been worked on others , can equal the power of a good and noble story of undeserved suffering that each and every one of us can enter into emotionally—we've all been wrongly judged, and punished for things we didn't do—and there is little harm, I think, in observing that the most moving parts of the story—the eleventh hour cry, for example—are also the most human ones.

       This combination of passivity and of “entering into” experience lies at the heart of being moved, I think. One common experience that might help us to clarify how the process actually works, is that of being picked up at the airport. We know our friends are coming to meet us, and we know very well what they look like—and yet, when we actually see their faces, standing amid a throng of strangers, our world lights up a little. The mood, the slant changes. To everything   that we see in our mind's eye has been added the presence of living beings with which we can interact. There is an engagement, a rapport, and it moves and also elevates us.

This spontaneous wringing out of the heart can be elicited by all sorts of experiences, of course. As Heraclitus remarked some six centuries before the birth of Christ, “He who would be wise must acquaint himself with a great many particulars.” The great advantage of becoming familiar with things is that it allows us greater opportunities to interact and enter into them—to be moved.

I occasionally find that I'm moved simply by the sight of a shelf of books. I may have been in their presence daily for weeks or months, preoccupied by this or that literary project or computer card-game. I'm familiar with the books, of course, the titles, the authors—I bought them, after all—but they might as well be wallpaper, until that moment when I look again, as if for the first time, with what might be called “loving interest” and am surprised and moved by the delightful opportunities that are presenting themselves to me. I have once again become “available” to them. Modern Hungarian Poets , Spain at the Dawn of History , Peter Handke's A Moment of True Feeling , A Maigret Trio, Verdi with a Vengeance. The heart aches with the desire to pull them all down at once and consume with the appetite of a Titan.

  Our most moving experiences are accompanied by a sharpening of inner vision, to a point that seems to encompass all of experience—both inner and outer—and this feeling has the virtue of being not in the least bit withdrawn or “mystical.” But whatever the intensity involved, being moved seems invariably to involve elements of both discovery and recollection. Perhaps the experience isn't that far removed from the “transport” that Plato associates with the experience of making contact with the Ideal.