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A circle would represent an individual world, its center point standing for that individual’s consciousness, or perspective. Most circles did not touch, because any given person of the billions on the planet knew only a few other people. Some circles only grazed one another, representing people who may only have seen each other in a parking lot or checkout lane and paid each other no more mind.
Some circles intersected, sharing parts of their respective worlds (the individuals were friends, or neighbors, or had communicated about something). A few circles went so far as to graze the center points of other circles, representing the intimacy that two people might share, in which they felt they could almost enter the other’s consciousness – but not quite, Goines admitted, noting that no two circles actually enclosed each other’s center points.
Goines had for some time already pictured a person’s “world of experience” as a circle whose center was a person’s consciousness, with radiating lines representing experiences. But he realized now that he had assumed the lines radiated great distances – indefinitely, since the image actually lacked a circumference and was just a center point with radiating lines whose points represented, by their distance from the center and from points on other radiating lines, the relative urgency or coherence of a person’s concerns. Radiating lines close together (and relatively urgent) in one person’s circle will be farther apart (and relatively less urgent) for another person, even a close friend – maybe so far apart as not even to register as of any importance whatsoever.
Amidst thinking about this, Goines did a double-take. Individual consciousnesses tried to influence one another’s thinking, as he had tried to influence his relative Curbe’s thinking about Trump and social justice and freedom to practice religion or not. But sometimes the ways of one person’s thinking were so at odds with the ways of another’s thinking that ideas proposed by the first person seemed to just bounce off the other person, as though the other person’s “circle of consciousness” were a vulnerable egg, so fragile that foreign thoughts had to be repelled to protect the egg from shattering, as though the person’s consciousness were shaky and unstable and could shatter apart and fall down.
While interesting in an abstract way, Goines saw that consciousness was too multifaceted and complex to be captured in circles or spheres or eggs, whatever use might be made of them in painting or poetry.
| Copyright © 2019 by Moristotle |
Agreed that consciousnesses are more complicated than to be accurately represented by geometric shapes, nevertheless the concept, to put abstract, esoteric relationships into simpler terms as a tool to pry some insight from the world, is valid, in my humble opinion. More on Curbe, an interesting, and seemingly two-dimensional personality, an idealogue whose ideology has built-in protections from discordant data. The idea of those lines "just bouncing off" one who automatically refuses to consider a differing opinion as possibly valid is one very valuable insight from the "geometry lesson".
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