Refraction

Picture a tree.

Note its bark, the set of its branches, whether it holds its leaves through winter. I have pictured one too, and the two are not the same tree: I have laid my impressions over mine and you over yours. We share the word; we do not share the thing. In the old structuralist terms, the signifier crosses between us and the signified stays home. And if we cannot agree on something as plain as a tree, what becomes of love, of grief, of the particular weather of a given afternoon’s despair? The word arrives. The experience does not.

This is fundamental condition of language. Language was built to trade what kept us alive (“there is danger there,” “the figs are ripe,” “help me carry this”), and it is superb at the categories survival needs. It is hopeless at the inside of a single moment. Every science, pressed far enough, rests on somebody’s report of an experience, and the report is not the experience. The raw feel of things sits underneath everything we can say and crosses over to no one.

So how does anything get through at all? Through the lengthened metaphor: “I am overwhelmed” carries almost nothing; “my inbox makes me feel that I’m being hunted for sport” carries a little more, because it hands you a structure to stand inside instead of a label to file. Stretch that gesture far enough and you have art. A novel, a song, a painting is a metaphor extended until it is habitable: the longest bridge we know how to throw across the distance between one interior and another.

But even art does not reflect the experience it carries. It refracts it. Say a fish swam, and your fish may be red where mine is blue; paint the fish and the colors bend; photograph it and they bend a different way; film it and the motion comes back while something else falls out. Each form bends the light on its own terms, and none of them lets the thing through clean. Reflection would hand you the world unchanged. What art hands you is the world bent through a medium, and the bending is the only way anything arrives at all.

Which leaves the gap exactly where it was. No metaphor closes it; the fish is never quite your fish. What I have not worked out is whether that is a loss to mourn or the price of the only company on offer: that we never entirely reach one another, and that the reaching, bent and partial and bent again, is most of what I have ever been able to call being understood.