Placeness in the Heart

The heart, the ancients believed, was the seat of all emotion. We modern, rational beings know better; science tells us that it is the brain that processes stimuli, rallies the chemical and electrical resources and gives the body its marching orders. When something frightens us, saddens us, moves us – when we see a loved one, when we spy an enemy, when music or drama touches us in the most intellectual or primal of ways – it is the brain that’s behind it all, juicing the system. It is natural that the heart would have been pre-science’s candidate for the center of feelings, because that is where we tend to most noticeably feel them: in the rapid rhythm of fight or flight, in the skipped beat born of beauty and desire.

And yet … no matter how many studies prove the brain’s preeminence, we – who, like candies, have a hard nut of the primitive tucked inside our coating of rationality, always ready to get stuck in our scientific teeth – refuse to fully believe it. It is to the displaced, status-lowered heart that we turn to explain ourselves. We can be heartsick, an important action is heartfelt, when we are courageous we have heart, or are urged to build courage by taking heart (and, conversely, when we are cowardly or have little faith, we have lost heart or are disheartened); at sad news we come with a heavy heart, when love ends we are heartbroken, with good news we are heartened, joy plays a song in our heart, it is heartily that we grab the gusto, and heartlessly we steal it from others …

And on, and so forth. Science tells us that the heart has nothing to do with these adjectives and adverbs – but just try to replace “heart” with “brain” and see how thuddingly it falls from the lips. “Brainfelt”? “You gotta have brain”? “I come with a heavy brain”? No, don’t think so.

Granted, the brain as Numero Uno is the product of scientific principles that have been around for far fewer years than the centuries, the millennia in which beliefs and superstitions about the capabilities of the heart have existed. Moreover, the brain just doesn’t have the romantic aura that the heart possesses. The brain is the Rodney Dangerfield of major organs – it gets no respect. It’s dull – compared to the kinetic heart, the brain just sits there and does perceptibly nothing, a spongy mass that might as well not be there for all we are aware of it – and, of course, that’s its fault, since it is what allows us to have awareness at all. (To add insult to injury, the most cataclysmic of brain ills – a stroke – is erroneously thought by many people to be something to do with the heart, so much so that medical popularizers have tried to rename it in the public mind as a “brain attack.”) We have a likeable, instantly recognizable, stylized cartoon-version, Be My Valentine drawing of the heart – there is no such vernacular illustration for the brain. (Indeed, we have Valentine’s Day, a celebration of the loving heart; no such brain day exists, unless we’re talking about the College Boards.) The brain struggles for identity because, though it sits, synapses sparking and leaping mere millimeters behind the sensory inlets of our eyes, nose, mouth and ears, we ignore and devalue its powerful and necessary contribution to our very being and believe that we are creatures of the “mind” – something we deem as being different and removed from the brain.

The brain, in other words, lacks placeness. The heart is lousy with it – it is, in our minds,  the place. Some of that is because we can feel it, and we can see it causing our chest to rise and fall; it is the first machine within us that we become aware of, and, when it is time for us to end, it has the final word. Moreover, the heart’s placeness has much to do with its actual place, its location – right smack dab in the middle of our body, upfront and vulnerable. The brain is, though right here in our head, tucked away somewhere within a protective shell. In earlier arslocii essays, we spoke about how placeness is a partner with empathy; oddly, though empathy is a function of brain plus experience plus genetics, we rarely think of the brain as an empathetic force or repository, but rather as a cold, analytical mechanism – it is the blood-pumping device called the heart that we see as the font of empathy. And let us not overlook the Hallmark Card-ish sentiment that  within “heart” is “art.”

If we are to be modern and rational adherents to the scientific method, we must and should find it not difficult to embrace the notion that the brain rules. But so long as we retain the basic animal in us, so long as mystery and imagination and metaphor are part of what we are, so long as we know that we do not know, so long as we know that science is wonderful but imperfect and sometimes blindered – so long as all these contingencies exist, and so long as we humans see the heart the way we want to see it, then maybe there is something to it, maybe there is some sort of spiritual autonomy and power that resides in the heart. Maybe we’ve been able to intuit that, sense it, a certain something that science will one day catch up with. Maybe we’ll learn that in some ways the brain takes its orders from the heart, not vice versa – that the heart is not just a dumb pump but something that has a brain, too. Maybe poetry is right; wouldn’t that be nice? Paraphrasing the words of the current pope, who is the brain to judge?

Where and When

So much of the arslocii experience – the feel of placeness commingled with the mindfulness of art, held together, often, with a tissue-thin wrapping of empathy – has to do not only with presence but also the present. The perception of art and the strength of its impact has, as a key element, to do with time – the time of day you see it, the length of time you’re with it, the time in your life you perceive it.

There are some loci of placeness that affect you no matter the time variable: morning, night, spring or winter, at a youthful age or in later years, these places just have that ineffable “it,” a charisma, a baraka, making us feel as if we are being reunited with an entity from which we were separated at birth. A memory, recalled. But, for most other place experiences, time is a defining factor.

I am not one, American though I am, who thinks that sports is art, or an art; in many American minds, games and athletes seem to have supplanted art as a high, or even highest, form of human attainment. But I am certainly aware that, from art’s very beginnings, the athlete in the midst of some physical endeavor has been a subject-matter honorific staple, from the kinetic grace of the discus thrower to, God help us, Leroy Neiman’s drippy-gloppy Playboy-era renderings. Yet, every year for the past two-and-a-half decades of my life, I have found myself drawn to a sporting event that passes  by not far from where I live, and in it I have found something artistic, and even something arslocii.

It is a bicycle race that runs for more than 120 miles, circling through the city, and, in its looping course, coming multiple times up a ridiculously steep hill, nearby, that tests the strength, agility, ability and smarts of the participants. They call the spot “The Wall,” and when you hit it, you really hit it.

It has become something of a tradition with us: We get up somewhat early; the race begins at 9 a.m. about 7 miles away. Sometime between 9:15 and 9:30, the racers have made their way to our area, to attempt their first ascent. We know, attuned as we are now, when to start out and how long it takes to walk the two blocks from our house to what has become our favorite viewing spot along The Wall, so that we can see the cyclists, already miles into what will be a grueling day, struggle up the hill. That time of morning, even on what will inevitably become a drainingly hot June day, it is still crisp, even a little dewy. The sun hasn’t yet awakened and realized that its job is to help the vendors of high-priced cool liquids. The crowds – and this race, and especially this particular part of the course, attracts perhaps thousands – haven’t yet arrived. The cordoned-off street is sparsely populated with aficionados, or, like us, traditionalists, and neighbors. Good vantage points along the barriers separating viewers from participants are easily had; in an hour or two they will be filled, three deep in spots. You can almost, at this moment, taste the anticipation, smell the potential energy. We few, we happy few, we still half-asleep few, stand by the barricades, look down the hill, and know that something wicked-good this way comes.

And then, it’s here: First, the sirens and horns, and the police motorcycle escort rumbles by in perfect formation. Then, cars with race officials, and media, and friends of the sponsors, roar by, honking and blinking their lights, trying to convince us that they, too, are in the race and not just gladhanders. We viewers move even closer to the metal grating of the portable barriers, and we grip the top rail of them, and lean out over them, to get the first glimpse.

And here they come: At first, just a row, then a group, then a phalanx, and then a sea – of multi-colored team uniforms and helmets, from a distance a strange oceanic wave rocking back and forth in rhythmic fashion, drifting closer. And then, they are at our side, this peloton, these athletes, already laboring to make it up the hill, of which there is much more to go from where we stand. The cyclists’ faces are grim, determined; their arms, taut on the handlebars of their aerodynamically austere bikes; their calves bulging, already on the edge of cramp. Dozens, a hundred, swoosh by, and we greet them and celebrate them with cheers, and whoops of encouragement, and the clanging of cowbells, a welling up of not only human kindness or sports fandom but an empathetic desire to give them our strength, a gift that will help propel them up the hill and send them on their way more easily. For a moment, we give them us – an odd symbiosis. The cyclists are not artists, and what they do is not art-making, but there is art in the color and kineticism, and in the relationship between us and them. Not Art with a capital A, but art that rhymes with heart. 

And then they are past and gone, except for a few stragglers, whom we give our loudest cheers and deepest support, to urge them to keep going, keep at it, catch up with the pack, go for the gold – and, once they’ve struggled past, in the residual roiled quiet we make our separate ways home, as if from a dream, or to return to one. The race will go on, most of it without us. But we had that moment. Alone, individual, we shared it.

Or, that is, we used to. This year, the real world encroached, and financial considerations caused the race organizers to pare down the event, cutting the 14-plus mile circuit from 10 loops to seven. And the way they decided to cut was from the top – that is, the race started at 10:45 a.m. Which meant that the first assault on the hill didn’t arrive at our location until about 11 a.m.

The later time changes the way we see it; it feels different on our skin; our noses sense something else, something more already-used; our bodies are not as tight and stiff as an early-morning body is; there are more viewers, and not just our in-the-know veterans, but callow interlopers; it seems to be no longer our turf but just another place. And when the cyclists do appear, there is something indescribable gone – they are no longer a cloud of fantasy but some bunch of bikers, interrupting our brunch. There is still excitement, of a base sort, but what was once special, magical, unintentionally but definitely artful, is now a reminder of a world ruled by and transformed into a commodity. The thrill is gone, and with it the magic.

And so is the art. And the placeness. When the experiential elements alter, even by a few ticks of the clock, the world is a changed place, as are the events in it.

To paraphrase Woody Allen’s oft-quoted bon mot about success, 80 percent of arslocii is showing up. The other 20 percent is showing up at the right time.