Caught Between My Mind and My Heart

The heart's verdict is usually the vote from the secret box; uncounted, it passes for a surprise.

“I am caught between my mind and my heart,” a person says. Everyone understands what is meant, and no one asks what is meant; in our language a sentence said so much and questioned so little is hard to find. The sentence has two shores, and you know them both. On one shore stands someone describing a person their friends introduced as “exactly your kind,” a person with everything in its place. “A very good person,” they say; at the third saying you understand there is a sequel, but it is not coming. “But?” you say. “There is no but,” they say. “If there were, I would tell it. Everything about them is in its place. My heart simply would not warm.” On the other shore stands someone describing the person their whole circle joined to pronounce “impossible”; as they tell it their voice changes, and they hear it themselves. “I know,” they say, “I know it all.” Knowing is of no use. Two people come from two opposite directions, stop at the same spot, and in their mouths is the same sentence.

Sayer and listener alike tie the sentence to the same place. The heart is a separate authority, it reads its own book, it cannot agree with the mind; in the war of the two, the person is a spectator. I do not believe this war is a war. There are not two parties; there is a single mind, half of it speaking in the light, half in the dark.

It works like this. When you meet a person, your mind opens an interview; it opens one even if you do not wish it; before the tea has come to the table it has already begun. One part of the interview is open: you know the questions, you hear the answers. What is their work, are they educated, are they orderly, what is their temperament, who are their people? This part you can even tell your friends; what you mean by “everything is in its place” is this open list. But the interview has a closed session too. The questions there you did not choose; of most you do not even know they are being asked. Questions like these: Would this person stay in my hard day, or run? Could I listen to this voice for forty years? If I gave a secret, where would it spend the night? Beside them, do I grow smaller or larger? Can one be entrusted to these hands? Does this skin, this scent do me good? No one asks these questions aloud; but all of them are asked, all of them are answered, and the answers come to you not one by one but as a collective feeling.

Why the circle’s advice so often does not hold is understood from here as well. Those who introduce you, saying “exactly your kind,” look at your open list; they have no other choice; your closed list they do not know, and neither do you. That is why the meeting of two people who match faultlessly by the open list sometimes passes like a civil-service interview: every answer is right, there is not one wrong, and both sides want to rise from the table as soon as they can.

If the two lists point the same way there is no matter; you say “both my mind and my heart want it,” and you name it great love. The famous sentence is built when the lists part. If the open list says “yes” and the closed list “no”: “Everything is in its place, but my heart will not warm.” If the open list says “no” and the closed list “yes”: “I know it will not walk, but it is not in my hands.” A person takes this doubleness for fate’s caprice. It is not caprice; it is a counting deficit. Half the votes are counted in a secret box, and only the result is announced to you. The verdict of the authority you call the heart is, most of the time, the vote that came out of that secret box; because you did not count it, you take it for a surprise; a surprise it is not. Know the temperament of feeling from this too: feeling shows direction but shows no grounds. It says “go,” does not say why; it says “run,” does not hand over the file. With a verdict without grounds one cannot live; finding the grounds falls to you.

Now we have come to the vital part of the matter. Is the closed list always right? It is not. If you look at who wrote those questions there, before you appear clerks not exactly impartial: old relationships, the wounds of first youth, the screens watched for years, the memorized lessons of the culture one grew up inside. My observation is that the closed list sometimes makes you flee from the one who would protect you, and sometimes pushes you toward the one who will wound you anew; for familiar pain comes to a person as more “right” than unfamiliar peace; the mind is inclined to what it knows, not to what is good. The sentence “my heart goes to him” therefore does not count as evidence by itself; one must also look at where the heart takes its orders from. The heart is innocent; the clerks who write its questions are not always innocent. Nor does the sentence “my heart will not warm” count as a verdict by itself; sometimes it protects you from one who truly would not suit, and sometimes it merely frightens you from a goodness you are not used to. Without knowing which, do not sign.

The most frequent form of erring I see is this: the closed list cuts the new person the old person’s answer. The one you have newly met builds a sentence; the sentence is innocent, but its tone resembles the tone of someone who grieved you years ago; and into the closed box, at that moment, a “no” vote drops. The vote is cut to the new person; the offense is the old one’s. The reverse happens too: someone takes their “yes” not from themselves but from a memory they resemble. A smile, a scent, a movement of the hand; the box is tampered with by these as well. For this reason not every verdict of the heart is fresh; a part comes from the archive. A verdict come from the archive must be read once over before being applied to today’s case.

What to do? Pull the closed session into the open. When the feeling comes, and when it does not come, do not sign the verdict at once; first a short inquiry. “My heart did not warm”; very well: where is the cold? Look for the concrete: at which moment of theirs did you draw back, at which sentence of theirs did your inside close? What you will find is sometimes a serious sign; for instance, without your knowing, a boundary of yours has been touched, your inside has acted before you. Sometimes it is the echo of an old wound; the one across from you has no sin at all, they merely resemble a wrong memory. The only way to part the two is to seek the answer. If you say “it is not in my hands”; that too is fine; what touched your hand? To which need of yours does this person answer, and is that need a healthy need, or an old hunger? The person who asks these does not cool from love; do not fear, feeling is not so delicate as to fail an inquiry. From the inquiry only misunderstandings come out weakened; what is real comes out of the inquiry strengthened.

The matter of boundaries I must open here, for it is the closed list’s most precious page: the things that for you admit no bargaining. In love the boundaries loosen somewhat; and the right of it is this; while two lives pass into one another some doors open to the very end, no other way is closeness built. But to loosen is one thing, to be erased another. The loosened boundary is a treat: “normally I would not do it, but for you I will.” The erased boundary is a loss: “what I want, I myself no longer know.” The first draws near; the second, strange as it is, draws apart; for the one across from you is now together not with you but with what is left of you. Every discomfort you keep silent, every “actually I do not want to” you swallow, is written into the closed ledger. You forget; the ledger does not forget. When its day comes, those accumulated records return to you as a verdict of a single line: “My inside has gone cold.” No one understands where it came from; for no one has read the ledger; not even its writer.

A moment when you were caught between your mind and your heart there has surely been; everyone has had one, I have too. Go back to that moment once more, and this time change the question. Do not say “which shall I listen to?”; that question makes you a spectator. Say “to which question, exactly, is my heart giving answer?”; this question makes you the judge. When you find the answer you will see that the fight has ended; for there never was a fight. There were not two parties; there was a single you, half speaking aloud, half whispering. To make the whisper hearable is in your hands. My question is this: who was the last person your inside said “no” to? And; to which question had your inside said “no”? Did you ever look for it?