Yes, just as I do not believe that our perceptions have much in common, I have grave doubts in the possibility of meaningful communication. I mean one thing, say another and you understand something else entirely.
Yes, we may have similar needs for food, shelter, tenderness, companionship, sexual tension and release, a sense of direction and purpose, self-respect, adoration from screaming hordes of big forty-something women yearning to smother you in the warm folds of their soft flesh...um, where was I? Ah, yes. In each person these needs are layered in different ways, foregrounding some at the expense of others, each coloured by issues of fear, anger, exhaustion or excessive energy. These build up into completely different pictures, just like you can use the same pigments to paint a Mondrian or a Rubens.
And when we talk, all these needs bleed into your words, tones, expressions and gestures and all my needs shape my interpretation of them. What I want from you shapes my reading of you.
Perhaps that is why we tend to yearn for the battlefields of love and war. They are the great simplifiers. They strip away all but the most basic emotions of panic, hatred and lust, rendering the labyrinths of human motivation into one flat, wide highway, on which we race towards a fatal collision that will utterly change or annihilate our future. What bliss!
We are an insane species with a million years of pain ahead of us. Any thought of apocalypse is just wishful thinking.
"I went down to the depot just to meet the twelve oh two.
As a child, I used to theorize that maybe people have different tastes in everything because they perceived the same sensory data in radically different ways: What if you see blue as the colour that I call red? Not colour blindness, but every colour is simply switched on its way to the brain. Like my two cameras interpret the same scene taken at the same time. Yes, I still haven't managed to convince the Nikon that it is not in hell. But then, I'm not exactly convinced of it, either.
Take random cat picture and try to crop it until the composition works. Unfortunately, I have a perverse predilection for things that are broken, which means that it starts 'working' for me when it is just that annoying little bit off...
