Kaleidoscope

The boundaries between myself and other people have always been treacherous to navigate. I can rarely — without writing, without looking in the mirror for a new freckle or wrinkle — tell if my emotions belong to me or someone else. And so I like to imagine my brain like a kaleidoscope: a colourful hall of mirrors in which the only way out is to parse the real from the reflection.

Kaleidoscopes aren’t particularly comforting. They make bad telescopes; they speak in riddles; the inner contents of their mechanism easily distract them. They are locked in their beautiful but lonely inner world.

At least, it often feels that way to me, which is why I make conscious efforts to reach out, to break the repetition. I draw in the boundaries that designate the in-between of myself and the world around me. Even when I get the lines wrong, it’s helpful to know where I’m headed besides the vague out of my head. I have learned that love is a practice of distinction-making.

First and foremost, there is a distinction between what we feel and what we do when we love someone. We let these loved objects, loved people, go even when their absence turns us into an empty pond. Love — of the divine, of your neighbour, of your self — is a curiosity. To fall in love is to trip over the boundaries of your experience and to land with one foot in another’s. We fall out of ourselves and into, empathetically, the experience of another person. We fatefully stumble out of ourselves because we pressed our nose to the glass, enraptured by curiosity, were thrown off balance by the desire to know a person, a thing, that is not ourselves.

If love is a kind of gravity, a physics then loving is practical magic, slights of hands with mirrors and windows and projections. Loving someone/thing is to build a projector within your mind; it is to willingly turn your hall of mirrors into a palace of windows. It is to allow the loved object or person to exist within yourself without the presence of your gaze. It allows them to exist within you without the presence of your gaze. It is a new kind of inward attention: a beam of light shining inwards that has an external object — an optical paradox. Love/ing is neither neuroscience nor biology but science in its essence.

And so in loving, we create within ourselves a projection of the world as it appears to someone else. This projection runs on a profound curiosity about the other-worldly. In other words, the mechanism of this projector is empathy.

Projectors cannot function without the distinction between what I know to be true and what I know to be an illusion. We cannot tumble into the world of another person unless there is a clear boundary between theirs and our own. And finally, we cannot press our noses against the glass — as children do to restaurant windows to see what the warm, electric hullaballoo is going on inside — unless there is an utterly terrifying but utterly beautiful other for us to gaze upon. Love and empathy are only possible when there is a defined self that the object of is gaze exists in a distinction and a fullness separate from its own.

Kaleidoscopes become very useful when turned up towards the sky, like a spyglass, and a ray of sunshine illuminates its cold, glass chambers.

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