How I See Human Stuff (part m of n)
Sep. 27th, 2007 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwI feel as if mebbe I put the wrong foot in my mouth the other day while talking to someone and it tickled my brain enough to want to bend a usual impulse for me and try to explain. Usually I avoid doing this both on philosophical grounds and from the fact that my brain works weird.
So this weirdness is in how I see Human Stuff.
Which is that if you have to sit down with someone and Talk About A Relationship, or Talk About an Incident, it's because something has already gone wrong. No amount of talking will fix the previous understanding. At its best, talking is useful for generating a new understanding, or for demonstrating a continued willingness to try to come to understandings. But whatever the previous state of affairs is, having a Big Talk about it indicates that that state of affairs is dead as a dodo, never to return.
Obviously I didn't always see Human Stuff in this manner. I used to be big into Truth and so forth, and thought that people sat down to Talk their way to Truth, or something. Nowadays I've moved more to seeing Human Stuff and relationships both friend and other as being more Art than Truth. Not artifice, with its connotations of artificiality. But Art with a capital A. You know, ars longa, vita brevis and all that.
The incident that crystallized this view for me was last year, actually. I have this friend - a great lady in a lot of ways, but the ways she and I see the world? So very different. And there was one night when we very dramatically became close friends. Some years later / aka last year, I mentioned something about how draining and weird that night had been for me. Near Friendship Meltdown ensued, because the night wasn't draining for her. Her vision of why this night made us friends was so completely different from mine that we both had to backtrack wildly and not discuss it anymore.
I used to worry most about things like did I trust my friends (and boy I did a Humpty Dumpty on the concept of Trust, and overloaded that poor word), and was it Real Friendship or just acquaintanceship, and so forth. Ever since the big realization, I've tried to let that go. I try to ask myself what kind of art/structure the friendship builds rather than what the friendship is. For example some friendships are very task oriented - you're great friends to work on jewelry together, or to edit fiction together, or whatever. Other friendships are very situation oriented - you're great friends for talking about romance together, or for hanging out together when you're sad. But I realize that the nature of friendship isn't always reciprocal. Just because I consider Friend A to be a great task-friend because we have such fun making jewelry together, doesn't mean that is how Friend A sees it. Maybe Friend A just loves hanging with me when they're sad, and they come over and make jewelry with me because that's what I like to do and it distracts them from their sadness. The thing is that there is no way of knowing what our mutual perceptions of the roles we play in each others lives might be. All we can know is what we do with our actions and what we choose to articulate verbally. Sometimes Friend A might be really hurt if I characterized our friendship as task-oriented. That might to them demean the feeling they get out of the space and companionship. Or if I said to Friend A that I couldn't imagine burdening them with my company when I was sad, how would they feel if it was mostly when they were sad that they sought me out? Would they feel bitter? Resentful? Hurt and excluded? Maybe all this time they thought I was sad a lot when I was just making jewelry. Maybe they thought they were cheering me up with their visits and know that they know it's just about jewelry they don't want to come over anymore.
So the result of this is that I feel that if you have a good time hanging out with someone, and they have a good time hanging out with you, that the last thing you should ever do is discuss the groundings of the relationship. If at all possible, avoid this like the plague. Maybe it works differently for other people who see the world in more synchronizable ways, but for me it is always a route to badness. So for instance if after much long awkwardness a new comfortable relationship builds with someone - don't think this means it is now time to discuss the old awkwardness. There will never be a good time to discuss the old awkwardness. You have the option of enjoying the present pleasure and bearing the private weight of your own perception of past awkwardness until you can let that awkwardness go. Or you have the option of risking the current pleasure to attempt to build a new understanding, one piece of that understanding perhaps based on an examination of past awkwardness. But what you have in the relationship right now will absolutely be sacrificed, immolated, by the discussion of grounding principles. The meanings of a friendship are as complicated and connotative as the meanings of those anglo-saxon words in the OED with 20 page entries. Except they're actually being matched up with root-words in some other language by the use of a translator that makes Babelfish look like that actual brainwave fish in Douglas Adams novels. So it's all about the chaotic shifting 20 page entry for your feeling in your language being matched by a painfully crude algorithm to an equally subtle complicated 20 page entry for a different feeling in a different language that the other person speaks.
Up on the calm surface away from the groundings, we just carry on and grunt and wave our hands and drink coffee and give small gifts and tell each other how pleased we are by the gifts. Underneath is this vast chaotic oceanic multi-strung multi-dimensional something. And every time you try to have conversations about What a Relationship Means (and I don't mean just the sexual kind of romantic relationship - I mean any relationship - friend, family, school, work...) it is like you are reaching out and grabbing the other person and diving down into this drowning oceanic chaos with them. Both of you come back up shaken and changed. This can be a bonding experience in itself, like sky diving or other extreme sports. The two of you might resurface hand in hand going "look, wow, we survived that" then turn to each other and hug. Or you might be ripped apart to opposite shores by currents made up of stuff you can't even imagine. Or like drowning swimmers you might push against each other trying to rise to the surface for air. If you have certain kinds of personality disorders you might lure folks to the watersedge just to push them under - this is how I picture emotionally abusive people sometimes - like the lover in that ballad who asks the girl to strip at the water's edge so he can keep her clothes after he's drowned her.
My point is that you just don't know what you get when you go down there. And so if what you have with someone is good, it is better not to go there. Perhaps some people will find this cowardice, but I am all in favor of making the gamble if what you have is bad, or in danger of being lost. I just think it is foolish to plunge repeatedly into that current if what you have on the shore is already good. Make sand castles together. Collect shells. Run along the edges of the surf. But the full on riptide experience of trying to understand who another person is and what that means for your relationship with them - and trying to verbalize that understanding in a common language to each other?
A different part of what I mean is that the ocean is alien to us. That perception that we have of each other when we go digging for truth isn't any more real, isn't any more true, than the perception that we have over coffee and snacks and phone calls and postcards and small gifts. I actually, at this point in time, lean towards the feeling that it is less true. That the most useful definition of who we are and what we do and what it means is the liminal one. The people we are on the shore, the relationships we have as they appear on the surface, are more true and more important than the chaos within. It is the choices we make about how to turn that internal chaos into the complicated art of human interaction that define us within human society. They define us within large scale society on the level of politics, and they define us on the small scale society of groups of friends or family units. We don't control how others see us, or how others act upon us. We don't control how we feel inside, or what we think about others. But we control how we express our feelings, thoughts, and reactions. To my mind that means the expressive choices we make are the most important, the most honest expressions of our identity and of our relationships. So I think that when a friendship is under strain and we turn to each other and say "What did you really mean by that" or "What did you really feel about that" something has already gone wrong. The communication we received or sent was damaging, and our first response is a kind of denial. We say to ourselves that that cruel, wounding communication wasn't the real communication. They didn't mean to say something hurtful and cruel, because they really love us. They didn't mean to treat our feelings with disrespect, because they really respect us.
I think when people say "what did you really mean by that" it is not a search for a more "real" reality, but an invitation to immediately alter the existing reality. Partly this is a good and important, though painful, part of the evolution of relationships - new common words and memories can be born out of these moments, like painful transformations.
Being a philosopher can make the whole experience more painful, because Western philosophy has a set of linguistic assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with the tricky shifts in logic that are necessary to navigate the psychological ocean underlying human activity. We talk about truth and Form and all sorts of sort of Platonic ideas of absoluteness and Aristotelian (sp?) ideas of categorization, and it just doesn't work. The elements of human interaction form sets whose identity is both exclusive and inclusive, both wildly disjunct and very overlapping. There are all sorts of lines which connect to nodes through back alleys of dimensional space. It is more like the way we articulate the rules of magic or of religion or of alien minds in science fiction articles than it is about ideas of absolutes. Even Plato in a way got this in practice - with his stories of the cave and the shadows which are to be understood as stories and as teaching tools and as visions and as at least the thought-possibility of real caves and real shadows. But there is this philosophical desire to say "it would be better if it didn't squidge around. If there was a Truth that we could scrape or climb to." I say that there is no such Truth, and that even if there were such a Truth I resist the notion of labeling it better.
This is what we've got, this messy playground. That we don't all see the same way, that we don't all move through in the same way. And if you and someone else are having a good time swinging on the monkey bars and weaving through the jungle gym and swinging higher than each other on the swings, then what earthly good is it to stop playing suddenly and to ask how the other person got to the playground, and what the swings mean to them, and what is the significance psychologically of the effect of that pond over there. And by the way, do you think it is something in your past that makes you shout Olly Olly Oxen Free when I sing Oye Oye All In Come Free? And don't you think really my version is better and truer and we should both shout Oye Oye in the future?
Of course if instead of playing you are rolling around in the wood chips trying to gouge each others eyes and pull each others hair out and bite each others thumbs, then perhaps it would be a nice distraction to shout "Time Out, Time Out! What exactly is a playground?" Or maybe your idea of friendship is to wander around the playground together like scientists going "hmm, I wonder what the effect of playground surface on jump-rope-skipping duration is" or whatever. Or maybe you don't like to play on the swings you like to sit on the grass and picnic. Whatever. My point is that to me, philosophically, whatever you're doing with whoever you're doing with it, that's the whole point. Right there. And if it's good you go with it, and if it's bad you try whatever linguistic and moral and intellectual tricks you both can muster to try to change it. But whatever it is, that is what it really is. Whatever it is underneath is something different, it's own separate thing. Your dark twin isn't the real you (that thing Ged chased out into the ocean in the Earthsea books wasn't, I'm convinced, the real him). The chaos beneath the surface isn't more real or more powerful or more important or more shifting than the surface itself. It's just different.
I mean, biologists can tell you about the worlds of bacteria and mitochondria and what have you that live their own separate lives within you at any given instant. That's not even counting whatever parasites you might be carting around. But we all agree happily to the convention that the surface, the skin and hair and eyes and mobile mouth with high contrast lips, is more important to our human perception of identity than the load of bacteria we carry around. So why is it when we discuss psychology and so forth that suddenly we think the neuroses and fears and half-articulated memories and so forth are more real than the actions and the speech that actually emerge from us to others?
I know it is scary to be responsible for the surface self. I was facile a moment before about the skin and all, but people suffer for that identification. Before you even get to gender dysphoria or people cruelly assuming that folks with physical handicaps are mentally handicapped, there's all the weirdness of feeling that you really ought to have red hair or a smaller nose or bigger boobs or less/more hair or whatever - I mean we experience this same feeling of disconnect from our bodies, that they don't really express who we are. But all the more reason to revel in the surfaces of our behaviors? I mean, your behavior is so much more easily under your control than your alignment of image and self-image.
Ok - this is the inside of my brain pretty much all the time. It just rolls on like this. I'll stop for now here, but my main point of the beginning, reiterated - if a friendship is working it is working, and if it is broken it is broken. And they way you can tell is by the actions and words that you share, not by the past or the underlying whoozits and whatsits. And when it is working, think long and hard about whether you really want to change it by the act of observation. Observation changes everything.
So this weirdness is in how I see Human Stuff.
Which is that if you have to sit down with someone and Talk About A Relationship, or Talk About an Incident, it's because something has already gone wrong. No amount of talking will fix the previous understanding. At its best, talking is useful for generating a new understanding, or for demonstrating a continued willingness to try to come to understandings. But whatever the previous state of affairs is, having a Big Talk about it indicates that that state of affairs is dead as a dodo, never to return.
Obviously I didn't always see Human Stuff in this manner. I used to be big into Truth and so forth, and thought that people sat down to Talk their way to Truth, or something. Nowadays I've moved more to seeing Human Stuff and relationships both friend and other as being more Art than Truth. Not artifice, with its connotations of artificiality. But Art with a capital A. You know, ars longa, vita brevis and all that.
The incident that crystallized this view for me was last year, actually. I have this friend - a great lady in a lot of ways, but the ways she and I see the world? So very different. And there was one night when we very dramatically became close friends. Some years later / aka last year, I mentioned something about how draining and weird that night had been for me. Near Friendship Meltdown ensued, because the night wasn't draining for her. Her vision of why this night made us friends was so completely different from mine that we both had to backtrack wildly and not discuss it anymore.
I used to worry most about things like did I trust my friends (and boy I did a Humpty Dumpty on the concept of Trust, and overloaded that poor word), and was it Real Friendship or just acquaintanceship, and so forth. Ever since the big realization, I've tried to let that go. I try to ask myself what kind of art/structure the friendship builds rather than what the friendship is. For example some friendships are very task oriented - you're great friends to work on jewelry together, or to edit fiction together, or whatever. Other friendships are very situation oriented - you're great friends for talking about romance together, or for hanging out together when you're sad. But I realize that the nature of friendship isn't always reciprocal. Just because I consider Friend A to be a great task-friend because we have such fun making jewelry together, doesn't mean that is how Friend A sees it. Maybe Friend A just loves hanging with me when they're sad, and they come over and make jewelry with me because that's what I like to do and it distracts them from their sadness. The thing is that there is no way of knowing what our mutual perceptions of the roles we play in each others lives might be. All we can know is what we do with our actions and what we choose to articulate verbally. Sometimes Friend A might be really hurt if I characterized our friendship as task-oriented. That might to them demean the feeling they get out of the space and companionship. Or if I said to Friend A that I couldn't imagine burdening them with my company when I was sad, how would they feel if it was mostly when they were sad that they sought me out? Would they feel bitter? Resentful? Hurt and excluded? Maybe all this time they thought I was sad a lot when I was just making jewelry. Maybe they thought they were cheering me up with their visits and know that they know it's just about jewelry they don't want to come over anymore.
So the result of this is that I feel that if you have a good time hanging out with someone, and they have a good time hanging out with you, that the last thing you should ever do is discuss the groundings of the relationship. If at all possible, avoid this like the plague. Maybe it works differently for other people who see the world in more synchronizable ways, but for me it is always a route to badness. So for instance if after much long awkwardness a new comfortable relationship builds with someone - don't think this means it is now time to discuss the old awkwardness. There will never be a good time to discuss the old awkwardness. You have the option of enjoying the present pleasure and bearing the private weight of your own perception of past awkwardness until you can let that awkwardness go. Or you have the option of risking the current pleasure to attempt to build a new understanding, one piece of that understanding perhaps based on an examination of past awkwardness. But what you have in the relationship right now will absolutely be sacrificed, immolated, by the discussion of grounding principles. The meanings of a friendship are as complicated and connotative as the meanings of those anglo-saxon words in the OED with 20 page entries. Except they're actually being matched up with root-words in some other language by the use of a translator that makes Babelfish look like that actual brainwave fish in Douglas Adams novels. So it's all about the chaotic shifting 20 page entry for your feeling in your language being matched by a painfully crude algorithm to an equally subtle complicated 20 page entry for a different feeling in a different language that the other person speaks.
Up on the calm surface away from the groundings, we just carry on and grunt and wave our hands and drink coffee and give small gifts and tell each other how pleased we are by the gifts. Underneath is this vast chaotic oceanic multi-strung multi-dimensional something. And every time you try to have conversations about What a Relationship Means (and I don't mean just the sexual kind of romantic relationship - I mean any relationship - friend, family, school, work...) it is like you are reaching out and grabbing the other person and diving down into this drowning oceanic chaos with them. Both of you come back up shaken and changed. This can be a bonding experience in itself, like sky diving or other extreme sports. The two of you might resurface hand in hand going "look, wow, we survived that" then turn to each other and hug. Or you might be ripped apart to opposite shores by currents made up of stuff you can't even imagine. Or like drowning swimmers you might push against each other trying to rise to the surface for air. If you have certain kinds of personality disorders you might lure folks to the watersedge just to push them under - this is how I picture emotionally abusive people sometimes - like the lover in that ballad who asks the girl to strip at the water's edge so he can keep her clothes after he's drowned her.
My point is that you just don't know what you get when you go down there. And so if what you have with someone is good, it is better not to go there. Perhaps some people will find this cowardice, but I am all in favor of making the gamble if what you have is bad, or in danger of being lost. I just think it is foolish to plunge repeatedly into that current if what you have on the shore is already good. Make sand castles together. Collect shells. Run along the edges of the surf. But the full on riptide experience of trying to understand who another person is and what that means for your relationship with them - and trying to verbalize that understanding in a common language to each other?
A different part of what I mean is that the ocean is alien to us. That perception that we have of each other when we go digging for truth isn't any more real, isn't any more true, than the perception that we have over coffee and snacks and phone calls and postcards and small gifts. I actually, at this point in time, lean towards the feeling that it is less true. That the most useful definition of who we are and what we do and what it means is the liminal one. The people we are on the shore, the relationships we have as they appear on the surface, are more true and more important than the chaos within. It is the choices we make about how to turn that internal chaos into the complicated art of human interaction that define us within human society. They define us within large scale society on the level of politics, and they define us on the small scale society of groups of friends or family units. We don't control how others see us, or how others act upon us. We don't control how we feel inside, or what we think about others. But we control how we express our feelings, thoughts, and reactions. To my mind that means the expressive choices we make are the most important, the most honest expressions of our identity and of our relationships. So I think that when a friendship is under strain and we turn to each other and say "What did you really mean by that" or "What did you really feel about that" something has already gone wrong. The communication we received or sent was damaging, and our first response is a kind of denial. We say to ourselves that that cruel, wounding communication wasn't the real communication. They didn't mean to say something hurtful and cruel, because they really love us. They didn't mean to treat our feelings with disrespect, because they really respect us.
I think when people say "what did you really mean by that" it is not a search for a more "real" reality, but an invitation to immediately alter the existing reality. Partly this is a good and important, though painful, part of the evolution of relationships - new common words and memories can be born out of these moments, like painful transformations.
Being a philosopher can make the whole experience more painful, because Western philosophy has a set of linguistic assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with the tricky shifts in logic that are necessary to navigate the psychological ocean underlying human activity. We talk about truth and Form and all sorts of sort of Platonic ideas of absoluteness and Aristotelian (sp?) ideas of categorization, and it just doesn't work. The elements of human interaction form sets whose identity is both exclusive and inclusive, both wildly disjunct and very overlapping. There are all sorts of lines which connect to nodes through back alleys of dimensional space. It is more like the way we articulate the rules of magic or of religion or of alien minds in science fiction articles than it is about ideas of absolutes. Even Plato in a way got this in practice - with his stories of the cave and the shadows which are to be understood as stories and as teaching tools and as visions and as at least the thought-possibility of real caves and real shadows. But there is this philosophical desire to say "it would be better if it didn't squidge around. If there was a Truth that we could scrape or climb to." I say that there is no such Truth, and that even if there were such a Truth I resist the notion of labeling it better.
This is what we've got, this messy playground. That we don't all see the same way, that we don't all move through in the same way. And if you and someone else are having a good time swinging on the monkey bars and weaving through the jungle gym and swinging higher than each other on the swings, then what earthly good is it to stop playing suddenly and to ask how the other person got to the playground, and what the swings mean to them, and what is the significance psychologically of the effect of that pond over there. And by the way, do you think it is something in your past that makes you shout Olly Olly Oxen Free when I sing Oye Oye All In Come Free? And don't you think really my version is better and truer and we should both shout Oye Oye in the future?
Of course if instead of playing you are rolling around in the wood chips trying to gouge each others eyes and pull each others hair out and bite each others thumbs, then perhaps it would be a nice distraction to shout "Time Out, Time Out! What exactly is a playground?" Or maybe your idea of friendship is to wander around the playground together like scientists going "hmm, I wonder what the effect of playground surface on jump-rope-skipping duration is" or whatever. Or maybe you don't like to play on the swings you like to sit on the grass and picnic. Whatever. My point is that to me, philosophically, whatever you're doing with whoever you're doing with it, that's the whole point. Right there. And if it's good you go with it, and if it's bad you try whatever linguistic and moral and intellectual tricks you both can muster to try to change it. But whatever it is, that is what it really is. Whatever it is underneath is something different, it's own separate thing. Your dark twin isn't the real you (that thing Ged chased out into the ocean in the Earthsea books wasn't, I'm convinced, the real him). The chaos beneath the surface isn't more real or more powerful or more important or more shifting than the surface itself. It's just different.
I mean, biologists can tell you about the worlds of bacteria and mitochondria and what have you that live their own separate lives within you at any given instant. That's not even counting whatever parasites you might be carting around. But we all agree happily to the convention that the surface, the skin and hair and eyes and mobile mouth with high contrast lips, is more important to our human perception of identity than the load of bacteria we carry around. So why is it when we discuss psychology and so forth that suddenly we think the neuroses and fears and half-articulated memories and so forth are more real than the actions and the speech that actually emerge from us to others?
I know it is scary to be responsible for the surface self. I was facile a moment before about the skin and all, but people suffer for that identification. Before you even get to gender dysphoria or people cruelly assuming that folks with physical handicaps are mentally handicapped, there's all the weirdness of feeling that you really ought to have red hair or a smaller nose or bigger boobs or less/more hair or whatever - I mean we experience this same feeling of disconnect from our bodies, that they don't really express who we are. But all the more reason to revel in the surfaces of our behaviors? I mean, your behavior is so much more easily under your control than your alignment of image and self-image.
Ok - this is the inside of my brain pretty much all the time. It just rolls on like this. I'll stop for now here, but my main point of the beginning, reiterated - if a friendship is working it is working, and if it is broken it is broken. And they way you can tell is by the actions and words that you share, not by the past or the underlying whoozits and whatsits. And when it is working, think long and hard about whether you really want to change it by the act of observation. Observation changes everything.
