Distance, Intimacy, Exposure

Language refers to, but cannot contain, unspoken understandings.  It cannot kiss, it does not make eye contact.  Without the immediacy of exposure, a new kind of intimacy arises, one that permits a different kind of understanding: distance frees the creative mind by removing it from the immediacy of others.

If we trail back to my last post: between me and my cats, a million unspoken understandings.  Between me and the humans I love, the same; but here there is a difference.  My human relationships are never uncomplicated existential truths based upon unspoken understandings.  There is a constant need to clarify meaning, and what is true on one occasion may easily be false or very differently applied on another. These human relationships are complicated card houses built on an intricate system of construction, recognition, and validation.  My brain struggles, (as it appears to me) against reason, to understand these constructs and their necessity.  Humans expect to be defined as much by "how" as by "who": the pretense of our social identities, of many-layered associations between objects and ideological systems, makes the understanding of humans and their choosings very difficult.

It is impossible to untangle humans from their language...but it is possible to grab hold of their moments when they are mediated through text.  In writing, all of the relationships, structures of understanding, and references are exposed to the analytic capacity of the reader, who can give off no unintentional signs to the speaker which might change the mode or context of meaning.  Through distance, intimacy with the speaker becomes possible.  Through distance, there is no immediate exposure to scrutiny, paranoia, anxiety, confusion, or sensory inundation.

Of course, the reader may still choose intimacy with text over intimacy with the author.  This is accomplished by the way that we extract meaning from relations; as soon as the words are removed from the speaker's context and placed within the reader's frame of reference, they take on a new life.  A beautiful sunrise, the morning of one human's story, reminds another of the death of a friend, or a place they'd rather not revisit.

Have I reversed myself here?  Is it possible to speak to a human the same way as cat, who does not struggle  to choose from a thousand possible meanings before crying at her bowl?  And if it were, would the majority of us wish it to be so?  What part of us lives in this choosing?

This brings me back to my original point: language refers to, but cannot contain, unspoken understandings.  Language does not experience, but references our experiences.  Its metamorphoses of meanings translate and refract those of human beings, allowing intimacy through distance, exposing the struggle of humans to construct meaningful identities without anything solid to hold onto.

The unspoken understanding, the empathy of text, resides in its referential nature; it allows us to connect with the generative processes of construction.  In this way, we can connect to the shared experience of being under construction, of trying to make and share meaning among creatures who are constantly overexposed (and often in western culture simultaneously isolated).  Thus our unspoken understanding is carried by speech, hidden in the struggle to find truth and make truth at the same time.

A Brief Introduction

"I grok, you grok, the happy green grass groks....thou art god!" - Robert A. Heinlein

My cats and I have agreements.  On the stairs, I walk to the right, and they walk to the left.  We negotiate.  Love before typing, but only for five minutes.  If they ask for food, they get it.  If I ask for them, I get a pile of fur, no questions asked.  When people ask who I live with, I count them.  They are persons, residents of my weird kingdom--an indeterminate number of humans, two cats, and a million unspoken understandings.

These understandings are where meaning is made, the meaning that art tries to speak.  It is the connectedness of life, the way that warmth seeks warmth.  I know the boundaries of myself only so that I can find my way to others, much as light delivers the world to the human eye.  All of humankind's best discoveries revolve around light: fire, electricity, biological possibility.

I would like to uncover this light with my curiosity, awaken it with my imagination.  I would like to walk bravely into the existential crises of our species and connect with our dreams and our demons, our politics and our poetry and the moments that wake us up in the middle of the night, burning with life.

Ignorance begets fear, and fear begets hate; open minds make way for open hearts.

I would like to push the limits of myself, so as not to be trapped in a skin-sized prison of my own making, our own making, by crawling out of the earth made word by my mind, and letting my voice become light, finding the world by sending it out into the battle.

This is not a religious journey.  I do not have a camp.  I speak for no nation, no sect, no cult.  I speak for speaking.  I speak beyond the idea of superiority, the necessity of reductive binary systems.  I will shout down the wall between myself and the other; we will dance in circles until the world spins...the world doesn't need to be told what it needs.  I will give myself and you will take what you like, as is always the case.

This is a place of boundary work--rants, fiction, poetry, thoughts--voices like light, questions to drill airholes where I fear I might suffocate beneath the weight of ugliness and shock, dead bodies and and hate laws, dictatorships of the mind.

I know, somewhere, there is real choice: not for or against, not with or without, but a being with other beings that can unlock us from our self made cages.  Do not reduce me to tree-hugging, rationalism, spiritualism, or cut me up with any other dichotomous ism --I am, simply, myself--another voice from underground.