There’s always a gap between the world we perceive and the world as it is, and we’ll never be able to measure how wide it is. There’s a distance between the person we know and our knowledge of the person, and we’ll never be able to measure how far it is. The things that we love are loved in effigy. Memory is not lossless. We encode our past and present into mental symbols, both to store them as approximations and to extrapolate possible futures – similar to the process of breaking a physics problem down into mathematical symbols, for convenient representation and extrapolation of outcome.
There are two possibilities for love. That which you love is real, and is thus flawed in comparison to your symbolic conception of it, or that which you love is not real and you will always be left longing for tangibility. Self-love is difficult under these circumstances. You will never quite be the personality you imagine yourself to possess. You will always be, in your own eyes, a little out of focus, a double vision, a vision of who you think you are superimposed on the moment to moment image of what you are doing, and they just never quite line up, no matter how you try. Sometimes we try to demean and degrade this self-image in an attempt make it an easier role to play, but that doesn’t actually work – because that’s still just a persona, not a person, and you will never quite be able to match its step.
The mind is a terrible place to live, messy and disordered, with secret passages leading arbitrarily from one room to the next. Everything is confused, our files are mixed up, and sometimes when we try to pull the file on a year we find instead the smell of a flower that was in bloom, or we try to remember a name and get a joke instead. This is very frustrating. It can be tragic. It can be lethal. But this disorganization, this sloppy symbolic representation and filing system, is also a superpower.
We think in metaphor. Mostly we just use this to make dick jokes, but once in a while we use it to understand things, to convey things, we have dreams of spiral staircases and wake up with theories of double helix DNA, or tell stories of men who turn into bugs to convey the crushing indignities of modern life.
That’s why we love art. For a moment, we can pretend that a world can be perfectly represented, that what we see is what is actually there. It is a dangerous delusion to indulge in, but there are days in which and ways in which only the artifice can reveal the structure of the real.