Have a Banana

Ever cry at movies? Me neither. I would like to think I'm too reasonable for that. But I don't know...

Knowing-that-I-don't-know is my rational mind censoring itself. It is the job of the rational mind to control and balance all of the faculties: instincts, appetites, aversions, sensations, perceptions, memories, emotions, imagination, empathy, values, conscience, pretense, even reason itself, less like a contest between left and right and more like a dozen monkeys jumping on the bed until some fall off leaving the others to jump all the harder. Reason needs them to sit down and share the bananas.

But balance is dynamic. Even if you are the reasonable one, you don't sit still while the others go on bouncing. It is reasonable to sometimes be less reasonable, a familiar theme to me. Take a look at Don't Dis and Dis, two notes from 2020 (the year, not the eyesight). I nurture my inner poet whenever I think of it because my inner scientist is too ready to take over. You don't want Dennis around if his inner poet has been squashed. 

Equally, you don't want Dennis all sloppy wet when, after an hour of misadventure, the lovers in the story finally arrive at The Kiss, or one of them Dies. Sniff. Sigh. Sorry. Don't mind me. This has been going on since Westside Story. As I recall, back then the whole theatre was sobbing. Blame it on the music. Leonard Bernstein was playing us like we were the orchestra, and there wasn't anything in the score about being reasonable. Bernstein wants it molto lacrimoso, where Bach would ask for molto ragionevole ma non troppo noioso. ( Google Translate)

Protagonists of our stories usually suffer from too much of this and too little of that. Their tragedy (or comedy) is that they cannot see what is obvious to us. It is not that they kiss or die. Everybody does that. It's that they think they know what they are doing but they don't, and we are longing to tell them, but we don't know either, even if we are sure we know.

Don't weep for me, nor laugh either. I know that I don't know.

You're laughing. Just be reasonable and pass the tissues. I'm out.

Have a banana. They're almost ripe.