Not to get too heady on you or anything, but I've always been mystified and mortified by the uneasy connection between what goes in our heads, silently, and how these ephemeral thoughts actually connect to the world, audibly. We think stuff, then say shit. Words are thus formed straight from the intangible fabric of brain cells colliding. You react, based on sound-signals you decipher according to your own unwritten rules of consciousness-comprehension. And we then assemble this uncanny interplay of human interaction under the rather harmless-sounding rubric of mere 'coversation'. A give-and-take that we're so used to in life that we think nothing of it. Granted, we constantly consider the content of what's aurally bopping back-and-forth in our dialogues, and we're 'reading' body-language, and facial signals, but the second-nature aspect of the exhange itself starts to get a bit creepy if you dwell on it for too long. On a rotating globe, screaming through space, we stand next to each other and shoot the shit about sports. That this passes for commonplace stuff still makes me uneasy.
Why? I guess it goes back to the kind of boring, circular arguments that dwell on free will and its ultimate form. How can we say we 'control' the thoughts that we think? How can you pretend to be 'in charge' of what arises in your brain and exits on your tongue? Genetics is one thing, and environment is another, but cram these two existential entrails together in life and what comes out is just us -- an awkward, perpetually defensive organism that values our stake in the world, even if we had no say in its roots.
We always have to prove that we are 'right', which I sometimes try to look at in evolutionary terms. Me no understand diddly-squat about evolution, per se, but there must be something inherent in our in-built survival mechanisms that will not readily allow us to admit that we're wrong. To hesitate, to doubt oneself, to be slow on the uptake when it comes to our own stand -- this would have, in the past, led to us being eaten. Devoured, pretty damny quickly. So now we've evolved into the kind of creatures that will brutally hurl insults strangers on chatboards over the artistic worth of a comic-book sequel because we secretly fear that we're probably wrong. Were our evolutionary forebearers somehow able to understand lanugage, and were I try to connect their own impulses to stay confident in the face of other-animal danger, and somehow, via my argument, have them intellectually link that notable and sensible state of ego-aggrandizement in the face of certain death with the current practictioners of internet-slurs, I'm pretty positive that these proto-pre-humans would take a long, sad, pitiful look at me before bashing my head in and dining out on my spleen. ("This is what we're evolving into?" they'd be thinking as they chowed down on my skull.)
Japanese has a concept known as 'iishin-denshin', which essentially means a group-form of mind-reading. Because this is a consensus-country, with everyone trying to ape all the others, the masses have developed a form of telepathy founded upon what's behind all those words. My own observation of this idea in various forms over the years has kind of led me to rethink my own notions of a single 'personality' as our defacto form. (Or norm. ) In the West, we expect the individual to be unique and creative and a lifeform all its own; in the East, in a collective culture, it's no surprise that a mono-personality is formed, an integration into others that creates fascinatingly broad ranges of expression, yet perhaps at the expense of individual 'uniqueness'. The West: Be different! The East: Be the same! One state leads to constant one-upmanship to sooth the ego; the other can tend to stifle distinct ways of thought. Viewed critically, from afar, you could say that humans have not truly found the ideal way to deal with each other. We grope as we can, based on where we come from, then gradually realize as we age that the cultural-system we inhabit has silently hooked us in to its style without so much as even asking if we'd like a cold drink.
What I'm saying is that not I dislike humans (because that would be, you know, pyschotic), or the way in which we communicate with each other; I'm saying I still don't think we've perfected, or even reasonably amplified, what it is that we feel nanosecond-by-second as we think in our heads, and how we could (or should) transmit these emotions to other humans in tow. Layers of family, and environment, and education, and time, make for an awkward collusion that results in our poorly shaped 'selves'. Extract said 'self' from its natural habitat and let it loose in the wider-shaped world, and it's no wonder that stagnant or hostile interactions can seem like life's norm.
Yet there's also all that other stuff, like kindess, and empathy, and humour, or love. We daily sense these other smelly organisms around us attempting to step out of their heads and into our own, whether it's via a joke or a smile or a good-natured slap on the back. All these simple, life-affirming pokes. I have to remind myself to see them, and notice them, and return them in turn, because it makes me appreciate that getting out of our own skulls can be actually be done. I guess it's not an imperative, this exiting-one's-own-mind-in-the-attempt-to-acknowledge-another, because people still can live a fairly fresh life catering to their own inward needs, but the warm grasp an old friend's firm hand, or a store-door held open for you as you dawdle along can, at the right times,when your private thoughts are all dark, make the endlessly fragile meeting of our minds seem almost worth it.
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