At what point does the world unfold?

This song.

Where do feelings originate?
The immediate response is, well, the interior of course. The emotional center. The agency of the subject. “The eye of the beholder”.
But what if I was to say that feelings aren’t our own at all,
that they actually surround us, and move us, like water?
And we swim in them, and they saturate us?

Engravings & paintings by Albin Brunovsky, 1935-1997

Like waves, feelings— desires, anxieties, fears-- bring us together and pull us apart. We can only control so much of the current’s direction and its effect on us. Simply put, even the most private of feelings, and what they mean to us, are created by multiple people.
Sara Ahmed eloquently describes this phenomenon of “Collective Feelings” by showing how affect, or the “motion” part of “emotion”, blurs the line between interior and exterior, subjectivity and objectivity, you and I.

“Feelings are not about the inside getting out or the outside getting in, but that they ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside and outside in the first place. Clearly, to say that feelings are crucial to the forming of surfaces and borders is to suggest that what ‘makes’ those borders also unmakes them. In other words, what separates us from others also connects us to others. This paradox is clear if we think of the skin surface not only as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us.”

”For example, Durkheim considers the rise of emotion in crowds, suggesting that the ‘great movements’ of feeling, ‘do not originate in any of the particular individual consciousnesses’, but come from ‘without’ (1966: 4). Here the
individual is no longer the origin of feeling; feeling itself comes from without, from the thickness of sociality itself. As Durkheim’s later work on religion suggests, such feelings do not remain ‘without’; ‘this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within us; it becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified’”

In essence, emotion is brought about by motion, by the fluid exchange between two bodies, two minds. While friends, lovers, strangers may come and go abruptly, each one has made an impression on us, an impression that will be transferred onto the next. The only defense we have against an increasingly individualized, mechanized world is to remember to move and be moved-
“Movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its
inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies – indeed, attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others.”
Collective Feelings, Sara Ahmed

In case you needed a smile-
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbellassai/the-most-wtf-pictures-of-people-posing-with-animals

In case you were wondering-
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/27/and-the-worlds-most-educated-country-is/