"Today, I am content, and that is enough."
- via Twitter, 29th Oct 2024, (name withheld)
On a few occasions I have seen Mosman Municipal Council accidentally fly the Australian Flag upside-down. Now this council/suburb being right on the harbour and with a naval presence, should be well aware that when a flag is flown upside-down, it either means that the ship has been abandoned and may be claimed, or that the ship is in distress and requires assistance. Likewise, when I see people protesting with the Australian Red Ensign which is upside-down, part of me wants to assume that they either have been abandoned and may be claimed, or that they are in distress and require assistance. Likely the latter.
Flags are useful and proper at communicating something in a hurry and from a distance but humans, which are ridiculously complex and nuanced beings, and so much bigger on the inside than the outside, often can not communicate something in a hurry, much less even adequately. What do you do about the whole realm of things like emotion, which can't really be communicated with words, can't really be communicated with tone, and can't really be communicated with expression? How do you communicate that which at times can not be described, much less transmitted to someone else?
What also doesn't help, is that essentially, we are all living in the fortress of our minds; with nobody else ever truly seeing the kosmos as we do. This isn't just a case of eternal parallax but genuine cosmic loneliness, where the entire of the universe must always be observed from a unique perspective. Granted, we can share experiences, participate in community and communion, and feel and do all those things like love, hate, joy, ennui, pain, worry, boredom, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Flying atop the keep in the fortress of our minds are the occasional flags of those things that we feel and do, but even then, those flags do a bad job of communicating the uncommunicable; which means that the fortress of our minds is also an inescapable prison.
The ironic thing about all of this is that I write all of this as someone who can observe emotions but not necessarily express or even feel them. Through a combination of genetics, the kind of household I grew up in, and the unrelenting fact that I have mismatched chromosomes as the base source code in every single cell in my body, I have a highly limited emotional colour palette. Happy, Sad, Angry, Ennui - I have at worst a CGA emotional card and maybe at best an EGA emotional card. I do not have VGA with 16 colours, I do not have Super VGA with 256 colours, and I certainly do not have 16 and 24 bit cards.
I am one of those people in the population (mostly men) for whom any and all emotions simply cease to exist once they have been nailed down. For many people, especially men, the whole project of going to therapy, as it is currently conceived, is completely useless. If I have a problem, then I want it fixed. Asking me how I feel about something, or to walk through the emotions, does nothing when I simply never felt them or never had the emotional toolkit to describe them in the first place.
However, I can look at other people and observe that they do in fact feel things, deeply; and in thousands upon thousands of shades which simply do not exist for me. This is to be expected. I am also red/green colour blind, so I already know that people see the world with more colours than I do. That's fine.
What's even funner and compounds this even further, is that other people's heads are black boxes. It is simply impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. Even worse, if someone is sitting with an emotion that is barely contained by language, then it is more impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. Even more worse, if they are thinking abstract thoughts, that is thoughts that don't even have language, then it is more more impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. If you have something which is impossible, doubly impossible, and even triply impossible to know, then how are you expected to make any kind of informed thesis about what is going on inside another person.
Perhaps my only insight into how someone else feels emotionally, is my own hopeless analogue. After being hit by a car in January of 2022, and then having surgery to insert screws and plates in my leg and arm, I have been left with a constant pain in my left shoulder. At best I can describe it as being stabbed by a pin but a whole line of them; constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ceasing. The fun thing is that even that doesn't actually describe what this feels like. The funner thing is that I don't even know if it is real or not; because it could be just the damaged nerve endings constantly firing off and sending messages. If I can't properly describe the pain that I feel in my shoulder or even know if it is real or not, then what hope do I have in understanding anyone else's pain, which appears on a spectrum of knowledge which is triply impossible to actually understand?
And yet even with a highly limited emotional colour palette, operating in EGA, I still know that pain however it is metered, is unpleasant. If it is physical, emotional, or whatever, pain is like the blinking warning light indicating that something has gone wrong, or that some system requires urgent attention.
The thing about pain is that it demands to be felt. The almost hilarious thing is that is all that it does. It demands and it demands and it demands and it demands and it demands. Yet here I am, forced to listen to the demands of an author with no words, the bruised apprentice of a teacher who offers no useful lessons at all, in a place where the light and darkness converge, and to be quite frank I will be damned if I sit and watch pain get what it demands. I can not entertain the demands of a tyrant. If I only have four colours in the palette, then I will fight pain with anger and either internally ridicule it or ignore it. As the owner of my emotions, I choose the terms and the conditions.
As someone with only a limited emotional colour palette, operating in EGA, that either means that I am simply unable to even experience the kinds of pain that other people do, or that I have resilience operating as some kind of patch or firmware to deal with the very obvious hardware inadequacy. Perhaps like Androcles, the famed idiot and slave from the Roman folk take (and for whom George Bernard Shaw wrote the stage play), I am able to survive even the threat of a lion because I am simply incapable of feeling the fear/pain which would have left me terrified. If about 20% of the population can and will experience depression in their lives, the unspoken opposite for whom everything is seemingly hunky-dory all the time are the 10%-20% of the population who never experience serious depression in their lives and likely can not even do so.
When I see other people experience pain, I know that I am never going to actually feel what they feel. Despite what people might say, there are no true empaths. At best an empath can synthesise the emotions of someone else and feel those but that's still very much like The Treachery Of Images, where 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' rings true. Empathy is a synthesis and Sympathy is still only worry and sorry for someone else. To the people lost and lonely, hurting and in pain, inside the fortress of their mind, this is of no help at all.
Hoist the flags. The wind will blow, the flags will be unfurled. This too will pass. The bells will ring inside your mind. The night will end. The sun will shine on you again. Platitudes are stupid.
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