Compaction: Love, Meaning and Experience

I think of myself as ‘differentialist‘; I see difference everywhere, and everywhere I see it I’m intrigued and fascinated by its sheer variety of shades, tones and meanings. Yet the more I investigate experiential meaning and significance the more I see compaction and ambiguity instead, so much so I’ve begun to wonder if compaction is ‘where meaning is’ rather than differentiation, to wonder if ambiguity is instrumental and essential  to experiential existence.

For instance, I first saw that defining moment in our early relationship in terms of differentiation rather than compaction, and so I first saw the differences in our love symbols ’hidden’ there, free will versus constrain-ment . Yet of a certainty there was compacted with my experience of constrain-ment the exercise of my free will, and while this might seem to illustrate nothing so much more than relationship and love symbol compatibility, I rather begin to wonder if it’s precisely the compact nature of the experience in such a situation that makes it so powerfully and intensely luminous -numinous even. I might tend to see it better (retrospectively) when differentiated one way than another way, but only because the experience fits my framework ‘better’ that way and I’m able to ‘make more meaning’, make better and more sense of the experience in that way.

So I’ve been reminding myself that everyone (ahem, myself) can and does understand in more than one way, even if they tend to mentally grasp and reflexively use one way more than another. Clearly differentiation and compaction work together (somehow) in human experience and in the meaning of experience – I’ve even been noting the issue of experiential compaction in my own life lessons, also here and here. I’ve noted compaction in the ‘for you is for me‘ relationship dynamic: when we do things out of love, we do them for our partner and their happiness but also for our own sake and our happiness. And while it is extremely difficult to separate out which motive is which, or which one is more, often seeming so interchangeable that we’re merely assigning motivation based on relative context and our current talking point.

It reminds me of how some people desire their partner to give them the love symbol that works for them more than they want their partner to express their love in a way that works for them. And in noting this in ‘passion addiction‘, I also noted how instrumental the exact ‘construction nature’ of our mental framework is to how well and which symbols (or experiences) ‘work’ for us – that is how well we ‘make meaning’ and sense of which symbols (and experiences) based on the nature of our mental framework. (It reminds me also of how we can get ‘meaning from the puzzle fit‘, like hormones and enzymes and the specificity of their receptors in molecular biology.) And as when the symbol fix is in, serious confusion can result from ‘misinterpreting’ such experiential compaction; we can fetishistically take  meaning from the thing (act, person or symbol) compactly associated with the experience rather than taking meaning from the experience itself.

This is what I meant (and still mean) when calling this the ‘love symbol negotiation‘; not only because we try ‘to get’ but because we try to understand and to give. Not only do we do our best to give our partner love in symbols they understand (and they try to give us love in symbols we understand), but also (rather than allow our heart’s reception to atrophy upon what has always worked for us) we (‘should’, I think,) try to expand our love horizons and adjust our interior spaces in order to better intimately understand our partner’s love and their love symbols, better understand their mental framework and their interior mental (and emotional) spaces.