On The Face Of It

            Your love is not my love.  Your fear is not my fear.  Your red is not my red.  Your blue is not my blue.  This is not to imply that we do not agree that love exists, or fear exists.  Certainly, we co-exist in a world surrounded by shades of reds and blues.  To suggest otherwise is Sophomoric. 

          We humans are intrinsically divided, separated physically.  That is, another cannot occupy the space that my being occupies.  Our acceptance of inherent physical separation intensifies the gratification of the human touch.  While transient, the Other’s touch succeeds in transcending that physical divide.  It is visceral and carnal: the slight brush of the arm, the soft stroke over the head, the back, the raw, sexual encounter.

          While we have found very elemental ways of relating in the physical, connections amongst the mental and the spiritual selves continue to present fundamental challenges.  We may agree that roses are red.  However, “red,” is nothing more than a symbol, a composite of letters, themselves smaller symbols-all of them dead, static.  Words have no meaning unto themselves.  They do not exist outside of a specific culture.  In fact, as our culture changes, as does the language.  Even as a fixed, arbitrarily assigned system of signs and symbols, -a default lens through which we may share a common worldview-language fails. 

          But, if we can agree that roses are red, then there must be a certain level of shared perspective.  Our culture has identified a plant in the environment and labeled it with the tag, “rose.”  Thus, that plant is a rose in Portland, Oregon, the same as it is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  Further, the rose is “red” inasmuch as we, as a society, have agreed upon a certain spectrum of colors-light to dark-as demonstrating values we call “red.”  When one pictures “red” in one’s mind, it almost certainly differs from the picture in the Other’s mind.  Thus, while both the former and the latter may look at a rose and declare, yes! the rose is red, it is only an approximation, an unspecific designation.  Meanwhile, one’s introspective idea of red may be infinitely distinct from the Other’s. 

          If general perception of our physical environment differs so greatly, imagine the disparity occurring in abstracted human emotions such as love and fear.  When a couple sits in a courtyard, rarely abandoning the other’s gaze, grazing the skin on the backs of hands, touching feet, they invite attention.  The observer thinks, ‘that is love.  This couple is in love.’  However, definitions of love vary greatly and depend on perceptions, individual conceptions of love dictated by unique experiences whether positive or negative, clear or obscured.  The word “love” has a meaning.  It is broad and sweeping, and ultimately, wholly subjective.  Experience cannot be symbolized or shared, it can only be.  My love is not your love.