Solipsism and Interconnectivity

I.

I’m trying to say that nothing feels real. Moments come and go and fade away. Memories seem like dreams, I can almost see myself in them, like a different person. Sometimes reality even seems implausible, sometimes while sitting, looking, talking, I feel the world tilt back away from me, glaze over like a dream. I’m never quite certain if I’m awake.

I’m trying to say that I feel sometimes incredibly disconnected from all that is around me, as if I’m floating through life without touching it. People sometimes seem impossibly distant, impossibly different creatures. I don’t understand the things they do, or why we all behave in this kind of shadowy secret way, as if we don’t have innards. I wonder why it’s not okay to show more. I feel like words are often inadequate for expression—thoughts are so much more than words, they are multi-dimensional experiences that mix up bodily feelings, senses of all types, goals, dreams, hopes, conjectures, memories… And I’m often frustrated by my inability to access the experience of others, and by my inability to share myself, my experience, my thoughts, my inner world, with others. Misunderstanding is a human condition. When a series of events produces a reaction within me, I want it to be touched and held and seen and understood and validated by others. That rarely happens. This makes me feel dismissive. This makes me feel achy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

There is some comfort, but also horror in the idea of solipsism. I am the only thing, just one long thought process blossoming into a complicated, colorful word within which I’ve built a place for a concept of self. Sometimes time feels jumpy, like I’m being plopped down into different settings and manipulated into interacting with varied, imaginative stimuli, just to produce feeling, to test the limits of the imagination, the boundaries of the big, sustained thought process which is the only thing, ever.

Sometimes I feel that way, but more often I guess I feel like we are isolated little units, blundering into each other with no hope of communication. Not only is language inadequate, it’s incredibly personal. A word is a only a symbol, attached to which are a series of experiences, and these will never, ever match up. Maybe this isn’t solipsism in a pure sense, but I think it relates to Gorgias’ idea that even if something exists, and even if something could be known about it, knowledge can’t be communicated to others.

II.

Despite all of this, though, communication does occur, at least to some to immeasurable degree. We can relate symptoms of physical pain, for example, and diagnose illness. We can meet for lunch at 2 ‘o clock. We can even listen to the same haunted notes and cry. And sometimes, quite often, despite the fact that we try so hard to present an outer idea of self and conceal our inner world, the inner world leaks out, and we study each others actions, personalities, histories, and come up with sometimes accurate conclusions. How?

All this makes me feel the opposite of alone; it makes me feel intrinsically connected to everything. It makes me feel as if we are not individual selves but fleshy pieces of a huge, breathing organism, something universal and communicative. Perhaps words are inadequate, but we seem to be communicating through out pores and veins, through our irises and our nerves.

These are the things I’m trying to say. These are the sensations I’m trying to convey. The words are inadequate, but I hope I am transmitting something.

Disclaimer of sorts: I know pretty much nothing about solipsism or Gorgias. These are just thoughts that I had brewing in me today, after watching Solipsist and reading a very small bit about the idea of solipsism. They are also probably influenced by reading excerpts of Emerson's essays on Nature.