Cory had
thought of him as the wallpaper that lined her life, someone who she couldn’t
imagine as belonging to anyone else. He was the constant in her life where
there were winds of change. Sure, he was prone to mood swings—either extremely
happy or at times morose, but his depth of caring for her remained the same.
He, she thought, felt the pains of the world a little more deeply; like a
guitar string that oscillates between flat and sharp, his oscillations were
difficult to predict—sometimes maddeningly so.
How to
explain the nostalgia for something she has never had? Perhaps the best way to
explain it is that it is a kind of obscene desire to experience life without
him. But perhaps psychoanalysis can only go so far when examining the psyche;
some parts of the mind are mysterious in their motivations, and I suspect it
shall be so for quite a while. Imaging, in the form of functional MRIs and CT
scans might tell us a great deal of how the brain works, but the mind is a
separate matter—and technology will spur on ever more questions as well as
answers. Thought, of course, is not merely the transmitting of neural signals
but also our responses to those impulses. What constitutes human thought—for
example, the appreciation of a sunset—might be observable in a brain scan, but
the reason why it is beautiful might be an entirely different thing.
But, you
say, it is beautiful precisely because it elicits a certain combination of
neurochemicals to the point of release. Yes, but does that not trap you in a
tautology, where the reason for a thing’s beauty is due to our brains, which
creates the beauty in the first place? Then nothing really explains beauty
other than the fact that when we see it, we feel it. Which is true, but what
consensus of feeling is needed to deem, for instance, Picasso’s work as
beautiful? We disagree on aesthetic judgments in as many ways as the wind
blows. If a cow thinks grass is tasty and if a bull finds that cow attractive,
how are we to justify our own tastes? Yes, to an animal and to a human to each
their own. If beauty and appreciation are truly in the eyes of the beholder,
then there must be billions of ‘beauties’ with their own separate merits and
disadvantages. But if so, doesn’t the term ‘beauty’ cease to have meaning, if
anything can be beautiful to anyone or to any living thing? The whole thing can
get quite involved and convoluted indeed.
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