empathy

Learned today about a phenomenon called sympathetic ophthalmia, which I initially thought would be more accurately called empathetic ophthalmia. Basically when one eye undergoes some kind of traumatic injury, weeks later the other eye will also become diseased, even without having been subjected to any injury. So this seems more like empathy, which involves experiencing on some level another entity's experience, instead of sympathy which is more like understanding from more distance. It also brings to the surface the self-detrimental component of empathy in its rawest form.

But there's more to it than that. The mechanism is thought to be that injury to the eye exposes the body to elements in the eye that it's not used to, so the body mounts an immune response against them. So this immune response attacks parts of the other eye, and it becomes inflamed and ill. I was struck by how the valiant inefficacy of this process. As so often happens, the ways our bodies try to protect themselves result in harm, and natural processes are ramped to the point to which they become unnatural.

It's also interesting how things exist in physical compartments in ourselves, such that one part of our body is completely foreign to another part. And kind of scared of each other, the way the body is freaked out by stuff in the eye that's always been there but that it's just never seen. A good chunk of diseases is about recognizing things that are simply in the wrong place; for example, nothing should cross the diaphragm that separates the chest from the abdomen. Sometimes when I'm learning about an organ I look down at myself and wonder at how close it is and yet how little I know about how it works and what it's doing at the moment.

With all the barriers, defenses, instincts, injuries, active and passive--empathy is not so easy, I think.