How are you? How would you like to be? These are not merely a wise guy’s joshing with you. They are explorations of experience and (inter-)personal process.
:- Doug.
“Describe what it is for you to . . .” is the opening to the wooded path.
:- Doug.
Metaphor is perception, loaded with shadings and plaiting. These comparisons are foundational to our consciousness.
:- Doug.
It might bear succulent fruit to gather around metaphor and practice clean language. It is likely to endow us with something we can use later that same day.
:- Doug.
Metaphors are wholes, gestalts rich with meanings hidden just inside, and more often deep in their caverns.
:- Doug.
The mind’s work, in all conversation and otherwise, is to make distraction.
:- Doug.
What are the unintended consequences of conversation? On the surface are things like everyone comes out with something no one carried in, stirring up an argument, finding others do not understand or do not care as you do, or you fall in love with a stranger. Deeper? Perhaps you find yourself doing things you never had the courage to do or even imagine yourself doing. Let’s think together on this.
:- Doug.
One of the early things we don’t know about conversation is what it is. We have no single all purpose definition.
:- Doug.
That one insight points me to what is important to me: life, humanity, beauty. Luhmann’s theory, as an article by David Seidl is explaining it, attracts me: it takes further the old theory of communication as message encoded, transmitted, decoded, and adds two steps: this message is understood by the other party (without which there would not be communication; but note that what the other party understands is likely to be at variance with what the first intended); and then the first party or a third, responds with his or their understandings. What is lacking I am seeing is a direction or purpose of the whole called conversation: why are we even talking in the first instance? It seems to me there is a purpose, maybe even in chit-chat: to show I am friendly, or to show I am worthy of your attention, or to share a laugh, smile, or tear.
:- Doug.
What is the ladder we take from communication to conversation? Here: under Luhmann’s social theory of autopoiesis, as I understand it so far, communication does not address purpose, nor direction: consequently this communication lacks life and humanity.
:- Doug.
Spatial/temporal words—in, on, under, before, then—are first stage vanishing metaphors. Words of journeys and containers—also being words, like is and are—are even more sneaky.
:- Doug.
All words, by definition, are metaphors: one thing standing for another. This tells us words cannot fully capture any concept. The more amorphous the concept, such as spiritual non ritual concepts, the less any word could capture and express all aspects.
:- Doug.
We ever have had only a vague conception of what is conversation. Nothing direct. No direct words, only comparisons. We need more comparisons.
:- Doug.
As the mist clears I begin to see metaphors everywhere. Even the word conversation is a metaphor showing to us turning! So first look in other directions to see more of the whole. Make new metaphors; stand in new places. Second, interrogate more deeply the metaphor you have till it yields more of its secrets.
:- Doug.
We might only ever be able to understand in terms of some other thing similar.
:- Doug.
You do not fit. All my life I’ve told myself this. It leads me to feel lost, misplaced in life. But none of us are meant to fit—rather to add. To bring something new. To show us how we all fit. Together. Our pieces—unfitting—are all one.
:- Doug.
The processes and how-tos seem to draw me in more strongly than, say, descriptive or survey articles and issues. Long range overviews showing threads and veins and arteries also draw me.
:- Doug.
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