Okay - an imperative.
I seek to catalogue emotions in terms of multiplicity. From these eyes, the biggest emotional "problem" suffering our world is mainstream masculinity's rejection of multiplicity, demand of unity, pressure of conformity, reductions of identity, culling of diversity.
My research will pertain to the soul -- towards a language to describe the force that I currently have too few words and too much meaning to enunciate. I have taken to calling it The River. Here are some words that currently describe the river:
Life. The river is a vital force that empowers the multiplicitous (as in, both literal and metaphorical) metaphorical beating of our heart. It is the blood that our heart pumps, the muscle that pumps it, and the fuel that our engine runs on. It is the substance and sustenance of life. In terms of the river, it is the water that shapes the riverbed, meaning it is also the riverbed, and the downward tilt that it possesses. (if downward tilt is ostensibly incorrect, disregard).
Love. This is a force that is immanent in all behavior, thought, action, and intention. Before we are socialized, we are this force. This experience of life is the experience of pure experience, and lacking all emotional imperatives, we only feel one emotion, less an emotion than a state, ongoing until (and perhaps before/after) death. It is an activity of constant concurrent awareness and acceptance, that I call experience.
Implicit in this selfsame conception of life and love is a dissolution of any mind-body separation.
Socialization does eventually threaten our ability to experience without action and to act without intention--to live solely on the basis of this force, in a state of active experience--and these threats, when perceived, demand protective intentionality, what we might label as thought, emotion, or action. Here, morality and will arrive, accompanied by compassion and protection. I recognize that here, I am approaching Spinozan territory.
Because of the discontinuity in threat between activity and passivity -- the experience of these threats is a passive, indirect one, as in, the threats happen to us, but the perception of these threats is an active one, as in, "we" perceive the threats -- "we" are not the actors in said perception. Our lack of agency over the reactive protection to said threats is a manifestation of the lack of agency by which these threats arrived. Our agency, prior to said threats, manifested in experience. This does not change after threats occur. Rather, other abilities of the river (here, I approach the edge of my language to describe) react to protect. If there was a large rock impeding the flow of the river, the river would continue to flow over the rock until the rock is eroded (active voice, passive action) by the river. The water does not change, or act, it simply continues to exist in reaction to the rock. The difference between the river and the human is that the human does not possess (or is not taught) the language of this non-dualistic agentic existence, and instead, possesses the language of agency. This multiplicity of agency, to be both active and passive at once, at the whim of the flow of the river, but also, the flow of the river, is key to my research. Because the identity of these actors is, by now and by definition, imprecise, I will try to refrain from using pronouns to describe them.
Because the river is life, all action to protect this force should be held in terms of it being life or death necessity, with its moral connotations. Because the river is love, all action to is to protect the experience of love, with the moral connotations that that may entail. Actions to protect, or, to use more compelling verbs, to save life and to stay love are, to me, actions of utmost compassion and morality. The more complex a threat is perceived, the more precise and perceptive its reaction must be. Because all action stems from or is motivated by these pure intentions, all action is moral. This does not mean good, but it does mean "not bad."
There is much complication to be added here, but I think this justifies a solid framework to describe my understanding of human emotion. From where I sit here, words like anger and anxiety and hate are imprecise, or inaccurate, as they fail to describe what is occurring in compassionate terms, sans problematization, an evidenced necessity for all description of emotion and behavior.
This inaccuracy is especially severe in predominantly masculine spaces, where problematization of non-agency is perceived as necessary for improvement, success, and avoidance of weakness-related shame. Here, we encounter problems (intentional word choice): blame, bigotry, othering, and competition. In seeing these behaviors from the moralizing light of the river, I seek to de-problematize these behaviors and allow for explicit (external) compassion to permeate the culture, in synergy with predominant implicit compassion (internal).
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