1st Emotion - "1E" / "Romantics"

“Romantic” (1st Emotion) 

As already mentioned, one of the main features of the First Function is its redundancy. The 1st Emotion is no exception here. The envious statement of the artist Bryullov comes to mind that when Pushkin laughs, he “sees his guts.” Of course, excess of feelings can be expressed not only by exaggerated laughter, but also by streams of tears; the main thing in the behavior of “romance” is an inadequate, clearly excessive emotional reaction to current events.

If the redundancy of the 1st Emotion is multiplied by the specific love role of the emotional function, which was mentioned above, then, I think, it will become clear to everyone that a “romantic” is the best, simply amazing lover (by “lover” I mean not so much physiological potential, as much as the ability to excite a special state of euphoria, which humanity is accustomed to identifying with love).

“Flood of feelings”, “spiritual storm”, “volcanic passion” - the “romantic” is endowed with all this from birth, therefore, no matter how things are with him in all other functions, the “romantic”, one might say, is doomed to success in love by nature itself.

Moreover, the attractiveness of a “romantic” as a love partner is not always determined by purposeful conscious or unconscious actions on his part: serenades, poems, passionate whispers, etc. According to my observations, just a loud, contagious laugh or just a profuse eruption of tears (even not addressed to you personally) can awaken the love instinct, including the corresponding physiological parts of the body. In other words, the excess of the 1st Emotion can not only infect a person with its mood, but also become a starter of sexual arousal. The famous singer Luciano Pavarotti answered the question “Does the voice have sexuality?” answered like this: “As for the sexuality of the voice, you would need to ask women about this. In general, I receive letters in which representatives of the fairer sex write that, listening to me, they experience a sexual sensation.” Sexologists know of even more expressive examples when individuals, while contemplating extremely funny or very frightening sights, experienced not just sexual arousal, but a real orgasm.

In this context, the story of the novel between teacher Belikov and Varya Kovalenko from Chekhov’s story “The Man in a Case” becomes especially clear. Varya was an obvious “romantic”: “…broken, noisy, she keeps singing Little Russian romances and laughing. As soon as she bursts into loud laughter: ha-ha-ha!” With this laugh, it seems, Varya struck down teacher Belikov. Or, if we retell the content of their novel in the language of the biologist quoted above, Belikov, by the age of forty, had reached the state of an activated individual, and Varya’s “ha-ha-ha” became the key that opened the lock of his instinctive love program.

The love attraction of the “romantic”, at the same time, is fraught with a certain danger for those who happen to fall on the hook of the violent eruption of his feelings. The fact is that humanity is still in the deepest misconception regarding the rules for reading emotional language. It is generally accepted that feelings are precisely that area of human existence where there are no lies, and that the expression of feelings is always an impeccably accurate reflection of a person’s internal states and the system of relationships between people. In reality, this is not so: the form of expression of internal states depends on the position of Emotion on the steps of the functional ladder, and relationships in general proceed not according to the emotional, but according to the volitional function (which will be discussed in detail below).

I say this because there is a terrible danger of taking the love outpourings of the 1st Emotion at face value and, under their influence, taking steps that the “romantic” does not expect from you. Let's say, if you see sparkling eyes and hear a hot whisper: “...I love!...I adore!..”, etc., then it does not follow from this that what is said should be taken literally and you should rush to notify your relatives about the imminent wedding. A “romantic” always expresses his feelings with great exaggeration, so if he says “I love you!”, “I adore you!”, then it only follows that he likes you in some way. In any case, when listening to the love outpourings of a “romantic”, it is advisable to drop 20-30% of the emotional intensity in order to get a fairly accurate and clear picture of the experience.

Liza Minnelli gave a charming description of the specific inadequacy of her 1st Emotion in an interview. To the question: “Aren’t her experiences artificial?” She answered: “No, of course, but they are thickly powdered and painted. If I fall in love, I say on the very first evening: I can’t live without you, don’t disappear from my life, I can’t live without you.” - You are lying? - “It’s all too mixed up: yes and no. In the morning, if he leaves, I can forget about him and not remember the whole day. But on the other hand, it really seems to me that if he left forever, I would die!”

The seething of “romantic” passions is not only inappropriate to the situation, but also completely unrelated to the subject of feelings. The passion of the 1st Emotion is selfish, it is born and lives in “romance” quite autonomously, from itself and for itself, regardless of the formal “provocateur” of experiences. Therefore, Elena Vinograd, Pasternak’s “muse” during the creation of the collection “My Sister is Life,” was absolutely right when she asserted “that she herself is not in the book and none of her features are there, only Pasternak himself and the poetic generosity of his romantic inspiration.” I confirm the truth of what Winograd said with my own discouraging experience: having once found myself an unwitting provocateur of “romantic” inspiration, I was extremely disappointed to discover that I was simply completely absent from the poems that supposedly related to me. The shocking truth is that a “romantic” is a current capercaillie, living in an illusory world of exaggerated experiences, a voluntary hostage of his excess and autonomous emotions.

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In Chekhov’s previously mentioned story “The Man in a Case” one can find a curious and not without poison observation of the “romantics”: “I noticed that Ukrainian women (and Varya Kovalenko was from Ukraine - A.A.) only cry or laugh, of average mood They don’t.”

Although now it is difficult to say where Chekhov’s statistics on the emotionality of Ukrainian women came from, in principle, this observation in itself is absolutely correct. The “romantic” is indeed very characterized by a high contrast in the coloring of his experiences, and he achieves fullness of expression only when the needle on his emotional speedometer begins to go off scale. Moreover, the transition from one extreme to the other occurs almost instantly. Pushkin’s brother-in-law wrote: “Pushkin’s transitions from a fit of mirth to fits of overwhelming sadness occurred suddenly, as if without intervals, which was caused, according to his sister, by highly nervous irritability. He could be irritated by both Homeric laughter and bitter tears when he whatever you want, according to your imagination."

It is best to compare a “romance” with an actor in the ancient theater, in which there were only two contrasting genres: tragedy and comedy. Therefore, if the owner of the 1st Emotion decides to choose a career as an actor, then preference should be given to theater rather than cinema, since the very specificity of theatrical performance requires a certain acceleration of sound. But this is by the way. The main thing is that for a “romantic” joy is not joy, but mania; sadness is not sadness, but depression. The happiness of those around us is that most of these experiences remain inside and only echoes of states reach them. This happens because the 1st Emotion is not inclined to share feelings, prefers to savor them alone, being an actor and a spectator in one person.

When the power of the “romance” experience reaches its peak (result), a release of emotions often occurs. And here anything can await him: from world fame to a madhouse. The fact is that the forms of manifestation of the peak of the 1st Emotion are diverse. They can take an artistic form (poetry, painting, music, dance), which is often followed by fame, recognition, etc., or they may not take shape at all, or rather, take shape in the form of a stream of tears, incoherent cries, inarticulate screams, followed by, sometimes, imprisonment in a house of sorrow follows.

Let's be completely honest: both music lovers applauding in boxes and stern orderlies from psychiatric hospitals often encounter the same phenomenon - the 1st Emotion. The difference is that music lovers call it “genius,” and orderlies call it “manic-depressive psychosis.” Although the line between one and the other is not just transparent - it is absent. It all depends on the point of view. Poetry lovers considered Pasternak a genius, literary officials considered him crazy, and both sides had enough arguments in favor of the correctness of their diagnosis.

The harsh truth of life is that manic-depressive psychosis in modern psychiatry is an emotional reaction that is inadequate to events, i.e., something that is inherent in the 1st Emotion by nature itself. I will not say that all “romantics” are in danger of being imprisoned in a house of sorrow. But the fact that from childhood they have problems associated with the emotional, which seemed to be the best and strongest side of their nature, is undeniable.

Tearfulness is the earliest sign of the 1st Emotion. However, the normal reaction for a “romantic” child with tears to crises and external pressure is rarely correctly understood by others and gives rise to contemptuous characteristics such as: “crybaby-wax”, “roaring-cow”, etc. And since nothing changes in the order of functions of the “romantics” over the years, constant bullying on this matter can impose on them something like a complex of emotional super-inferiority. One woman with such a “complex” wrote to a psychiatrist: “I cry over books and in movies, I cry at the sound of an orchestra, listening to songs. It’s enough to see a girl in a wreath on TV... The slightest trouble - and again tears. I’ve already begun to hate myself for them, they have become ingrained in my voice, I feel like I’m somehow defective.” I think the author of the letter can be consoled by the fact that she is not alone in her suffering, and even great people often could not cope with their tearfulness. For example, Maxim Gorky never had a day without tears, and when reading poetry, even very bad ones, he cried without fail.

Circumstances that contribute to increasing the distance between reality and the emotional reaction to it will be discussed below. Now it is important to note that the diagnosis “manic-depressive psychosis”, as well as its everyday analogues “crybaby”, “hysterical”, “nurse”, “clique”, “roarer”, etc. should be withdrawn from use, because the absence of an equal sign between a fact and an emotional reaction to it can be incriminated by the vast majority of humanity, which nature itself predetermined to be the owner of an excess 1st Emotion.

Suspicion of the incapacity of the “romantic” arises among those around him in connection with his ineradicable craving for mysticism. The range of mystical moods of the 1st Emotion is enormous, but no matter which of the mystical directions the “romantic” adheres to, the main thing for him remains the unreliability of the arguments of reason and the unconditional faith in the reliability of experiences. More precisely, the situation here is somewhat more complicated. For the 1st Emotion, one bare postulate about the superiority of feeling over reason (as in early Neoplatonism) is not enough. It is much more important to have a consistent artistic structure that is sufficiently convincing in its imagery. But whether this structure pretends to have any intellectual design or does without it at all is not important.

Let's take, for example, astrology, the secret or open adherent of which is almost always a “romantic”. Although attempts have been made and are being made to formulate astrology scientifically, it clearly does not need it and does not rely on it in any way. And it’s clear why - this is not where her strength lies. The power of astrology lies in its own artistic structure, where the names of the Latin gods assigned to the planets of the solar system, combined with the mysterious images of the signs of the Zodiac, build a gigantic stage of an inexhaustible and vibrant cosmic theater. The trails of meanings behind each of the Roman gods and each of their combinations, multiplied by the trails of meanings and interpretations of the zodiac signs, create a kaleidoscope that can be rotated indefinitely without the risk of repetition and without fear of spectator boredom.

Therefore, we can firmly say that astrology is indestructible. Neither forceful methods (which some Roman emperors resorted to) nor rational arguments will help in the fight against it. You can kill astrology only by “de-artistizing” it. Being artistically undressed, she will die instantly, but astrologers are little like suicides, and, therefore, one will have to put up with astrology and mysticism in general, just as one has to put up with the weather.

Faith is a specific emotional-mystical form of what rationalists call “knowledge”, and it will live on earth as long as emotionalists are alive. In conclusion, briefly, and without being distracted by particulars, we note a typical difficulty for the 1st Emotion: it is by nature mystical and is the main creator and consumer of religions, magic, superstitions, as well as any other artistic signs and sign systems that claim to be absolute. Which does not always find understanding on the part of those around him, with a different order of functions, and creates the impression of “romance” as a figure, at best absurd, at worst - insane.

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About the handwriting "romance". It is enough to look at the handwriting of Pushkin and Pasternak to imagine the general contours of the handwriting of the 1st Emotion. Of course, the art of calligraphy is now in decline, and you will not find handwriting similar to Pasternak’s, not to mention Pushkin’s, however, the unity of the principles of writing is preserved. Firstly, the sweeping, lengthy handwriting: there is a lot of air between the elements of the letter and the ends of the letters, directed up and down, are excessively elongated (this is probably why Akhmatova called Pasternak’s handwriting “flying”). Secondly, the handwriting of the 1st Emotion is characterized by decorativeness: extra dashes, tails, curls - in a word, elements that are not necessary for conveying information, but give the letter non-informative aesthetic significance.

Emotional excess is clearly visible in the punctuation of “romance”. He loves strong, sharply expressive characters, such as dashes and exclamation marks, and also often abuses the spelling of words with a capital letter. Someone well noted that Gorky metal dashes like lightning. Indeed, Gorky's punctuation is the clearest example of a “romantic” style of writing.

"Romantic" - poet. A poet even when he does not write poetry or does not write at all. The uniqueness of the style of the 1st Emotion lies in the conscious or unconscious poeticization of expression, which consists in the use of various kinds of tropes or techniques that can enrich, or better yet, give increased brightness and imagery to the image.

Take the favorite “romance” - metaphor. Metaphor as a device is used not only by the 1st Emotion (which will be shown below), but it is typical of “romance” to use it in two forms: gilding and a magnifying glass. Metaphor, by its very nature, presupposes the inadequacy of comparison, which suits the 1st Emotion, which is inadequate in reaction. But the peculiarity of the “romantic” metaphor is this. That it works to exalt the object being compared, or, in any case, to greatly increase the scale.

Once criticizing one poem, Maximilian Voloshin exclaimed: “Beer can be compared to the sea, but not the sea to beer.” For all its claim to absoluteness, this phrase is only partly true, but as a particularity it impeccably accurately reflects the “romantic’s” uplifting and hyperbolic understanding of the tasks of metaphor.

The above also applies to those cases in which the “romantic” uses a metaphor to wound the subject. For example, when Pushkin, seething with anger, wrote in an epigram that the quiet professor Kachenovsky thins his ink with “the saliva of a mad dog,” not only was there nothing adequate to the original, but the subject itself was terribly exaggerated, albeit with a negative sign.

Continuing the theme of formal preferences of the 1st Emotion, I will add that the “romantic” in poetry, creating and consuming, in addition to the brightness of the image, values brevity most of all. Blok, for example, considered the optimal length of a poem to be 3-4 quatrains. However, in asserting this, he did not deduce some general laws of the poetic craft, but his own, conditioned by the 1st Emotion, understanding of the nature and meaning of poetry. It lies in the fact that the 1st Emotion, being effective, strives for a result in poetry, i.e. to describe the peak of emotional states, neglecting what preceded them and what followed.

Boris Pasternak’s words that poetry is “picking out the raisins of melodiousness from the life of a sweet cod” can be considered programmatic for the 1st Emotion, because the poetic task of a “romanticist” lies in such “picking out” with everything else being taken out of the brackets. Therefore, I think that the ideal poetic form for the 1st Emotion should be considered Japanese haiku and tanka. In them, the “romantic” principle of instant photography of unique emotional states, the principle of “picking out raisins of melodiousness” is presented in the most concentrated form.

I'm afraid one might get the impression that the owner of the 1st Emotion is certainly a poet and marks his every emotion with rhyming. But that's not true. Indeed, during the period of the highest experiences of Pushkin, in his own words, his hand reached for the pen, the pen for the paper, etc. But let’s say, for such a “romantic” as Khrushchev, at the same moments the hand could reach for the shoe, the shoe for the table… Manifestations of the 1st Emotion are diverse, it is impossible to list or retell them, therefore, when faced with 1st Emotion in life, With emotion, it’s better, just in case, not to expect poetry from her.

Activities that are far from the artistic sphere, and a complete lack of culture in general, do not prevent the “romanticist” from considering himself the highest and indisputable artistic judge. The latent feeling that culture, being a direct derivative of emotions, is his native environment, allows the 1st Emotion to absolutize his own tastes and impose them on others without hesitation. Sometimes it seems justified, sometimes it doesn't. Let's say, when Alexander Blok, when asked by Stanislavsky about his impressions of the latest performances of the Moscow Art Theater, answered bluntly: “It was very bad…” - you can still somehow understand. But when Khrushchev began to stomp his feet on artists and poets, it seemed to go unnoticed. However, both of these tactlessness are phenomena of the same order: the result of the innate, completely independent of the cultural level of self-confidence of the “romantics” in everything related to aesthetics.

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To the purely external manifestations of the 1st Emotion, one should add unusually lively, bright, excessive facial expressions in relation to the events taking place, along with exaggerated, “Italian” gestures. Actually, the language of facial expressions and gestures is the same language as all others, and, naturally, when expressing the feelings of a “romantic”, it is just as inadequate and exaggerated. I will say more, I had to meet people with a quiet, unforced vocal system, and it was grimaces, coupled with bright gestures, that betrayed their 1st Emotion: disproportionately to the described situation with widely spread arms, frequent grabbing of the head, etc.

The only anthropological feature of the 1st Emotion, quite clearly traced in the Caucasoid-Negroid branch of humanity, is large bulging eyes, equipped with a kind of radiant internal illumination.

Nature has generally arranged it in such a way that at the moment of strong emotions (regardless of the position of Emotion on the levels of the functional hierarchy) a person’s eyes begin to glow. Thus, Anna Karenina, in love with Vronsky, herself felt her eyes glowing in the darkness.

This glow is especially characteristic of the “romantic,” from whose eyes sometimes sheaves of bright sparks fly out, like fireworks. And let us give it its due, this circumstance greatly colors the 1st Emotion, sometimes bringing us, sinners, to sexual arousal, even in cases where the external appearance of the “romantic” does not excite us in any way. Let us remember that in “War and Peace” it was the radiant look of the ugly princess Maria that won the heart of the hussar Nikolai Rostov.

For my part, I can assume that the shine of the eyes in connection with emotional and sexual arousal has something to do with the dilation of the pupils. Probably, a strong internal injection of hormones of a certain emotional range causes the effect of pupil dilation, similar to the effect of instilling belladonna extract into the eyes. It is not without reason that the word “belladona” is translated as “beauty”; it is not without reason that during psychological experiments the sight of women with dilated pupils inspired men with the idea that they were sexually aroused. In general, it would be interesting to trace this phenomenon of brilliant, dilated pupils as an exponent and stimulator of sexuality back to the animal world, and it would be interesting to study the hormonal mechanism of eye glow itself. But this is no longer a matter of psychology; there is a special discipline for this, called pupillometry, which deals specifically with the study of the emotional reactions of the pupil.