⩩ 5
How little we know each other! What we see and learn of each other on the street, at school, at work, is not a person but a cross-section of one, a cardboard image, something static, flat, without depth or interest. And given the urgency of our own needs, our investment and absorption in our plans and goals, how could it be otherwise? Our attention is busy laying out our path going forward in a hundred places. We do not see each other; we don’t have the time. Or rather, we see each other only as much as we need to get around each other, to get what we need from each other. We run perpendicular to each other. We icebergs! We ants! We are like spheres that can only touch at a single point, and the rest of our volume does not come into play. Therefore the monumental importance of conversation in human life. Our relations to others are pictured in passing on the street, one person brushing by the other: conversation is stopping, turning around, going with, the person bringing you into their home, bringing them into yours.
I don’t mean any exchange of words. I mean an exchange that has listening as a moment, genuine listening, listening with the whole self. When we listen in this way, there is nothing we need to do, nowhere we need to be. More, there is no one we need to be: we don’t need to defend ourselves, to justify some odd thing we did or to see ourselves praised. In fact, we don’t need to be seen or heard in our own right at all, and for the time we even forget we exist. For ourselves we don’t exist, except insofar as we hear. We are all ears, all audience. Our attention is given in its entirety to what is being talked about, to what the person has seen and is now setting before us, to this voice, a miracle, an incomprehensibility, the earth and air themselves from nothing, and a form born live breathing dancing and singing from them, god or a part of god. And now they fill up the world. They are infinite. And for the time there is a population of one, or two: their voice and our ears, our understanding, our questions.
What results is a turning activity. We turn from what we have seen, experienced, know, to what they’ve seen, experienced, know, enlisting to that end all our powers. We listen not only to the words but the tone, the mood they breathe, the expressions of their hands, eyes and brow. As much as the words we hear the silences. We are patient. When they use phrases we have heard before, we don’t jump to thinking we know what they mean for that reason: we strive to know not what others meant but what they mean in using them. We allow new uses. We don’t put them in a box, under a label; we have no use for secondhand names and titles. Above all we take our time. We are slow, slow to speak, slower to interrupt, still slower to judge: we simply assume for the time that this person is a source of truth, if only we can understand them.
This is a process without finish. When we meet each other here, endless, free of time, moved by infinite interest in what is, we meet a friend at the top of Mount Olympus. The conversation is infinite. It is about the whole. When you lift a quilt it doesn’t matter which corner you take or what patch you grab: keep drawing and you lift the whole thing. We want to understand what, at bottom, does this person want? What is the character of the world they dwell in? — and we, since we dwell together, and understanding them requires bringing into play everything we know and laying it side by side with what they are saying. So every answer, every sentence, raises five more questions and the continuation of the conversation is guaranteed. The only question is: which to ask next?
And so the problem of managing this great flow of ideas, of organizing conversation. Or who hasn’t felt this problem, — and dreamed its solution? Overwhelmed by the thoughts, intrusions, doors, who hasn’t caught a delicious glimpse of true conversation, graceful, stately, ordered? Where nothing is overlooked, nothing forgotten, everything in its place? Where we see and are seen in our entirety, where everything is known or we are on our way there, fully touching, the occupation of one by two?
I have that dream, and here is what I take from it. What we are missing is a sensitivity to, a language for conversation. We don’t know what to talk about when. Starting talking about one thing, another comes up and we go off after it and lose the first; or, sticking to the first, we lose the one that came up. There are therefore two signs that are essential to conversation. A flag is set down where a door, a second path appears and is not followed; and when you go through it, straying from the first for the time, you go into a footnote. The two signs are two sides of one fact, one decision, a juncture along the way. Their function is to externalize conversation, to make us pay attention to it as such, to help us to become aware of its structure by naming its parts and making a record of it, thereby putting handles on it, shared handles, giving us something to hold on to, to return to, to count, to account for and perhaps to disagree about.
A shoutout to my collaborator Danny at breakfastswerved, who not only created a drawing in tandem with this essay but has done the same for each previous letter in this series. If you haven’t seen them, check them out. You can find them here.
Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Did it make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Do you have another angle on the topic? Leave a comment.
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I really love this entry G, in part because I was privileged to have heard some of the evolution of these ideas and because you have shaped them into a stronger, more cogent argument for the value of the markers or signs of essential conversation. Although I was not previously, I am now sold on this idea of markers and eagerly look to an opportunity for you and I to intentionally add flags and/or footnotes to our next conversation. I think it will be tricky to accomplish, but worth the effort.
I also want to add another thought. I think conversations with the kind of intentionality you describe in Audience are especially challenging because they require both the motivation to be a better listener and also the repertoire to do so. Your fine musings have the potential to inspire the motivation needed to take on such a challenge and your markers add what may prove to be useful tools in some instances, but I am suspicious that once we commit ourselves to giving up needing “to be seen and heard in our own right,” many of us are still without the essential tools needed to listen and hear, such as summarizing and reflecting the ideas and feelings being expressed while saying nothing more than that. Even asking questions has the potential to lure us back into thinking of our own next incisive question (and thereby succumbing to the need to be heard in our own right) rather that listening fully to and hearing what is being said right now by the speaker. Then again, if listening (and hearing) were easy, everyone would be doing it. : - )
I feel you, and I tend to approach conversations - at least the more important ones that won't or can't occur as often as I'd like - "prepared", with a checklist of topics I want to discuss with the other. But sometimes I wonder if it's worth the ensuing loss of spontaneity. Who knows where would we have ended up without it? Most likely nowhere - but still...