Subverting the indecency of the mind ~ Malinda Words

'When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.’ That’s a quote from Milan Kundera’s celebrated novel, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ I came across it while reading about Kundera having just learned that the Czech-born writer had passed away at the age of 94 in Paris, France.

And I asked myself, ‘how often does the heart speak?’ And I asked myself also, ‘is the mind listening and even if so, does it always hear?’ Maybe, I told myself, the heart doesn’t speak loud enough to be heard. On the other hand, maybe the heart doesn’t speak soft enough because often it is the whisper and not the shout that is noticed.

Anyway, what is all this about decency? Where does it come from and who defines its contours? What are the conditions that warrant the labels, decent and indecent, civilised and uncivilised? Have they been decided upon after long and deep deliberation by people mandated to do so, and were they then placed before the people for ratification?

Obviously it is all arbitrary, governed by place and time, altered as circumstances make the established order of things untenable. Hearts and minds, moreover, are fickle entities; their ability to communicate, be communicated to and draw conclusions are eminently open to subversion. The strongest and most insightful mind is weakened and rendered impotent in an instant. The heart, resolute and warm, can break into a thousand pieces and grow stone cold in a fraction of a second.

Neither are they impervious to external bombardment. The missiles are sometimes directed at heart, sometimes at mind but as frequently it is the shards and shrapnel issuing consequent to explosion somewhere else that lacerate. Mindlessness and heartlessness are not necessarily mind-wrought and heart-wrought respectively.

Let us assume that the mind, mindful of decency, indeed refuses to object when the heart speaks. Is it when this happens that we call people mindless and insane? Working backwards, are we to assume that those who are thus labeled are in fact people who have heard the words their hearts spoke and therefore resolved not to object?’

The world is made of people, each and everyone endowed with a heart and a mind. So, I wonder if we can read the world in terms of the dynamic proposed by Kundera; an amalgamation of hearts that rarely speak and an amalgamation of minds that feels it would be indecent to object when the former deigns to say something.

Such things are hard to assess, of course. It’s easier at the personal level. The exercise of extrapolation is easy, but one ought to be wary when drawing conclusions. Everything about ‘humanity’ is not always the sum total of the particular shards in each and every human being.

At the personal level on the other hand we can think about (yes, that’s mind-work) about feelings and reasoning. We can think about a particular moment and ask ourselves, ‘did the heart speak and did the mind object?’

At some level this is just an academic exercise. Maybe psychologists would know better. I don’t. All I know is that I’ve come to realise that the ‘logic’ (if I may use that word for want of anything better) of the heart is more reliable than that of the mind.

Kundera, again in the same novel, dwells on aspirations, of wanting something better or higher. He says that such people must expect someday to suffer vertigo, which he offers is not the fear of falling but ‘the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.’

Well, it’s from the book, so we really can’t say that it was a Kundera Life Lesson. He once wrote (in ‘The Joke,’ the only Kundera book I’ve read, by the way, that optimism is the opium of the masses. That’s not something affirmed by Kundera’s life engagements. Some ideas depicted in his novels are considered part of the larger tradition of existentialism but he was more interested in reality as opposed to existence, he was fascinated by what people are capable of becoming. And this is perhaps why he had occasion to reflect on vertigo and offer the above explanation.

He’s gone now. He has been unburdened of the vexed questions of heart-mind dynamism, duality and, perhaps, unity. He cannot fall, ever. He cannot fail and can no longer be tormented by the tensions of desiring to fall and at the same time the compulsion to defend himself against falling, against the terror of that possible outcome.

I take heart. My mind finds it indecent to object. So I express love for Milan Kundera and by way of salute make myself promise, ‘I will read “The unbearable lightness of being.”’

malindadocs@gmail.com.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

15 July 2023

Subverting the indecency of the mind

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