Coffee Talk
It's raining in Connecticut, what else is new? I've gotten up at a respectable hour, why you ask, to work on my Nelson paper, of course, silly rabbit. But I've left myself this little window of time (before I leave to get my haircut) that is good for little more than drinking coffee, selecting a few quotes, and blogging instead of papering. Just the same, I think I've come up with a clever angle, say a little bit about everything and say a lot about nothing. It seems to have gotten me this far, and well, a class where the final paper is the sole grading criteria, you need to prove that you've ingested what's been thrown at you, articulate it back, with dedication, comprehensiveness, and breadth. I spewed out quite a bit last night so perhaps having it done tomorrow won't be an impossibility. Mom and Dad are going to some fancy Christmas party tonight and I am sure I can count on Kristin to bring up the social life - so a house to myself, a coffee machine, Aristotle, Oakeshott, and a notebook and a half of notes. I am all set.
I've been contemplating writing a speech for Feb graduation. It's basically an open contest, submit your speech, read it before a committee and they'll pick a winner. It's weird because speaking before this audience is really artificial. I haven't done much in terms of interacting with the people in my graduating class and I wonder if any of them even know who I am. Just the same, it's my graduation, I've done a lot for Midd, I did the Feb orientation bit, and I am capable of delivering a decent speech, provided I have some time over break to spend on this. Plus, they are a bunch of shlubs and I don�t really care to hear anyone else in my dumb feb class talk anyway.
This prospect was weighing on me on my drive home on Tuesday while I was mulling over the idea of conversation - informed by Oakeshott � and this whole idea of the liberal arts serving as initiation into the conversation of humanity. But anyway, while I was driving, I got to thinking about secret languages and the vast multitude of discourse going on, all the time, around us. Driving down the highway through Massachusetts, it's every man for himself. Cars whizzing past, no one stops to help one another. I found myself a little jealous of truckers with their CB radios because they seem to have an unfair advantage; an advocate on the self-help (in the Hobbesian sense) highway, someone to confirm ambiguous directions, recommend a good pit stop for apple pie and clean bathrooms, or even just answer back when you ask a question. These are perhaps the most important things one needs to know in life, after all. Dialogues prove that there is life beyond the self - this is reassuring. But I started thinking about secret languages, secret conversations, invisible to the naked eye, particularly those that excluded me. But the vast majority of conversations are secret, private, in a language I don't understand for any number of reasons. One reason might simply be that I never bothered to study the grammar and accent, another might be geographic - I am too far away - out of earshot, and maybe another has to do with the basic conception of empathy - we never understand how it is for other people, despite their attempt to explain it to us.
We're all in different places, physically and cognitively. We each wear a watch that signifies our desire to personalize abstract time and make it our own. We all start at a different time and we each are racing toward our own finish line. Anyway, so my point is that conversation seems futile because conquering the divides between people is such an awesome obstacle. We're all speaking our own languages into the night air. I will grant that we've agreed upon a common dialect to conduct business transactions, but as for the important things, we�re jabbering on and on and no one�s bothered to publish a dictionary.
In this messy race toward progress, perhaps the most we can ever hope for is a jogging buddy, someone to run beside, in step, for a length of strides. Maybe when we keel over with an inevitable cramp - someone else is hurting too, or at least someone who has pulled a hamstring before, pauses their own race to show us a stretch or two. Then they carry forward and we search for our pace again.
With that, there are two basic forces that operate on everything just about all of the time - entropy and synthesis. Breaking apart or coming together. Gravity and natural decay pick away at our bodies, making things sluggish and tired. When challenged by inevitable expiration, you can submit and resign yourself to what is inevitable, or you can commit yourself to synthesis. It takes more work. It's going uphill in roller-skates. By the purest definition, it is unnatural because it defies the entropic breakdown of nature. As for those who believe in and work for synthesis, they have fallen victim to the magic of magnets, attraction, the invisible ties that bind. The attractive ones, for them it's too easy to go it alone and so much better to be strong, bound, and united. There seem to be so many real obstacles that come between us, visible ones � like walls, borders, race, languages, generation gaps, digital divides � these are real, tangible, things. In spite of all of this, it�s amazing that that invisible ties manage to zip through poles and we come together, even though there isn�t a scientific logic why we can overcome natural processes of entropy and expiration.
I want to draw a distinction between conversation and communication. Moreover, just because we currently have the means to communicate with one another with unprecedented speed and access, it doesn't mean that the quality of that communication has improved in any way or that we�re any closer to an universal human language. What's the point of being able to reach someone if you are too busy, over committed, and multi-tasking to engage in anything resembling an important, honest, or telling exchange? What�s the point if we�ve replaced honesty with defense mechanisms? Ruling out practical benefits like scheduling meetings or quickie directions, what good are cell phones and blackberries? Email sometimes masquerades as an old-fashioned �what I am doing these days� letter - but we've left off the signature, the font is too generic to ever replace the uniqueness of a voice, and these emails are often so few and far between, they don't properly fit the nature of the medium. We seem to be a nation addicted to communication access � families share cell phone plans instead of sharing dinner table conversation. The whole notion behind this presupposes that the modern family can only be connected through invisible channels � the physical ones are pass�.
I think we've gotten very caught up in the "doing" - and I don't think it fits to say that one "does" conversation - one does the laundry or does an expense report - one doesn't so much do conversation. We�ve discarded the notion that something worth doing for its own sake is the highest activity. If what you do is only with the hope of getting something in return, we forget that there is value in doing something for yourself, but you stand to gain by sitting, listening, talking � there is a value in conversation. And this experience of education is initiation into a world that values communication over conversation. I think we�ve already forgotten how to listen, we�re on the verge of forgetting why we come together, and we�ve always been unable to slow down time and make the important things last. Put these things together � we aren�t superheroes, we never were, but in the process of wanting to be something extra-human, something that doesn�t sleep or tire and seems to hold down the impossible, we�re losing human essence in the process.
Anyway, this rant / oration isn't finished, it�s not so much a speech, it�s not so much my Nelson paper, I think it�s just an observation on the lousy state of affairs and where our priorities seem to be slumping off to. I think I've been prompted to think about how you compel people to commit themselves to synthesis.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:00 AM
