The mysteries of the net are incredible and this time they are intelligible, dear Alison,
Dave B. called Robin Hamilton who posted me that you are talking to me on your blog....
honored,
I am.
At least here we know who this -I am- is...
pasting:
lyric is the same question as "I am"-
(to which I am commenting, who am I?)
By which I mean, it seems to me that to assert "I am" is the same as asking "who am I?" Or even that to say "I am" is to ask if I am another.
well, I would like to see who on earth is going to make some sense out of the entire lot, starting with your question without a question mark (that first "I am" is a statement, or at least it seems to me now; continuing with my comment, which becomes a question..., as a friend said, smiling broadly!
-the felt world of that person is secret-
(I don't know if I would have written something similar, we know that empathy if processed - the fact that someone knows how to is another chapter - opens the doors to all perception)
Yes...and no. I was thinking about Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain this morning (for obvious reasons); it opens with a discussion of the difficulty, even impossibility, of communicating physical pain, which is sometimes a question of crucial importance in, say, medical diagnosis. We are forced to use various systems of rules of thumb: it is like a needle, it is a dull ache, on the scale of one to ten - but here where subjectivity rules supreme, language hits its real limits. Empathy (love) is the imaginative attempt to bridge that gap, the only recourse we have being that of language (of all kinds: here I include the language of sobs, cries, screams, gestures). But, no matter how much we try to imagine, we cannot actually know what the other person is feeling: any more than we can know whether the colour "red" that we perceive is the same colour that anyone else does. We simply agree that this shade which we both see is red. Which is not in the least to devalue empathy or love; maybe the reverse. I don't see what else is going to save us. I probably value it higher than any other human quality: but it does have to be untangled from simple projection, which is the enfolding of the other into ourselves. Love is also greatly a matter of tact: which sounds a whole lot more prim than what I actually mean.
Yes, here Alison there is material for me. And it all sums up with my refusal in toto of the medical science, not to mention psychiatry, psychology even worse (sorry Mark, don't take it personally, as a matter of fact since poetry IS above the other sciences, and you being a poet, there are great possibilities for you to be an excellent psychologist). Unluckily in order to be a good doctor one needs, besides the technical information university provides, an enormous knowledge of the human being. Arts usually give this opportunity to those who are able to understand/approach them. And yes with you Alison, empathy is love. And that is why a person who loves can be a guerisseur, someone who cures, wins the dis/ease, which has so many causes: spiritual, psychological and finally shows itself on and inside the body. And yes again, it has to be untangled from our projections, that is why it is so difficult for an empath to carry on with an ordinary life, and also why some artists or poets were considered the "mad" of our society, or at their best, treated as outsiders. And another big applause for your mentioning "tact", which has not to be confused with "good manners" even if they are useful to refine children to the knowledge and perception of it.
-the I is what a person makes when translated into feeling which is released from the constraints of exterior gaze-
(will there ever be a freedom from the constraints of exterior gazes?)
Even in our most private selves, we are witnessing our selves. But I think it possible to think of the possibility, even if it is impossible. And there are degrees of freedom from the constraints of gaze, from the total imprisonment that leads to narcissism (for narcissism seems to me an emptying of the self into the gaze rather than engorgement, a self-poverty) to the freedom of unselfconscious solitude. Which may be, when I think about it, when we are all gaze, all eye/I.
Yes, I like this turning around the concept of "seeing". It was Virilio, if I am not mistaken who spoke consistently about the "régard" (gaze), should refreshen a little what is by now all forgotten.
Take care Alison, what is the problem there?
Hope you are feeling better, anny
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