(Don’t be alarmed, scientists are not studying feelings, they are only studying emotions, divorced from cognition, as they travel in recognizable systems throughout the brain and the body.)

Philosophy, rhetoric, and literature -- until recently at least equal to science in prestige -- were once careful students of feelings.

Given Ruefle's definition, faith is a feeling. So is love. So are each of Haidt's moral foundations:

Care/harm for others
Fairness/cheating, Justice or Proportionality
Liberty/oppression
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/Subversion or Respect
Sanctity/degradation or Purity

 Each of these characteristics can be traced to emotion.  But all are expressed in a particular context by specific persons in reference to their understanding of others: their feelings about a situation, issue, or person.

I am alarmed we do not give feelings the careful and critical attention they once received.

The emotion of fear is what drives all animals away from life-threatening situations, and that is not the kind of fear I have in mind. Feelings, on the other hand, are more complicated and involve cognitive reactions that combine, or can be combined, with emotions, memories, experience, and intelligence. That is the kind of fear I have in mind—the feeling of fear that involves an intelligent, cognitive reaction. Fear that requires self-consciousness.

My horoscope for yesterday agrees: "Fear keeps you alert better than coffee can.  It also plays with your sense of time, helping you experience the power of nanoseconds.  Your performance will get a lift because you channel your fear well."

I don't disagree. I try to be self-conscious working through my fears with cognition.  But fear is a bad beginning.  Anything born mostly of fear is suspect. Combining the emotion of fear with conscious feeling of fear is insufficient, even dangerous.

Fear is a self-justifying feeling.  From the involuntary emotion of fear can too easily arise self-righteous volition.  Under attack nearly any response is right. And under fear's influence, a mere slight can seem a deadly spear.

Neurobiologists have distinguished emotions from feelings, though I am afraid our language has for so long used the two terms as equivalent currency that it is a hopeless task to expect any listener to hear one word and not think of the other. Emotions are hardwired, biological functions of the nervous system such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, and hunger-impelled action (also called “feeding behaviors”). They are each purely physical reactions over which one has no control, and they are common to all animals with a central nervous system.

No control over hard-wired emotions?

In Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), Jaak Panksepp writes, "Emotive circuits have reciprocal interactions with the brain mechanisms that elaborate higher decision-making processes and consciousness."

Arousal of these emotions is automatic. But expression is a matter of choice.

Fear may very well arouse a fight or flee response, but we choose between these options and the varied possibilities presented by each.

In many churches passages from the book of Job are being assigned as this season's daily reading. Included in today's reading: "When I say, 'My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,' then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body." But while he says this, Job does not make this choice.

Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word—it can be found in Old English, while dread enters the language in Middle English.

The poet sees and hears more than the etymologist.

The Old German faera and fer are not related to ear or read.

There is a shared origin with per and peri as in peril and perchance and perceive, suggesting a round-about, vague, ambiguous relationship. There is also a direct connection with a whole host of ancient Greek terms beginning with pero- meaning maimed.

My fears tend toward the amorphous.

My fears curtail my capabilities.

Sometime after I had already written the pages you are about to sit through, I realized I had been using the wrong word throughout. Dread is a more accurate version of what I am thinking about, and I have Julian of Norwich, a fifteenth-century anchorite, to thank for pointing this out. In her Revelations of Divine Love, the account of a vision she had during an illness in her thirty-first year, she says, “I believe dread can take four forms.” In a nutshell, the first of these forms is what I will describe as the unconscious emotion fear—your very first response to the smell of smoke, the sound of thunder, the sight of flames, the slap. The second form of dread is the anticipatory dread of pain, either physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological, and that, folks, covers nine-tenths of the world’s surface. The third form of dread is doubt, or despair. And the fourth form of dread is “born of reverence,” the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most.

I was reasonably certain my right eye was developing a cataract.  I delayed going to the optometrist.

My children joke that if my arm is nearly sliced from the shoulder I will apply ointment, take an aspirin, drink plenty of fluids and go to bed early.

When I finally sat in his chair I suggested the possibility of a cataract, to which he responded, "You're a bit young." (I was then in my early fifties.)

After a couple of tests, he asked.  "Been in any bar fights recently?"  No, I replied.  "Take steroids?" No again.  I had a non-age related cataract usually resulting from blunt trauma or steroid abuse.

Hearing the diagnosis I had anticipated, I began to slump in the chair.  I could not keep my eyes open. I could not speak   It was as if the calibration between my brain and body suddenly shut down.  I blacked out.  I fainted. For a few seconds, I was gone.

My only explanation is that some aspect of mind -- despite every conscious choice -- was in deep denial at the prospect of death.  The diagnosis frightened this me out of myself.

Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors. James Ward, a British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872 but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: “I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it—I fear myself.” What do I mean by fear? Why I mean that thing that drives you to write—but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.

I could share a story or two that would step out of the foyer and deeper into my cluttered rooms. I prefer, however, the cacophony of the street.

But surely it is no surprise that fear arises mostly from within. A century after Freud, five centuries since Shakespeare, thirty since Job. This is something we have long known.

"Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh bristled."(Job 4:13-15)

It is interesting to note that this idea—fear’s being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain—figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain—poets, take note—and thus psychological torture more effective than physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983:

"The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

A shifting collage of images constitutes my past.  I arrange and rearrange the images: crafting themes, pondering possible patterns, generating self-referential symbols.

I imagine past happiness and hurts. I imagine future death.  Between and extending from these images, I imagine my life.

Thursday evening I had a conversation.  The conversation spawned images of how I might spend most of my waking hours for most of the rest of my life.  It was only talk.  The prospect is entirely imaginary.

Yet what I do with this bit of imagination will have some influence on future images.

"I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic -- with this linguistic reference for which I did not find everything that would have suited me -- and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real in the very form of the knot." Jacques Lacan, Seminarie XXII

But something seemed to be missing from my neat little formula; surely the dog’s face was important, too? This dog was eager and friendly, if a bit clumsy, but what if the next dog took a good-sized chunk out of the child’s face? I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the recurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden: “And ghosts must do again/What gives them pain.”

My mother was a fabulous entertainer, nothing gave her greater pleasure.  The summer I turned four she put me on stage to share the fun. Dressed as a hobo I sang, "Down at the station, early in the morning, see the little pufferbellies all in a row... See the station master, turn the little handle, puff, puff, toot, toot. Off we go!"

I continued to share the stage with my mother and others until I left for college.

Fast forward twenty, forty, now a half-century later:  Before an audience I seem calm and competent.  I speak or ask questions, even occasionally sing.  Inside my brain and guts are in flames.

In my late thirties I arrange to attend a reception in New York.  There are a few colleagues from Japan.  I'm introduced to David Rockefeller. We chat about the Rothko exhibit.  I sip red wine with a fellow alumnus of the Reagan White House.  Finally my target enters.  I ease toward him.  We discover a shared interest in the art of Muso Soseki. After speaking softly for twenty minutes, my assignment is completed.

Returning to my hotel room, I thrash in torment, never sleeping, as each word is recalled and found insufficient.

In my late fifties I host a reception in Washington.  Friends and colleagues crowd the room. One calls it a "wonderful event."  He is impressed by the "earnest enthusiasm" of those present.  But more than a dozen others send last-minute regrets.

I am embarrassed and regretful.  Again and again, there is a vague insufficiency.  Again and again there is pain.  Again and again my performance fails to meet expectations, mostly my own.

The shodo above is by Muso Soseki, the Japanese kanji says. "No Spiritual Meaning."

I don’t know if other poets have this fear, but if they do not, I reason it will only increase the anguish of the outcome if it one day passes into being. To pass into being—now there’s a fear no one ever had. No one ever feared being born, even when all those responsible for the event were fraught with fear for the unborn. And if I may segue to a child at the age of four, I recall watching her beingapproached by a dog that was, well, much larger than the girl herself. The girl’s face was astonishing to watch. It was completely elastic and changed from an expression of wonder and glee: Please come to me doggie and we shall play oh what happiness to be approached by you—to—in less than ten seconds—an expression of sheer terror: Fear! fear! doggie will eat me up and mommie is far away. As the dog slowly crossed the room, in what could not have been more than two minutes, the girl’s face changed expressions so many times I gave up counting. As she oscillated between feeling secure and insecure, it struck me that her face would probably continue to change, albeit at a slower rate, every time she was approached by a dog for the next couple of years, one day coming to rest on that expression that was likely to signify forever after how this human being felt about dogs.

I was walking the wastelands left by strip mining. A decade before I was born the flat, fertile prairie had been torn asunder.  Steep hills now surrounded deep ponds and muddy bogs.

The destruction of the land had softened over time. Slag heaps were hidden beneath tall grasses.  Rain, snow, freezing and thawing had broken the soft rock of the ancient seabed leaving narrow valleys scattered with milky mica, iron pirate glittering in the sun, and fossils of fabulous creatures.

Barely three miles from home, a twelve-year-old became Kit Carson or Stanley searching for Livingston or, in one Thanksgiving blizzard, Robert Peary making for the North Pole.

My dog Cleo and I were above "Dead Cows" (sensibly named for dozens of cattle skeletons stuck in the mud) when movement caught my eye.  He (even at this distance, almost certainly he) was carefully choosing a path across the flooded bottom-land.  Willows quivered as he grasped one then another to steady his step.

I had thrown myself flat against the ground on first glimpse, holding Cleo tight against my left side. But then from, maybe, thirty feet above and sixty yards distance I decided this was a friend coming to find me.

"Mark! Mark!", I stood and waved.  But the voice that replied with one indecipherable sound was deeper than any twelve-year-old.  This was not Mark.

I turned and ran as fast as I could, pine bows slapping my face as I raced through the woods, stumbling over rocks, sliding down flinty hillsides. The deeper, the darker, the better.

On the ridge over Dead Cows I was at the edge of my known universe. It was my purpose that day to explore toward sunrise.

I now know the original meaning of explore is "to cry out" or "to flow out".  I rushed into the unknown in a blur of green and moist earth spongy beneath my sprint.  When finally I paused to take a deep breath I was, except for Cleo's asking brown eyes, surrounded by the unknown.

I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean—what I think I mean—by “imbecility” is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel. It was a Master who advised that we speak little, better still say nothing, unless we are quite sure that what we wish to say is true, kind, and helpful. But how can a poet, whose role is to speak, adhere to this advice? How can anyone whose role is to facilitate language speak little or say nothing?

I have given my life mostly to banality. On rare occasions I have ascended to mediocrity. I can't claim to have consecrated my life to anything.

I am paid to move people toward vaguely understood goals. I talk and write more of possibilities than actualities. Most respond by wandering wherever they choose.

Questions are good. Questions are often all that's left after a hard rain of reality.  Gadamer argues:

"... the path of all knowledge leads through the question.  To ask a question means to bring into the open.  The openness of what is in the question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, awaiting a decisive answer.  The significance of questioning consists in the questionability of what is questioned.  It has to be brought into this state of indeterminacy, so that there is an equilibrium between pro and contra.  The sense of every question is realized in passing through this state of indeterminacy, in which it becomes an open question. Every true question requires this openness." (Truth and Method, page 363)