Technically this is called “intersubjectivity,” which Oxford Reference defines as “The process and product of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings, and expectations with others....Things and their meanings are intersubjective to the extent that we share common understandings of them.”
The “shock of recognition” is what Melville called it: “For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”
But it’s also what can be called “numinous,” as defined by Merriam-Webster: 'Numinous is from the Latin word numen, meaning "divine will" or "nod" (it suggests a figurative nodding, of assent or of command, of the divine head). English speakers have been using numen for centuries with the meaning "a spiritual force or influence." We began using numinous in the mid-1600s, subsequently endowing it with several senses: "supernatural" or "mysterious" (as in "possessed of a numinous energy force"), "holy" (as in "the numinous atmosphere of the catacombs"), and "appealing to the aesthetic sense" (as in "the numinous nuances of her art").'
This accounts for the “shock” that Melville describes, which is a kind of electric shock that happens when a connection is made. The etymology of the word "numinous," by the way, means "to wink." When we look at a work of art, or a myth, and something "winks" at us, then we know not only that we are also being seen, but that such an incarnated image is the carrier of those invisible energies. If it "winks" at us, it is recognizing something like it in us already, something of which we were heretofore unaware, perhaps. That is, re - cognition, like to like.
A poet writes about an experience and we think, “I’ve done that" or "I’ve felt that way.”
For 14 years, Home has been a collection of moments in time for me rather than a physical location. The moments are always there to return to, but the physical location has altered with the years. I went to Google Earth and looked at my sister’s house in Anchorage. It’s still there, much as she left it in 2008 when her bank repossessed it and sold it at auction. But I can’t go back to it, open the door with a key that I left behind with my sister, and climb the stairs to my room in the loft above the garage. The house that I lived in, not to mention my dear sister, are no longer there. As Brian Cox put it so beautifully, moments in time still exist, but we can no longer reach them. Because of the geometry of space-time, we are impelled to move inexorably into the future.
But I’ve learned a very hard way that it is possible to live a double, a parallel life in one’s mind apart from one’s physical situation. When I was married and away from my wife, like when I waited 385 days for her to get her visa and join me in the States in 1995-96, or when I was in the Army stationed in South Korea in ‘98, I was effectively split in two; my body was located in one place, but my heart was in another, thousands of miles away.
But that was when I was married – a common enough condition.
Right now, and for the past 14 years, I have been physically located on a small island in the center of the Philippine archipelago, but I have projected myself, by conscious effort, those same thousands of miles away to my homeland, to the places and some of the people I’ve known, that I remember (since memories are all that I have left) as constituting the place I call home.
Recently I encountered a poem by Raymond Carver that dramatizes a situation that all of us have been in at one time or another. But the specific situation, in its physical details, happens to be a perfect metaphor for what has happened to me this very long time away from home. Carver himself agrees that “If this sounds/like the story of a life, okay.”
Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In
You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of a life, okay.
It was raining. The neighbors who had
a key were away. I tried and tried
the lower windows. Stared
inside at the sofa, plants, the table
and chairs, the stereo set-up.
My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me
on the glass-topped table, and my heart
went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,
or something like that. After all,
this wasn’t so bad.
Worse things had happened. This
was even a little funny. I found the ladder.
Took that and leaned it against the house.
Then climbed in the rain to the deck,
swung myself over the railing
and tried the door. Which was locked,
of course. But I looked in just the same
at my desk, some papers, and my chair.
This was the window on the other side
of the desk where I’d raise my eyes
and stare out when I sat at that desk.
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.
And it was something to look in like that, unseen,
from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.
I don’t even think I can talk about it.
I brought my face close to the glass
and imagined myself inside,
sitting at the desk. Looking up
from my work now and again.
Thinking about some other place
and some other time.
The people I had loved then.
I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I’d done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.
What Carver encounters and recognizes in the telling of this poem is himself. If I can use one more Latin word, it is an adjustment, a mutatis mutandis, which I take to mean - in this context at least - is a glimpse of ourselves in a parallel existence – at once outside looking in and inside looking out. Entranced for a moment by the doppelgänger seated behind his desk, yet knowing that it is impossible, he shatters the window, the aperture through which he saw into the past.
I hope my own revenance won’t require such an act of violence.
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