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kate_schaeferI've been posting in my own LiveJournal for a year now, a year today. I don't post every day; sometimes I'll let a month go between posts.
It's an odd thing, living even this much of one's life out in the open where strangers can see it and misinterpret it. Those who know me, of course, have far more context in which to misinterpret anything I write.
I used to know someone who said that all attempts at communication fail; that is, no matter what message one person tried to get across to another, no matter what method used for the communication attempt, the full communication would not make it; some meaning would be lost. We're always all alone in our heads. Even something as simple as please pass the salt? I asked. Especially something as simple as please pass the salt, he said. And because of this loss of meaning, we're all of us lying, all the time, no matter how hard we try to tell the truth. I'm lying as I say this to you now, he said, and you're lying right back to me.
There is, of course, a loss of meaning in my relating this long-ago conversation. I've edited out the things that I don't remember, the things I didn't hear at the time, the things I didn't grasp clearly then, edited them out without even thinking about them. They've always been lost to my memory, since they never got into it. I've left out the back and forth that I know we went through; I've left out the variations on the conversation we had over the course of months, wherein I tried to get closer to understanding what he meant. Did he understand a difference between deliberately saying a thing known not to be true while wanting the person hearing it to believe it to be true, which is what I think of as lying, and saying something that one mistakenly believes to be true but which is not, and again, saying something which one believes to be true but which is incomplete? Yes, he understood those differences, but all of them were still lies, as was trying to tell the complete truth.
I was never sure if I really heard him say that because everything everyone says is definitionally a lie, there is no more moral opprobrium attached to a deliberate lie as conventionally defined than to any other statement. We circled around that idea in several conversations; it seemed as though the closest he got to a definite statement on the subject was not to deny it, but then he'd point out that by his definition I still didn't know what he meant by denying or not denying anything.
He was right, of course. He was also deliberately, obtusely, perversely wrong. When we say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are triangulating on an approximation, and we know it. We want to know those things that are germane to the matter at hand; we don't want to hear the witness's entire life story, no matter how whole that truth may be. Does that make the request for the truth so defined a lie? No, not as most of us define it, but yes, as he defined it.
It depends on what the meaning of is, is.
And what's my point here? I'm not getting to it yet, not just yet.
Many years ago, I had to take a prescription drug for several months which had the side effect of making me a little bit stupid and clumsy. There was no alternative to the drug, so I put up with it and apologized to the people around me. One of my friends reassured me that no one could tell the difference.
I was dismayed. No one could tell the difference? I could tell the difference; much of the intricate and entertaining inner life of my mind was missing. The delicate nuances of everything I had to think (and therefore to say) were flattened, so that the world I inhabited was much less interesting to me than the world I normally inhabit, but there was no difference to an outside observer.
And from these two anecdotes, about incomplete truth and incomplete thought, imperfectly presented, I arrive at LiveJournal, for incomplete narration. What do I write in LiveJournal? Whatever I feel like; whatever is at the top of my head when I begin to write; what I would write in a letter to a friend, barring personal content. What do I leave out? Most of what makes my life meaningful.
And what about you?
A later addition, because memory is faulty:
Glenn reminded me that what that conversation was about was not so much lying, although lying was part of the context, but manipulation: that all attempts at communication are really intended to manipulate the other person into doing something, and that the thing is usually hidden.
I find myself to be an unreliable narrator and go off to set some sleeves, knowing that the peculiarities of LJ make it unlikely that most people will see this addendum...
It's an odd thing, living even this much of one's life out in the open where strangers can see it and misinterpret it. Those who know me, of course, have far more context in which to misinterpret anything I write.
I used to know someone who said that all attempts at communication fail; that is, no matter what message one person tried to get across to another, no matter what method used for the communication attempt, the full communication would not make it; some meaning would be lost. We're always all alone in our heads. Even something as simple as please pass the salt? I asked. Especially something as simple as please pass the salt, he said. And because of this loss of meaning, we're all of us lying, all the time, no matter how hard we try to tell the truth. I'm lying as I say this to you now, he said, and you're lying right back to me.
There is, of course, a loss of meaning in my relating this long-ago conversation. I've edited out the things that I don't remember, the things I didn't hear at the time, the things I didn't grasp clearly then, edited them out without even thinking about them. They've always been lost to my memory, since they never got into it. I've left out the back and forth that I know we went through; I've left out the variations on the conversation we had over the course of months, wherein I tried to get closer to understanding what he meant. Did he understand a difference between deliberately saying a thing known not to be true while wanting the person hearing it to believe it to be true, which is what I think of as lying, and saying something that one mistakenly believes to be true but which is not, and again, saying something which one believes to be true but which is incomplete? Yes, he understood those differences, but all of them were still lies, as was trying to tell the complete truth.
I was never sure if I really heard him say that because everything everyone says is definitionally a lie, there is no more moral opprobrium attached to a deliberate lie as conventionally defined than to any other statement. We circled around that idea in several conversations; it seemed as though the closest he got to a definite statement on the subject was not to deny it, but then he'd point out that by his definition I still didn't know what he meant by denying or not denying anything.
He was right, of course. He was also deliberately, obtusely, perversely wrong. When we say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are triangulating on an approximation, and we know it. We want to know those things that are germane to the matter at hand; we don't want to hear the witness's entire life story, no matter how whole that truth may be. Does that make the request for the truth so defined a lie? No, not as most of us define it, but yes, as he defined it.
It depends on what the meaning of is, is.
And what's my point here? I'm not getting to it yet, not just yet.
Many years ago, I had to take a prescription drug for several months which had the side effect of making me a little bit stupid and clumsy. There was no alternative to the drug, so I put up with it and apologized to the people around me. One of my friends reassured me that no one could tell the difference.
I was dismayed. No one could tell the difference? I could tell the difference; much of the intricate and entertaining inner life of my mind was missing. The delicate nuances of everything I had to think (and therefore to say) were flattened, so that the world I inhabited was much less interesting to me than the world I normally inhabit, but there was no difference to an outside observer.
And from these two anecdotes, about incomplete truth and incomplete thought, imperfectly presented, I arrive at LiveJournal, for incomplete narration. What do I write in LiveJournal? Whatever I feel like; whatever is at the top of my head when I begin to write; what I would write in a letter to a friend, barring personal content. What do I leave out? Most of what makes my life meaningful.
And what about you?
A later addition, because memory is faulty:
Glenn reminded me that what that conversation was about was not so much lying, although lying was part of the context, but manipulation: that all attempts at communication are really intended to manipulate the other person into doing something, and that the thing is usually hidden.
I find myself to be an unreliable narrator and go off to set some sleeves, knowing that the peculiarities of LJ make it unlikely that most people will see this addendum...
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 02:27 am (UTC)I always tell the truth about what I feel.
There are of course some valid points to your old interlocutor's assertion. There's always something lost, and we DO live alone inside our own heads.
This had led me to the belief that even if we encounter intelligent life elsewhere in the universe we may very likely be unable to communicate with it. I mean, we're all bi-pedal, symmetrical mammals who are one of two sexes (yeah, exceptions noted) and we can't communicate very effectively with each other a lot of the time. How would we communicate with a silicon based, gender switching, irregular thingy? We sure haven't done too well with dolphins and whales and they're at least symmetrical, carbon based, mammals.
MKK
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 05:15 am (UTC)Are we actually trying to communicate with dolphins and/or whales? I know we train them and we track them, but do we try to talk to them? There must be somebody doing that somewhere... dunno if I want to Google it or just speculate wildly.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 05:06 pm (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 05:53 am (UTC)I hope you never have the experience I once had, of being told, "You're lying when you say you don't care for that music" (or book, but in this case it was music). "Everybody likes it. You're just trying to be a snob."
I don't remember what the exact piece was, but I remember what I'd said that triggered this. It was, "Like 90% of jazz, this does nothing for me."
no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 07:09 am (UTC)I think a lot of times when people say stuff like that - the "don't be a snob" response - they are thinking of other snobs they've known and are, in a way, fighting ghosts. "Eh, does nothing for me" is often a prelude to "It is inherently dumb, and people who like it have poor taste." [Jazz, romance novels, monster trucks... you name it.] So people get their backs up.
It also might be that they want to convey, "If you had a slightly different subset of knowledge to relate this experience too, like, knew all of music theory and etc. etc., you would understand what the jazz is saying and then possibly like it, but since you don't know the 'language' of it you can't reject the jazz-heads' judgement of it or say that they are fools who like crap." And are conveying it clumsily, furthering misunderstanding all around.
I think when it's done for real - "I know better than you do what you think" - it's evil. I particularly hate it when I encounter a psychoanalyst or an aura-reader, and feel grateful I'm not in their power.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 12:49 pm (UTC)No, I don't think that's what the person meant to convey, or he wouldn't have called me a snob. I think he was of the opinion that jazz is a popular music, that it's instantly appealing to everyone, and that if you say you don't like it you're an uptight liar. I see this kind of attitude a lot: for instance when I critique a popular but lousy movie, and am told "Why can't you just enjoy it?" when the point of the critique was that its lousiness made it unenjoyable.
Ironically, these days jazz is a snob elitist's music second only to classical, which is my music of choice. (These people probably doubt that I really like it; I'm just being a snob.)
"Eh, does nothing for me" is often a prelude to "It is inherently dumb, and people who like it have poor taste."
Not if it begins with "Eh," I wouldn't think. In my case it was no prelude, for I said nothing else, and my general reaction to the appeal of jazz is one of bafflement. If I'm going to denounce some kind of music, it'll be something else.
"You LIKE broccoli..."
That can often be, "You liked it the last time we had it" or "You said you liked it." Answers can be: 1) the child doesn't know what they like; 2) their tastes have changed unknown to themselves since last time; 3) it was fixed a different way last time; 4) they haven't conveyed that it's not that they don't like it per se, it's that they really don't want any right now. (We are talking about rather small children.)
My experience is that you get more "It's good for you" (irrelevant, and hard to believe of something that tastes repulsive) or "It's delicious" (i.e. my tastes are the entire world's) or "Eat it anyway" (the fascist approach).
no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 12:56 am (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 12:56 pm (UTC)If they were feelings about your personal tastes and preferences, those should be unarguable, though they might generate useful talk about why you feel that way, how he feels differently, whether you both match up with the world in general.
But on the other hand, I once had a business conversation about the print run for a book with someone who felt that her feelings, which she did not feel necessary to provide any explanation or justification for, took precedence over any established policies or procedures, educated guesses or other relevant thoughts about marketing, etc. That was just the way she felt and that was the end of it.