{"id":9924,"date":"2025-01-27T14:17:05","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T18:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-light-in-the-abyss-between-us-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-27T14:17:05","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T18:17:05","slug":"the-light-in-the-abyss-between-us-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-light-in-the-abyss-between-us-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Light in the Abyss Between Us \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I remember the moment a friend\u2019s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that other people can conjure up in their minds things not before their eyes. And the moment another friend discovered that the inner stream of language with which most of us narrate our lives courses through neither his mother\u2019s nor his sister\u2019s mind. And always the moment I waded into the winter ocean with someone with whom I thought I shared uncommon understanding, and I exclaimed \u201cThose needles!\u201d as the icy water stabbed at my flesh, and she stared at me blankly, and when I asked what her sensation was, she took a long pause, then said: \u201cPressure.\u201d Two bodies so seemingly similar, sharing 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their trust, immersed in the exact same environment, governed by consciousnesses so invisibly different as to render the contact between self and world sharp for one and blunt for the other. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a lyrical picture-book about the artist within<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Moments like these jolt us awake from the dream of perfect understanding, stagger us with the realization that no one ever really knows what it is like to be somebody else, that between one consciousness and another there always gapes an abyss black as the inside of a skull, and though we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they twine but a tenuous footbridge across it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope that they will not fray before we reach the rim of understanding, the outer edge of the other, which is all we can ever touch \u2014 and still it is enough, this sliver of salvation from the loneliness of being ourselves, this outstretched hand across the icy blue.<\/p>\n

Anne Enright faces this abyss in her lyrical novel The Wren, the Wren<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), drawing from it not a point of despair but portal of possibility. <\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

We don\u2019t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Looking back on viewing empathy \u201clike it\u2019s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything,\u201d the protagonist reflects:<\/p>\n

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I had a big beautiful cake in my head called \u201cFeeling the Pain of Others\u201d and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It\u2019s just like melting. We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And yet, she comes to see, we struggle to do this, for it is at bottom a profoundly complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind \u2014 merging, in the end, is not the measure of closeness, of understanding, of the proximity between consciousnesses in the icy waters of being. Enright writes:<\/p>\n

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There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first<\/em>\u2026 Now, I think the word we need is \u201ctranslation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness<\/a>, this gap in how we perceive the world is reflected in our actual sight \u2014 we each see the same photons differently due to variations in how our eyes and brains process light. While science is not there to furnish us with metaphors \u2014 its task is truth \u2014 we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between truth and meaning. Enright\u2019s protagonist reflects:<\/p>\n

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These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly \u2014 our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding \u2014 which is \u201clove\u2019s other name\u201d<\/a> \u2014 is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you. I remember the moment a friend\u2019s son came home from school to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}