Bless the knowledge, for making the blue different for me than for you.
I remember when the son of a friend of a friend came home from school to tell something between shock and joy how he realized when talking to a classmate that the idea of a mental picture is not just a metaphor, that some people can put things together in their minds. not before their eyes. And when another friend discovered that the inner stream of language most of us narrate our lives through is the mind of our mother or sister. And every time I waded into the winter sea with someone I thought I shared a rare understanding with, I would exclaim “Those are needles!” as the icy water pierced my flesh, and he stared blankly at me, and when I asked what his feeling was, he was silent for a long time, and then said: “Depression.” Two bodies that look very similar, share 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their confidence, immersed in the exact same environment, controlled by a consciousness so imperceptibly different that it makes the contact between self and the world sharp in one and dull in the other.
Moments like these make us wake up from the dream of complete understanding, they shake us with the realization that no one has ever really known what it is like to be another person, that between knowing and other things there is always a dark abyss like the inside of the skull, and although we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they are only a solid footbridge on the other side of it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope they don't unravel before we reach the edge of understanding, the outer edge of the other, the only thing we'll ever touch – and still it's enough, this frame to be saved from the loneliness of being us, this outstretched hand across the blue ice.
Anne Enright confronts this abyss in her book of music Wren, Wren (public library), drawing from it is not a point of despair but a portal of possibility.
You write:
We do not walk on the same road as the person walking next to us. All we can do is tell someone else what we see. We can point to things and try to name them. If we do this right, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.
Looking back on seeing empathy “as if it were the solution (and it is! it is!) to everything,” the main character points out:
I had a big beautiful cake on my head that said “Feeling the Pain of Others” and I cut it from side to side because I thought that feelings are a bridge between people, feelings cross the space, empathy is a gas, it is released by another, it breathes. by another. Sensation! It's like melting. We can combine, you know. We can connect. We can cry in the same movie. Me and you.
And yet, you see, we struggle to do this, because the bottom is a very complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind – integration, in the end, is not a measure of closeness, of understanding, of closeness between consciousnesses in the cold waters of existence. Enright writes:
There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a gap between everyone. And it's not a scary space. The empty spirit that exists between people may transcend emotion, but it may not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”
Given the co-evolution of perception and consciousness, this gap in the way we see the world is reflected in our actual eyes – each of us sees the same photons differently due to differences in the way our eyes and brain process light. Although science does not exist to provide us with metaphors – its function is truth – we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between reality and meaning. Enright's protagonist shows:
These days I'm obsessed with light, it's so hard to change. I'm not talking about beautiful sunrises, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a picture look good. I'm talking about the brightness itself, the atmosphere is bright. Light on my typing wrists. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see remains eight and a half minutes old. And so on. And you think it's shared by everyone but it's not shared, exactly — our eyes are struck by our own, personal photons.
Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding – “which is another word for love” – is not to see the same light but to see each other's light, the shy light that shines on the sea of our loneliness.
