why the fuck does it hurt so much when she doesn't reply to my texts? seems dumb
It hurts because you want it to.
Think about animals. They fall into two categories: those with rights and those without. Animals without rights exist at our pleasure, and we take it to be our right to do to them whatever we want. Microbes, fleas, mosquitoes, spiders, locusts, lobsters, snakes, pheasants, turkeys, pigs, cattle, etc. All of these can be killed or bred or crushed into fertilizer at our pleasure.
Animals with rights are pets. These are things like cats, dogs, cute pigs, horses, certain sharks, some dolphins and most whales. These animals are pets whether we have tricked them into living in our houses or allowed them to remain alive in the habitat to which they are indigenous. (It goes without saying that the Earth is simply taken to be humanity’s largest house and the charismatic animals that we protect by this fiction simply high-caste housepets.)
Anyway the point is that animals exist by and large for us. This is because humanity is a meddlesome trait. If there is an arrangement of matter in the world you can trust us to try and fuck with it. Domesticated animals are an excellent example of this tendency and the degree to which we cannot help ourselves. For instance, the most profitable breed of turkey, something called the Broad Breasted White, has been so effectively bred for meat that its gigantic breast muscles keep the sexual opening of the male from contacting that of the female. Hence every single turkey you have ever eaten has been the ultimate product of a person holding a hen upside down between his knees and injecting sperm into her vagina with a pneumatic gun. This is what happens when the index finger of the human mind cannot resist probing the velvet curtain of present possibility for a hole through which the future can pour.
I think that animals show what we do to the external world and represent what we do to the internal world: what we do to ourselves.
Shy or not, gregarious or not, your mind is an outward facing thing. Try imagining even the most abstract sequence of thought without the concepts captured in phrases like “what’s before us” or “put that out of your mind.” It is nearly impossible to imagine thinking at all without the concepts that these phrases represent (here, what you need to focus on and what you can forget.) This is because the mind thinks of itself as an indivisible point and one in relation to which all movement of body or thought is defined (forward progress, for example, is when we move “ahead.”)
Now how is the mind supposed to interact with itself when it is an indivisible point? Rather than worry about the fact that this is all a fiction we tell ourselves to keep from turning inward, we start to meddle. In this way other people (who presumably feel at least as self-contained and point-like in their perspectives as ourselves) become the subject of our manipulation. When we manipulate other people we are generally making them into mirrors by which we can know ourselves. This is a good rule of thumb for understanding casual interactions but it is like a law of physics when it comes to intimate ones.
Our dominion over animals was meant to reflect the dexterity of our minds. In actual fact this dominion simply shows off the dazzling clumsiness that appears when we think we know just what we’re doing. We dismiss this essential clumsiness as merely another problem to solve and so sleep through the lesson that artificially inseminating millions of turkeys every year would teach any sane species. Likewise, the lights we shine on ourselves tend either to melt or to cast into shadow the parts of ourselves it would be inconvenient to see. And so the realizations we have about ourselves are like mice: fugitive, seen by accident, and very difficult to grasp.
In the end, it doesn’t hurt because she hates you but because in the particular mirror that you’ve made of her it makes sense that she would.
The real question is why this makes sense to you.
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