Sentimentality

I probably should have added “variability of affect” to the previous post, but thought Sean Penn deserved his own post.  There can be no doubt that would have been his opinion, had I asked him, although he likely would like this entire blog dedicated to his very unique and unprecedented creative genius.  Not everyone had the audacity to float around on a boat outside New Orleans after Katrina, he would remind us.

We are told, often and both directly and indirectly, that our lives need romance.  They need adventures.  They need great passions, great sorrows, great joys. We must treat our relationship with the other sex as this sort of interdependent game in which both of us seek to maximize sentiment as long as possible, with the inevitable consequence–sentiment being mutable, and prone to go in all directions given a long enough time horizon–of the eventual dissolution of the game, and of course more sentiment and another game.  I see this weekly at the grocery store, reading the tabloid headlines.

The lesson I have learned from Kum Nye in particular, though, is that there is a very interesting layer UNDERNEATH all the great surface passions.  It is a realm in which calm and healing and fascinating energies grow and expand.  Let us say that curiosity is a buoy, floating anchored in the ocean.  You can grab the anchor line and follow it to its root, which of course is beyond words.  It is THAT.

All our emotions are like that.  Once you get to that layer, the explosions and fireworks and drama all seem kind of pointless.  I would not trade my trauma–and the transcending of my trauma–for anything.  It has been enormously valuable.

At the same time, I think much of our popular imagination is based on ghosts, on grand facades concealing nothing.  We lack spiritual skill.  This is a truism, but still worth saying, in my view.  We are so profoundly stupid, when intelligence is and remains possible.