Altars and Others

There is me. There is you. We often ask "who am I?", perhaps to the detriment of the alluring question "who are you?" We ponder at length on the nature of the self. Perhaps because it is beautifully infuriating that the we can perplex ourselves to such a degree; or maybe because philosophy is ultimately narcissistic (I like to blame Ayn Rand). We struggle at such lengths to understand the self, implying that the self is fundamentally impossible to understand. By logical extension, if the other is also a "self", then the other should be equally irreducible. So why then is the question "who are you?" usually satisfied by the return of a name, which is ultimately an arbitrary label?

We talk of borders. The border between east and west, the border between nations. The border between the id and the ego. I wish to look at the border between me and you--between the self and the other. Intersubjectivity looks at the way in which people interact, at the capability of people to interact. Why the divide? Is there only a "me" given that there is a "you"? Is there only a "we" insofar as there is a "them"?

My idea is, admittedly, somewhat abstract. Yet, were I to build an alter, it would include the following:
A MASK to represent the persona one fronts to others and the face that others perceive.
A SCRIPT to represent the disconnect between general conversation and meaningful dialogue.
An ID to represent the radical reduction and objectification.
A TINTED WINDOW to represent the seemingly invisible wall that separates individuals and skews their perceptions of each other.