I am not normally an emotional person.

This is both a true and a nonsensical statement.

It is true in that over the course of my life I am habitually a non-reactive type of person, not prone to either touchy-feely displays or to bouts of self-pity, that curse that accrues with a feeling of entitlement. Having said that, I must admit to anger. It is my most accessible feeling, and what eruptions I do have have tend to be related to rage, yet normally those only surface in moments when I am threatened, either physically or emotionally.

This is one sense of the statement “I am not normally an emotional person.” In this sense it is a true statement. Yet, as Damasio (and others) have shown, emotions are something deep and pervasive; not the simplest rational decisions can be made without reference to this, our first, discriminatory tool.

So whether the statement that started this is true or nonsensical is not really a valid question. It is both.

What all this tells me is that normally, my emotional reactions are there but that they are invisible to me. Having said this, it is not as simple as saying that I am unaware of my emotions and therefore I have a problem, but rather, when the background discriminatory tool that are feelings is functioning well, when the blare of anger is not needed to drive a self-protective response to some asshole who thinks he can play chicken with me because I am a middle-aged woman in a nice car and he is a 19 year old with his same-aged friend in his mother’s car (and with her insurance), feelings are supposed to be unobtrusive.  They are like a gentle ocean with a minor tidal pull. Feelings guide the boat of our reasoned decisions to make sure we take into account things that reason, for all its brilliance, is simply not complex enough to accommodate.

And so of late, when I go out into a sunny, brilliant day, with cherry blossoms rising in the updraft, pink flutters in the blue air, and still I feel as if I am riding under the black wing of Raven, I cannot help but wonder to what extent reason is in fact just another face, and extension of, the thing called feeling. Which, of course, makes nonsense out of a phrase like “unemotional person” or for that matter “emotional person.”  It’s like saying a four-legged biped or a two-legged biped.

My capacity to understand the day, to experience it, to think about it, and ultimately write about it, cannot occur today without the raven-wing any more than it could occur without the background swell of contentment that would more fittingly be there as a response to such a beautiful day. Normally I take my response to a day like this, to sun and fragrant air, and simply accept it as part of “how it is.” I don’t question whether it is reasonable to be happy on a fine day. This is, I think, right. I do question the sense of vulnerability that comes with the raven’s wing.

To question one and not the other is just a matter of habit I suppose and not really a matter of correctness in any moral sense. People function well together when, as a group, they respond happily to a fine day and probably wouldn’t if we all were acting like depressed over-thinkers instead. So it might just be that having feelings normally occur as a quiet (but powerful) guidance system is just what we evolved because this is what functions well for us as a group as well as for us as individuals.

To my credit, I do realize that this intimacy with Raven will go away. Since this haphazard emotional state seems to have to do with the endocrinal shudders associated with menopause, I suspect that when my body is finished turning down the tap on oxytocin and other please-let-me-take-care-of-you chemicals, things will return to the formally smooth state, although I suspect the colour of my sea will be substantially different.

I just hope the rage stays.  I rather like my “I will kill you if you threaten me” response to idiots and other undesirables.   In this, the evidence seems to suggest I may in fact have greater access to my willingness to bash the rude and dumb. I understand that once menopause has settled my body into a steady state, I will feel even less inclined to avoid conflict and even less likely to do the work necessary to keep unproductive relationships afloat. For this, I am glad. Roll on senescence, to thou I will offer tribute. And to you, Quiet Feeling, the ram’s blood.

I’ve had a couple of bad days. Don’t know why, and, actually, don’t much care, but I do want them to stop.

Work is not hard at the best of times, but it can be really busy, but right now it is slowing down and so the pace is a bit dream-like. Not a good dream, but dream-like.

So after work today I’d had enough for the nonce and thought “where can I go so I will feel better?” I flipped through my inner-file of places-that-I-like-to-go, waiting for the emotional hit that shoots up a big red finger pointing down from my metaphorical sky saying “THIS ONE.” It turned out to be a Chinese-Canadian restaurant (you know the kind that sells standard North American-style rice and noodle Chinese food along with grilled cheese and burger fare.

I took a booth (cracked Naugahyde), ordered tea, and opened my backpack.
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I found a new toy!

Philosophy class earlier…still having a great time but it bugs me that so many philosophers treat the mind as if it were something that could be considered apart from the body, as if mind were cool little bubbles of thought and word, connecting, separating and reconnecting in some immaterial linguistic hyperspace.

Not me I ‘m afraid.

Imagine a vast machine, one that takes up building after building, all connected by some enormous network of pipe, cable and wire. Imagine that each of these buildings is connected to the world by its own sensors; these sensors are set at various heights, with different directional orientations, collecting different information about the world by different methods. Imagine that the vast majority of the machine’s work is done in-house in the different various buildings, its products made, decisions about future manufacturing, about the activity of the sensors, about work pace, etc. are all made in-building before a summary of activity is sent along the network to proximate buildings and (recently) to the assessment team.  Now imagine the assessment team has been assembled to help the buildings coordinate their efforts. The idea is that the team will help the overall functioning in the few cases where some modulation of productivity might help the vast machine adjust to its changing market place.  The team has a place for itself at the edge of some of the buildings – this place added on after the rest of the buildings were already in place and fully functioning. The team is wired in to the system so it can receive summary reports from the buildings, but the team doesn’t know about the vast majority of the day-to-day activity, processes or decisions of the various buildings in the vast machine. The team doesn’t need to know about the day-to-day because that’s not why the team was assembled.  In fact knowing the day-to-day would interfere with the team’s job. The team was assembled to be able to assess things like ‘building T is making stuff that is going to undermine the ability of building E to function at all, so despite the fact that T really likes what it is doing, it needs to pull back because without E, T can’t keep going.’  Now imagine that in order for the team to come to that conclusion and send its message/suggestion back to building T, the message tube produces blue and pink iridescent bubbles that float out the window and up into the sky above the vast machine.  Aware reason: those bubbles, that’s what most philosophers think make us human.

Not a bubble person, me.

What it means to have a folk taxonomy….

So lets play a game: Which is the odd man out?

BIRD : CROCODILE: TURTLE

If you’re like me, you put crocodile and turtle together.

But….

I’ve been reading The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, Here’s what they say about that.

If birds descended from dinosaurs, and if crocodiles but not turtles are also directly related to dinosaurs, then crocodiles and birds form a group that excludes turtles; or crocodiles, birds, and turtles form separated groups; or all form one group. In any event, the traditional separation of BIRD and REPTILE is no longer tenable.

So we all have a folk taxonomy. (We also all have a goal orientation for that taxonomy, but I won’t talk about that much until another post.)
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