14th
The Power of Names
When you name something, you own it. When you assign a symbol to something previously without, you have created meaning. Part of the loneliness of growing older is that as we become increasingly more complex and specialized, the vocabulary for modeling our shared cognitive landscape becomes increasingly scarce to the point where it’s hard to ask a person what you hold in common.
The purpose of good conversation is to discover these shared boundaries. In describing your intuitive thoughts, you struggle to model them in cumbersome phrases and paragraphs; discussions peppered with deep pauses, “uhms,” and “ahhs” are my joy. To agree with someone that you feel some way; the mutual struggle to define and name it — like two ancient hunters exhausting prey — is a bonding experience.
Sadly, most of my conversations are far more mundane. They are information-seeking or persuasive or jocular in nature. It is hard to talk about deeply-held values and beliefs. Partly because the issues are touchy and the context never quite right, and partly because most people prefer to tame their lawns rather than their psychic landscape. But it is such a unshakable need to share and feel connected, most people inadvertently reach out anyway.
We create online communities, sports leagues, book clubs. And we talk and talk but still feel lonely. The problem with most of this is that talk is limited to the shallowest of those present. The meek shall rule the earth and the simple shall dominate the conversation. Arguments always devolve to the lowest common denominator, at least in the case of vocabulary. Academics may invent increasingly nuanced ways of expressing themselves in their own circles, but as soon as you place one in front of a television audience, they become a babble of incoherence, struggling to find shared ground.
The most courageous of us dive full-heartedly into the fray, breaking complexity into increasingly simple building blocks, losing small amounts of meaning in each iteration. The meekest of us give up the game, choosing to live in their self-contained intellectual towers. I feel unhappy with both approaches. The former seems to be such a waste of time: a perfect storm of sound and fury. The latter quickly loses touch with the reality it sought to model: keeping out the riffraff also deters the stray wiseman.
So I bide my time and sharpen my wit, shaping and defining more of my own psychic landscape. Writing is a conversation with oneself, the pen etching out questions and the mind carefully answering. And in staking out territory, if someone else stumbles upon the same land, the signs shall announce: “Come all ye weary travelers, for we offer sojourned shelter and a lay of the land. Nothing human is foreign to us — homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto — for I hunger for the unfamiliar.”
