I am suddenly struck by how much of our media works hard to evoke reaction in us through emotion, but also through a process not entirely like the triggering of mirror-neurons. I suddenly saw us as ‘the mirror-neuron society’, jerking in rejection and cooing in intimacy as the rain of signals given to us by images of other beings in hyperbolic circumstances engulfs us. Not just images of humans, either. When we see animals, our imaginations flare. And this is no accident. Our imaginations were born seeing flowing water, sky, animals, and living places.

Ryan drew my attention to the fact that animals often represent our first exposure to categories (plants may share this distinction). Of course, faces, too are a primary catalyst for imaginal flare. And thus it is no accident that we find each other fascinating (the word almost implies faces), nor that we might invent ways to remain distant or distinct, and through these ways establish a confused but peculiarly powerful sort of reductivistic symbiosis. The idea of one another feeds and catalyzes our imaginations; perhaps more dramatically when we have no actual contact. We no longer really ‘need’ to know each other… we know, instead, the attractive projections that our distance has established ‘in our name’.