Permission

I feel like I have to ask for permission. Like I am a small child standing in a large, mostly empty living room and who knows the space was made for twirling around in circles into dizziness. But, this is a living room where many fine things have been collected - crystal bowls, an antique chest from 1882, a vase of blooming orchids, an elegant leather couch - and while my child’s mind is pretty darn sure I can twirl around without breaking anything, there is the adult voice that tells me to be cautious, serious. The same voice I heard so many times in my youth when going into store with nicer merchandise. “This is a hands-off store.” And I’d nod a knowing and cooperative nod, fully aware that my chubby child fingers might wreak havoc simply by touching something.

But sometimes in my youth, havoc could be avoided simply by asking permission. The adult always knew - or knew calculably better than I did - when the odds of breakage or mishap were low. Granting permission, I perceived, was a matter of careful consideration. In the living room with the fine objects, or in the store with the expensive merchandise, countless other material circumstances hovered about, and the adult mind took them all in where my immature peripheral sense could not. The couch and the antique chest were too close together, or my outstretched, spinning hands might catch on the blooming orchids, the crystal bowl; or, there was a display in the store that looked precarious and topple-able, the fragile thing I wanted to touch was slippery and silvery and might fall from my grasp. The adult, it seemed, could veritably see into the future. “Why don’t you go outside and spin?” or “I’ll hold it for you so you can touch it.”

Being careful, I learned, was ethical. One must learn to respect the fragility of valuable things.

I will not tell you how much I’ve spent on education in my lifetime. It’s an absurd amount, and incongruous with the value of what I purchased. But, suffice it to say that my education is a crystal bowl, a vase of blooming orchids, a slippery, silvery thing that’s meant to sit on a shelf and be admired; not fingerprinted, and certainly not dropped. Mine is an education in writing, and an education in the literary. Mine is an education in ideas. Lofty ideas. Important ideas. I’ve been trained to write stories about ideas, and I’ve been trained to disregard frippery.

With that slippery, silvery object has come the certificate of authenticity. You put such objects on a shelf in plain view. You do not closet them, or worse, place them in the bathroom.

The message of my education has been: “Don’t twirl. You might break something.”

So. What do I do… when I have no ideas… but twirling ones?

It doesn’t seem so easy as the easiest response: “Well, for God’s sake, twirl!” Because I’m standing here, looking at that slippery, silvery object and really, really worried it could crash to the ground. And everyone who knows me for that fancy thing, everyone who respects me for that fancy thing, will be mortified if I break it.

Twirl… carefully? Calculatedly? Go outside and twirl?

I feel like I have to ask permission.

Sentimentality

I can’t not think about this anymore. (And immediately I want to close-analyze that sentence: why the word “think” of all things? Why the double negative? Is there syntactical avoidance going on?) But seriously, this is not a dramatic move.

If you haven’t seen the film “Homeward Bound,” you may as well stop here… Unless, of course, you plan to rent it. If you don’t like dogs, though, don’t bother and, seriously, stop here. The movie’s about dogs. It’s about dogs who travel across country to find their family again. Oh, and there’s a cat, too. Sally Field is the cat. But let’s just focus on what’s lovable. (Again, what is my prose after right now? Is this coy humor a diversion? A way not to do what I want to do?) The movie follows these dogs as they get chased by bears, separated in the wild, hunted by a well-meaning, but terrifically frightful animal control officer, and trek across some pretty awful landscape. And in the end, there’s this scene. The young boy, most attached to the eldest dog, is thrilled to have the young dog and the cat back, and he waits in expectation to see if the old golden retriever (because it has to be a golden retriever) will also arrive safely home. He waits, watching the horizon. We wait, just as breathless. And then there he comes, limping but really happy to be home, golden fur alight in the setting sun.

It’s beautiful, right? It was built that way. The choice of the dog, the narration written over that moment, the amount of time we’re kept waiting to see if this will be a truly happy conclusion, the lighting, the sound. All of it fabricated to elicit from us that soft, partly ashamed whimper, and the tears that follow. I know they built it this way. I know how sentimentality works - its mechanism and its technique. I watch a movie like “Homeward Bound” and I see the work that’s being done as it’s being laid out. I know what the ending will be. I’m a writer; narrative is my specialty. I’m rarely - and I do mean this - rarely surprised by a film.

And I weep every single goddamn time that dog crests the hill, limping and exuberant. Loyal and full of love.

Why?

I’ve written in this blog about my aversion to or suspicion of sentimentality. Under most circumstances, I feel like sentimentality is generally deceptive, especially in that it’s almost always contrived. Maybe I feel this way about any sort of contrivance - even tragedy, when done too obviously, is faulty. (What do I mean by “faulty”? Why that word? Here again, am I avoiding what I’ve come here to address, by referring to standards, quality?)

So, I don’t like sentimentality. I don’t like it for the very reason that I can anticipate it, and that I can break it down into its component parts.

So why, tonight, when watching a new romantic comedy with my daughter and my mother, did I want my boyfriend’s hand to hold? Why, tonight, did I hear the actors speaking and imagine how good it would feel to be spoken to thus? Why couldn’t I stop smiling when everything turned out okay? Why couldn’t I segregate the emotions the filmmakers built in me from my perceptions of reality? Someone says, “You deserve to be taken care of, for a change.” And I think, “He’s saying that to me.” Someone says, “You’re actually a softy,” and I blush, my true personality revealed.

Why do I want my heart to break and be mended (the passive voice there is incredibly necessary to this whole discussion, for in sentimental narrative, the heartbroken cannot mend themselves - that would contradict formula)? Why do I, happy and in love as I am, still soak up the swept-off-your-feet conceit of these movies? I don’t want the dog to show up any earlier. The suspense of waiting is delicious and heart-wrenching.

Winnie-the-Pooh says it’s the moment before you taste the honey that’s the best part of eating the honey. The anticipation of perfection, the sheen of the sunlight through the amber, sticky stuff. Is that part of why the sentimental has such power? Are we enamored of the suspense before the marriage, before the kiss? Do we want to linger in what has not yet become a full taste in our mouths? Eroticism is similar - it isn’t the nude body we want as voyeurs of magazines, television, and movies. It’s the expectation of the nude body, the nude body still out of reach. Sex has its own pleasures, but the expectation of it is, I think, far more exciting.

Why?

Giorgio Agamben might say that the reason we like this space of not-quite-there-ness is that we live constantly in the suspense of being and not-being. We hang, sometimes desperate, between becoming what we believe we are, and recognizing that we could just as easily become nothing like it at all. The erotic is defined by this kind of slippage. The taunt, the tease.

Are sentimental movies a kind of tease? Is there slippage happening there? Certainly, there is a slippage between who I am in the seat and who I project myself to be on the screen (am I her, am I him?), and there is a slippage between the sensible and the sentimental. The desire to feel and the determination to think.

There are moments when I feel sorry for myself for not being able to just purely enjoy the sentimental. It’s an act of will for me, and I rarely succeed. A narrative has to surprise me, and that’s hard. It’s not that I don’t think there’s something healthy and perfectly human about crying over a romantic moment, or holding your breath to see if everything’s going to be okay. I do, actually.

I was in a yoga workshop once. The teacher had taken a student from the crowd and had asked her to demonstrate a back-bend. The yogini kept saying again and again “soften your heart, soften your heart.” She meant the muscular space between the shoulder blades, which should relax in order to lift the chest. And the student - a teacher herself - replied, “I can’t. That part’s dead.”

I sorta wondered if anyone else in the room heard what I heard. A yoga teacher whose heart was dead.

But I have to turn the lens back on me, don’t I? After all, I am a writing teacher who intellectualizes the sentimental. I am a lover who parses the erotic. I’m not clear what I’m saying here… But I feel pretty clear about why I may have been avoiding saying it.