"It is the sense of touch, in a city you walk, you brush past people and people bump into you. In LA nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. It is that sense of touch. I think we miss that so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something."
The opening lines of Crash etched such an impression that the reverberations never quite left me - and I strongly doubt it ever will because it resounds in my own life.
We yearn to be loved and beyond the words we want to hear, we want to be touched. It isn't just about sensuality or sexuality - it is about the simplest of human connection and the warmth of another person. It is a language that is beyond signification, beyond the signifier and signified because it embodies itself love.
And it isn't about eroticism ...
It is a simple need to be touched - to be held; we needed it when we were infants, growing toddlers; what makes us believe that we can no longer do without it? Why do we no longer touch? Why is every act of touch perceived as a sexual assault? Why is the attempt to hold another. regardless of gender, an erotic gesture?
Is this the source of alienation in modernity? Is this the root of why our lives just run rapidly by and we brush against one another never quite making a connection - even those we claim to love?
Yet sometimes when we try to extend that sense of touch to those we love, they turn it away ...
Is this the reason why suicides have increased, why families are breaking up, why marriages fail, why the homeless are on the rise, why there are more criminals on the street, why the numbers in teenage reform homes are increasing ... why some of us choose to just stay solitary because the pain of losing a loving touch is too much to bear?
Why are we so afraid then to touch? What do we fear?
We fear that we will not be touched in return ... And so we hide behind metal and glass to keep ourselves safe.
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