Empathy 2
Faith: The distances - emotional, geographic, virtual - between us are immeasurable
and yet so palpable. Sometimes they make me very anxious because I cannot
reassure myself by looking at your face, hearing your voice and breath, touching
your hand. Yet, I rest in that distance and am refreshed and vitalized by it
too. My experience of the world - and of myself - is doubled through you because
you have your own life and I have mine and we can bring these rich lives to our
friendship.
“Love aims to close all distance. Yet if separation and space were
annihilated neither loved one nor lover would exist. Between space and love
there is the first opposition - that opposition which is contained as energy
within the original act of creation.” (Ibid., 90)
“Meanwhile, we live not just our own lives but the longings of our century.”
I know we can forgive each other everything and that I don't have to worry that
I will say something "wrong" because you will tell me immediately what you think
and we can discuss it between us. It makes me happy that there are very few of
the socially coded ‘feminine’ signs between us - yet we are women with each
other. Neither mother/daughter, nor teacher/student, nor 70's/90's feminist, nor
older woman/younger woman, nor female lovers. Yet there is an erotics and ethics
of relation between us which I have not experienced before. Can this be
philosophized? Or learned? Or only practiced, lived? I need to try to put it
into words, into language so that it can begin to make a new terrain, not just
for us but for others also, for the young women we teach.
“According to whether we are in the same place or separated from one another,
I know you twice. There are two of you…what changes when you are there before my
eyes is that you become unpredictable. What you are about to do is unknown to
me. I follow you. You act. And with what you do, I fall in love again.” (John
Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. P.79)
