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7. INTENTIONAL ACTIONS
"Ever since Reason first tasted
The vigor of an emotional thrust
Internal bargaining—
"I want/I don't" "I should/should not"
Invites a tug-of-war between them.
Interrupted
A raw Emotion rebounds and
Tapping into the self-balancing forces
Active within the initial system
It may backlash stronger on the rebound.
Challenged by it
Reason may sharpen its wits
And if Emotion slips out of hand
Its efforts are wasted.
But Reason fares no better when it plays
This cat-and-mouse game to the hilt—
Repeated interruptions tend to
Inflame the self-balancing forces
And spurt by spurt a regular
Emotion may ripen to
A full-blown passion.
Passions put Reason
In a triple bind:
It must keep Emotion in check
Or be trampled by it.
It must titillate Emotion
To sustain its own stamina
And at the same time channel
The energy into activities intended
To satisfy the emotional need or
Suffer self-confidence shattered.
If Reason masters that high-wire
Balancing act it may temper a passion by
Draining that surplus energy in
Arduous physical or mental activities.
And still the host system may
Just as well rebel
And in convulsive bursts of energy
Deliver armfuls of delirious gratification
Putting reason to shame.
Yet only in wrestling with
Impassioned emotional surges
Does reason catch glimpses
Of its own weakness and strength
And limitations."
*
"Eager to control
Nature's unwieldy manifestations
Reason reaches for
The heart of matter:
It observes tracks compares questions
The make-up and behavior of things
Takes them apart investigates and
Putts the parts together in ways
That harness natural forces to
Serve some rational demand.
To do this
Reason has to teach itself to think—
To align the findings in an order
That can be tested by others
And make sense to all concerned.
Thought does not come to reason
By itself—to this day
Every youngster must teach
Him/herself to think."
*
"As words stand in for
Separate sensory impressions
Thoughts stand in for
Experience—a chain of sensations
Received in a sequence of events that
Rouse an array of feelings.
The translation of feelings into words
Restructures a sensory experience
Into a rational event.
In other words
In thought
Only those impressions and sensations that
Follow the logic of cause and effect
Make sense to Reason.
Initial thoughts are unintentional—
Glimpses on the heels of
What you see or hear or smell
Anchored in words—
Random verbal translations dotting
Thought networks in the order
In which the eye nose or ear
Have received an impression.
Thoughts are intentional
When Reason directs the senses
To collect specific information
Intentional thoughts doing
The detective footwork—
Filling in the gaps between glimpses
Connecting the first impressions by
The logic of cause and effect until
A resolute picture-event
Coheres in the mind.
Resolute thinking
Brings Reason into power:
Having verbalized enough data and
Relying on words and thoughts alone
Reason starts functioning
Independently of sensory memory.
The ordeal of making sense of chaos
However is far from over—
Ever so often a missing link
Invites assumption and
As words suggest themselves
And fill the gaps
Inadvertently
Guess by innocent guess
Assumption widens the rift
Between what is actually there and
What is assumed to be there
In thought.
To the senses
Everything is self-evident—
A finger is part of a hand
The hand attaches to the arm
The arm to the body in a chair in
A room in a house on a street in town
Surrounded by pastures—
As far as the eye can see
Parts of a thing in motion
Stay connected while
The wide beyond rolls on
Without a break or interruption.
Not so to reason.
To convey in words what the senses
Perceive at a glance
Reason must distinguish the parts
Fetch a name for each separate part
Connect the part-labeling names
Floating in the mind to
Other floating labels
And do it in an order that resembles
The actual thing or scene out there.
By trial and error reason fits
The fragments together but remains
In the dark whether that whole
Hovering in the mind
Is a separate thing
Or part of a yet larger one.
With information so laboriously attained
Passed on from one generation to another
Each scrupulously investigating
Adding to or replacing the old
With new findings
Humanity has unraveled the order
In which things of matter
Come together and behave—
The logic of cause and effect
That governs the material world is
The order by which Reason
Conducts all its affairs.
Moreover
Close observation of the natural world
Leads to foresight and foresight to
Foreknowledge of events to come and
Foreknowledge to planning ahead—
To preparing for eventualities
Essential to existence.
Convinced there is nothing
The logic of cause & effect cannot fix
Reason focuses on your personal life
And ignoring the churning deep urges
Decides what is good and bad for you.
Soon masterminding every aspect of your life
Reason is apt to turn a life into
A vehicle of rational pursuits—
A balance sheet of failures and successes
Accounting for the good or
Bad life you deserve.
Since reality disregards
What Reason predicts or
Worth yet
Threatens to undermine some
Established line of reasoning
Instead of questioning or adjusting
Its handiwork
Reason provides for that as well—
It ushers upsetting information
To a shadowy region of the mind
Reserved for such eventualities—
The provision enabling Reason
To discredit and brush aside
All disturbing feelings experiences
Thoughts and information
As illusionary or
Better yet
Unworthy of its attention—
Dispose of what contradicts
Or fails to support an order
Professed by Reason.
That information however
Registers in memory
And is apt to surface whenever
Perception and reality collide."
*
"As it happens
Action is not natural to Reason either.
While habitual behavior is an acquired trend
Reason—a pedestrian plodding along
On borrowed energy—needs motivation
To lift even a finger—
Must have that extra spurt of energy
To generate muscular activity.
What complicates matters is that
The energy animating both
Emotion and Reason is
One and the same—
A single flow split in two and
Oscillating—
The more energy Reason uses
The more drained is Emotion
And when Reason relaxes its grip
Emotion gains vigor.
A rigorous stroll or mental activity
May settle a budding emotional unrest.
But unless the energy is drained empty
What's left behind does not vanish
But stays trapped causing
An irritating physical discomfort—
Flesh insisting
You do something about it.
Put into words
That nagging discomfort translates
Into wish want or desire—
A suspended unfulfilled emotional need
Now motivating activities intended to
Gratify that held back
Emotional urge.
Say a youngster fancies a jacket
In a store window and
Imagines himself wearing it
Collecting admiring glances.
Feeling diminished in stature without it
He asks his parents to buy
The jacket for him.
Told he can have it on condition
That he does homework before dinner
To get his wish the boy will have to
Give up playing ball
His favorite pastime.
The bargaining addresses his Reason
And while gratification postponed
Causes discomfort
The wish now motivates Reason
And supplies it with a steady
Energy flow as well.
The wish lends itself to manipulation
By parental eagerness to change
The boy's habits or
By the boy himself—
He can manage the urge
By using his imagination—
Inflate a sagging motivation by
Embellishing the jacket's attributes
Or deflate the wish by stripping it
Of the appealing details.
But if the boy starts thinking
And weighs in his mind
The emotional benefits expected
Against the enjoyment he gets
From playing ball
He may as well give up the jacket
And be at once relieved of the wish
Incited by his own imagination
And fixated by Reason."
*
"Unless Reason learns to engage
Emotion measure for measure
An emotional need unfulfilled
Does not vanish—the surplus energy
Sloshes up and down the spine
Mingling with dribbles of other
Hung-up emotional urges
Creating a derivative emotion—
A directionless expressionless urge
Apt to incite swings in mood
In thought and behavior.
A derivative emotion is on the loose
When a held back expression
Say of love or affection
Mixes with inklings of fear
The two mutating into
Jealousy or resentment that find release
In actions or vocal expressions
Pitched to diminish in stature
The object of affection
(Imagination at work).
A dash of anger added to the mixture
Is apt to escalate it to envy or hatred
The chemistry more potent than before.
Add a touch of courage and
Revenge bent on inflicting harm
Is in the wings.
There is no telling how many
Expressionless derivative emotions
May exist side by side.
Though caused by Reason's intervention
For this unwieldy trend
Emotion usually takes the blame
Misguided attention proliferating
Confusion within and without."
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