On Creating Symbols

Body Odor? Eczema? Gas?She's a sex symbol. What exactly does that mean? According to Tuan us crazy human beings become attached to the abstract by creating symbolic meaning. A nation, a state, a celebrity, a political figure. Why do we attach such symbolic importance to these things even though we have never had a complete sensory experience of them? Tuan writes, " An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the sense as well as with the active and reflective mind" (18). So does that mean that the millions of Americans who proudly support their country are clinging to an intangible concept? If one hasn't experienced the entire nation sensorily with an active and reflective mind, then how does one know what they are really supporting? To be honest, though fascinating, Tuan's writing is at times dense and I find myself lost in contradictions, my own mind tumbling and turning over his theories and hypotheses. I found that his chapter Space, Place and the Child, simplified the rest of his writing for me. It is a lot easier to understand how an adult relates to space and place if we can understand where we began and how we transformed from one to the other. Tuan's explanation of an infant or small child's relationship to space and place goes beyond psychology and child development. He explains how a child begins to attach importance to places and objects and why. The mother is identified as the first "place" recognized by an infant. I believe that the identification of mother as place is probably one of the few times in a human being's life that place and identity will meld on such a level. However this brings up an interesting question of people as places. Not only can humans relate a person very closely with a place, but a person can be a space and place in his or herself. Is this why we create symbols out of people we have never met? Seeing a TV celebrity or movie star in real life is always a surreal experience because we have let ourselves believe that we know something or everything about this person, whereas we forget that we have not had a complete sensory experience of the person. Once we have encountered to celebrity on the street or in a restaurant, we often feel let down, or relieved by the fact that, he or she is just a regular person. In the same vein, we often fantasize about remote or exotic places that we have seen on TV and in tourism brochures, but these brochures cannot give us the total experience of the place - the temperature, the smells and anything else remotely unpleasant that would never appear in a tourist brochure.Mosquitos? Humidity? Sand in your shorts? I think of my own experiences encountering a place or person who had previously been a symbol in my imagination. There is almost a feeling of having been deceived, but by who? We deceive ourselves by not placing enough importance in our senses other than sight. Because the human race is so reliant on our eyes sight, we don't always ask ourselves questions about what something might sound like or feel like or smell like, yet when we are confronted with something that does enable all of these senses, these sensations are surprisingly relevant to our experience. Why do we forget about them?