ARE YOU AROUSED?

Look at this sequence of stages in relationships from the beginning in the womb, to creating a space for relationship with the mother, to being at home, staying stable, going close to someone else, reconciling lives, and finally becoming one unit with another person.  The list is provisional, incomplete, probably missing some parts, maybe too simplistic, but it is basically a novel account, a story for life.  Fill in the details and you’ve got a plan and a history.

Attachment

Attunement

Domestication

Continuity

Intimacy

Entanglement

Fusion

This sequence is so biological and so anchored in events rather than cultural paradigms that it could be applied to say, a relationship between an adolescent and an animal.  Like "My Friend Flicka."  I dunno about a person and a machine — maybe.  A vehicle?

These are developmental stages in the dynamic process of a person making a way and a place in the world.  Now I want to name and describe a phenomenon that accompanies this adventure, both as a help and a difficulty.  The main term is arousal, which takes at least three bodily but culture-defined forms:  sex, sports, and combat.  

Again, arousal is biological but guided and defined by the mental culture of the person, either as an individual or as a group.  It can be either concrete and actual -- happening in the world -- or it can be vicarious, either observed or imagined, with the same detectable physiological results only a bit diluted since second-hand, so more likely to be understood and even a bit controlled.  Arousal is a state of the body when circulation and breath increase their rhythm, muscles may tense, and everything in nerves and organs is heightened, on alert.  It can be ecstatic or painful, capable of damage.  Therefore, it can be used as a reward or as punishment and can be life-changing.

Arousal can also be cerebral:  puzzles, poetry, and art forms but few arts as arousing as music, which involves the whole body.   th People who cannot respond to the environmentally arousing dangers and pleasures are few but doomed.  They are in a state that many fear, which they express in the metaphor of zombies.

Redirecting or combining sources of arousal — like fear of the other or fear of failure — and diverting them into causes that people share is useful for politicians, whether they are getting people to cheer for their country or condemn evil, imaginary as those things can be.  Calm, reasonable people are sneered at and ridiculed.  Yet we all love arousal.

If arousal is too intense and unmanaged it can become a frenzy, thrashing, berzerk, and this happens even in suppressed environments like high density cities.  Maybe more there than in rural places with space.

Wikipedia provides this description of arousal as a physiological state.

“Arousal is the physiological and psychological state of being awoken or of sense organs stimulated to a point of perception. It involves activation of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in the brain, which mediates wakefulness, the autonomic nervous system, and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of sensory alertness, mobility, and readiness to respond.

"Arousal is mediated by several different neural systems. Wakefulness is regulated by the ARAS, which is composed of projections from five major neurotransmitter systems that originate in the brainstem and form connections extending throughout the cortex; activity within the ARAS is regulated by neurons that release the neurotransmitters acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, histamine, and serotonin. Activation of these neurons produces an increase in cortical activity and subsequently alertness.”

William James described emotion more colorfully:

“What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face?”

Scientists vary over the idea that the emotions happen in our bodies before the brain feels them and gives them a name.  The older idea is that brain originates emotion.  Whatever position one has about it, clearly the culture is what tells you what name to use and how to describe how it feels or what it might mean.  Are you in danger or falling in love?  Is this terror or exaltation?  Are you bored or shut down?

If ideas of arousal are put into an environmental context according to the stage of development a person is traversing,  the story will be far more vivid and memorable.  In fact, arousal is both fuel and reward for moving on through the challenges.  Or possibly it is the seeking of relief from arousal that makes a person leave a situation that has become unpleasant.  All depends upon the scaffolding built so early in life.  Even siblings have contrasting intolerances or cravings.

These interplaying concepts are vital for a writer, though they might not be conscious or deliberate.  Much can be navigated “under water” along the lines of experience so that the writer hardly knows what will happen next.  Sense memories — the smell, the muscle tension, the cold slick sliding of scissors blades, a barely perceptible sound of drawers gliding in and out, and the awareness of a nearby hotly aroused body — a murder mystery is underway.  It’s the magical ability of words to carry everything else.  Much can be learned through reading.

Some aspects can be learned from studying other media.  It would be fascinating to design a course comparing the times of writing and their portrayed events in sequence through “Morse (1987 - 2000),” “Lewis”, (2006 - 2000), “Endeavor” (2012 - 2020),  from the tightly reasoned impatience of the early tales through this year’s loose, fancy, but not quite reasonable plot of the new "Endeavor."  The comfortable joking relationships of “Lewis” have come and gone, as well as the moral concern of Hathaway.  We’ve traveled from a post WWII cold war to this strange reiteration.  

Originally, Morse was a fiction character invented by Colin Dexter.  Morse’s invented life story is recorded on Wikipedia under the character’s name.  These people have come to seem quite real to us, even as presented dwelling in Oxford, England, a place overwhelmed with history and imagination.  The question for the course might be, “Is this imaginary story arousing or merely absorbing?”  Maybe becoming absorbed in something is a form of arousal.