Thought.is

A conversation is different than a discussion. A discussion is everyone talking about something — “Jane Eyre” or the latest Spoon LP or whether balding men really ought to shave the whole thing or not.

The best of nature shows and nature commentators speak with passionate indifference. Nature, after all, is neither kind nor brutal: it just is.  There is such intense drama — the large cat taking down a gazelle, hungry polar bears bearing the burden of an infinite winter, flora fighting for survival. And yet nature is absolutely, mercilessly, indifferent.  We can hear this in the voice of the great nature documentaries we know so well thanks to PBS.

I love this phrase — it’s what I named my would-be think tank when I was 22: The Society of Individuals. Twenty years later and I still cling to, and seek to elucidate, what such a society might be.

In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec has a great thing on apartments: you’re eating your dinner and right on the other side of the wall is someone else’s bathroom. Or mere feet from where you sleep, a stranger is sleeping, as well, your two heads almost touching.  If you think about it too much, it will freak you out.

When I was a kid, I was overwhelmed by the concept of infinity.  I’d lie in bed at night, in the dark, and try to picture the infinity of space, each limit in my mind giving way giving way giving way until I achieved a kind of vertigo and my skinny little body would tremble as if in orgasm, a conceptual tantra.  It was exquisite.

But if you look at movies and TV, we certainly privilege one network over others: the network we call civilization. That is, other people. I, for one, used to be quite taken with the human condition — with character studies and portraits, with human history, with how people operate.

Thanks to a couple of great teachers, I learned some things in high school. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I learned to write expository arguments. I learned the pleasure of reversal — flipping assumptions upside down. I read The Communist Manifesto.

But writing can tend towards the deadpan. Which is one reason I like punctuation so much — it’s the emphatic and the gestural within language. Of course, punctuation is not the only means of emphasis and gesture. Word choice, rhythm, syntax: these are quite literally what make prose pop and move. Still, the keen use of punctuation can make the deadpan sing.

One way to think about this thinking is to think about the experience of things making sense. I love this phrase, “making sense,” because we use it to mean we understand a given idea when the phrase suggests we just created the idea: we made the sense rather than recognized it.