“Communication”
We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.” In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”
“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.
All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us. While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well. As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.
Pitch, tone, palate and respiration. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax. Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body. I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!
Amaze and astound, in no particular order. As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.” Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.
There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it. And yet. “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response. And then. What becomes. Responsibility. Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too. Kind of equals.
So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth. It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.
I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him. “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.
Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”
I just wanted to mention…
“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”
-Lyn Hejinian-
Illuminating exploration. I particularly love the first sentence. And Hejinian’s spot-on and elegant quotation… Thank you.
thanks for reading!