A comment exchange ShadowLady and I had on her blog and D’s comment on Uxorious, Female Led, Other made me question more closely why I need to have (better) labels for my numinous relationship experience than ‘submissive’, ‘uxorious’ and ‘female led’. The question and answer (that I don’t need to have labels but find them helpful to cohere meaningful expression and perspective) I think may help me manage my interior darkness.

One ‘problem’ with the nature of labels, symbols, and other perspective positioning spectra, orienting mental frameworks and paradigms is that such interior constructs always must occur after the experience, are secondary to the experience and can never take the place of the experience. Yet if on one hand any experience has an objective temporal primacy in its aspect of engendering meaning, on the other hand interior constructs have a functional subjective primacy in forming a coherent understanding of meaningful experiences. (This also somewhat answers the question of whence cometh the meaning and whether it’s retrospective, fuller exploration another time.) 

They are both important for finding or deriving meaning in an unknowable cosmos or universe, but of course I tend towards symbolizational meaning – i.e. differentiation predilection. Thus whereas I think existential ignorance and uncertainty may be useful (as similarly with language) because there is always another opportunity for the meaningful satisfaction of finding ever increasing adequacy and accuracy in symbolization, being such a ‘human meaning matrix also gives my differentiation predilection endless opportunity to descend into that darkness of ‘perpetual dissatisfaction’.

Perhaps being a hero in the endless battle is nothing more or less than striking a functional balance between experience and interior construct – e.g. knowing which labels and interior constructs to pursue and which to leave alone.

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