towards understanding

come with me for a bit

Reader, for a second, picture this: you are standing at a clearing, looking up at a waterfall that extends impossibly high, extending far beyond what you can see. Hear the crashing of the water, notice the whiteness of the bubbles and the blue-green water that pools below. Mist rises, wets your cheeks. The light of the sun peeks from beyond the clouds, a hint of a rainbow glimmers.

Why do you let me take over your mind, even for a moment? So generous you are, to let my words shape what you imagine for a minute, paint something that you don’t see, wouldn’t see. You grant me this power; you grant my words power as you grace them with your attention and I thank you for it. Maybe you claim it happens unintentionally, the words instantly conjuring something out of nothing, a spell that you cannot resist. Like when someone tells you not to think about what’s bothering you. You could call it human nature, but our brains never evolved to read. 

There’s something more to it. In Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Culler talks about the concept of the cooperative principle: how conversations require participants to cooperate to achieve understanding, leading to assumptions that what we say to each other is relevant to this shared goal. When someone asks about your day and you reply “it’s almost Friday,” the cooperative principle is what leads to an understanding of your weariness from the week rather than an assumption that you are trying to dodge the question. 

Culler extends this idea to literature — the trappings of what make one deem something as literary (publication in a book or magazine) create the idea that a given set of words are worth the effort of reading and cooperating with what the author is trying to communicate. If we don’t immediately understand a few lines of a book or of a poem, we are used to giving some leeway to the author, offering them the space to let the work reveal itself later, even if the form seems bizarre, or the word choice is strange. Maybe the grammar seems incorrect, but our openness reveals that the words seem to flow more rhythmically, the silent ink on paper sings.

But what does this entail overall? Doesn’t everything we take in require us for to come along for the ride, to work with our authors and singers and dancers and painters as we engage with their work? Don’t we take the context of wherever we are and try to give the appropriate leeway to each other when we need it?

This is where I melt, choked up by how much we take for granted — the cooperation inherent in all that we do. How heavy is the weight of understanding another? How much lighter does it feel when we shoulder it together, even for just a moment? How alone are we ever in the world when every utterance to another is an example of shared effort? It seems that such cooperation should be easy — after all, we’ve always been doing this, from our first cries as infants hoping to be heard. But it isn’t easy.

The search for understanding comes naturally to us, but it’s effortful as well. I think about when I meet a new person. In the ideal case, we will bounce around different topics, dipping our toes into conversational puddles together to see if a circuit closes, if the electrons will move through us. Sometimes we linger here or there, wondering if we are feeling excitement or just the comfort of the water, when suddenly, springing into a certain topic, a shock of connection occurs and conversation begins to flow unfettered. 

But this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes there is not enough shared energy to keep trying puddles, sometimes a person doesn’t want to get their feet wet, sometimes a person doesn’t even know that there are puddles at all. It takes effort to collaborate in this way, it takes skill to connect in these ways. Every time it happens, it’s a special moment that took something out of each of us. There was energy expended to create the state that our minds exist in now.

This is always happening, whether you realize it or not. And this is not new information, not really. With a tired eye, it’s easy to see it all as mundane, attempting to turn the every day into something entirely different. But I cannot help but looking at what’s normal, staring at it with such intensity until I can see it as love; I cannot imagine staying engaged in the world if I don’t. Maybe you understand this as well.

Let us return to the start. We sit at the clearing, and in your generosity, you’ve joined me here. You’ve come along with me on this journey through these words. This may not be literature, but you’ve given me leeway to play with these words, maybe for the first time or for the hundredth. With an openness to the possibilities of the words that I offer, you have come to collaborate with me here, to create these images in your mind, to cultivate a shared understanding of what I’m talking about. 

Now, the mist expands to cover us both. The rainbow wraps around us.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay - synthpop record! pretty fun!

• POEM - “What I’m Saying Is” by Jeffrey Hermann - This stone, he says, spent a million years in the dark, part of some bigger layer of earth. Then, it spent a million in the light, sunning itself on the hillside.