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Conversations on conversations
I apologize for quoting my email with such abandon, but I want to keep some of the pieces of these messages in here, where I can find them later. I'll try to be discreet.
I wrote a retraction on REM's behalf ... and I believe I should apologize again. When I went back to check the original Faust message, I saw his comment that
The important thing, by the way, is not knowing the answer [...] but what knowing the answer says about the test subject's acquisitiveness of mind.
After my retraction, REM sent another email, which said, in part:
I, too, have come around to the view that "intellectual" is not a useful characterization [....] It's the ability to synthesize and associate disparate things and ideas that I find compelling.
[...]
[T]his is a long way of saying that I've decided to chuck "intellectual" as a desired category in favor of "acquisitive mind," and I suspect you probably feel the same way, if you think about it.
Perhaps I do ... I like someone who is always seeking out new things to put in their brain, but I'm not concerned about what those things are. Am I saying the same thing as "acquisitive mind"?
The point is, I am not going to avoid anyone because of what they have to say. This is not really a highbrow-lowbrow issue - it's "one of attitude, not education," as Iain said ... although I admit I muddied the waters quite a bit.
Aet best expressed the concern that several people had:
Still, don't you think conversations with different people may be some use for you as a writer? I mean, as an archivist and a historian, I do feel I should be able to enjoy (and learn from) interaction with all kinds of people.
Indeed. I thought I had made that clear, but I guess I hadn't. I believe in information. Whether that information is how to get debris out of a carburetor or what life was like when Earl Long was governor or what Mark Tansey is trying to say about semiotics in his satirical paintings, I want it. I want it all. I want to hear all the stories that anyone has to tell, and if I only trade with higbrow folks or intelligentsia, then I'm missing most of the best stories.
On the other hand, as a writer, I tend to have little patience with my characters if they can't fend for themselves. They don't have to be smart, but they have to be capable. This may turn out to be a weakness of my fiction: I don't write fainting hero(ine)s. I could never have written about Walter Mitty - I can't even read that story anymore - he annoys me too badly. I want him to slap his wife and quit his job and go do something interesting. Don't forget I'm one of the people who applauds when Nora slams the door.
But I digress.
Given that I'm willing to take any kind of information from anyone, you're within your rights to wonder why I don't want to talk about daily life. Seems contradictory. But, again, I haven't exactly been lucid.
Ysabel caught the omission:
Actually, that leads to a question. You state that you don't think that anyone else will find your daily life, the mundane details, interesting. You then use that as a reason to avoid such conversations entirely. You don't actually say that you don't find the mundane details of someone else's life uninteresting, though, I notice. You sort of dance around that point and imply that you don't feel that you have the right to unload those one someone else and it's a symmetry thing.
As I explained to her, I am more interested in hearing about other people's lives than I am in talking about mine. I keep a journal to talk about my life (and even then I tend to mostly cover other topics); I figure my life will just bore people. So it's not as symmetric a standard as I made it out to be.
I don't say that hearing about other people's lives never bores me - sometimes it does - but I know I like to hear just about anything, whereas I can never be sure what other people want to hear, and I am tremendously scared of coming off as a bore or a whiner or an egotist in conversation ... so I don't risk it.
Perhaps I can best state it this way: I am more interested in your ideas and stories than your daily life (although your stories and your daily life overlap to a large degree, of course). The converse is that I assume people are more interested in my ideas and my stories than my daily life.
I'm aware there's a risk that I'll seem emotionally closed. As Iain, among others, warned:
Talking about one's problems to other people can be both a means of connecting, and of sounding out one's problems to one's self.
And it's just a feeling, but I suspect that because you will not talk about yourself and your boring day, people may feel that they don't know you as well as they'd like, that you're hiding from them. Everybody's daily life is not of interest only to them - if it were, gossip would have died out ages ago.
Well, I like gossip as much as the next person. But I tend to collect gossip; I don't have any of my own to pass along.
I suppose I have a real problem with the reciprocal standard. I want to hear about how Ysabel is doing - I worry about her sometimes. I want to hear what Iain's annoyed about today; I want to hear whether Shmuel's still having money worries ... and a dozen other similar examples I could name.
But - I confess it - I shut down after a steady diet of the same. If your work sucks day in and day out, and you've told me about it several times, there comes a point when there is nothing more either one of us can gain from talking about it. I am aware that this is cold-hearted of me. It's not that I don't want to give emotional support; it's that there's a finite number of times I can say "I'm sorry to hear that" and not have it sound hollow to me.
Perhaps I'm overcompensating. Perhaps I don't want anyone to shut down like that when I tell them about my problems - so I don't tell them about my problems at all.
Or perhaps it's because I prefer to not need the emotional support. After all, I have a mechanism here to babble about my issues ... a safer one, all told.
Do bear in mind that I tend to be overcautious about friendships,especially new friendships - they're rare, and I don't like to risk jeopardizing them. One of the reasons I love my friendship with Marc is that we can insult each other with abandon - there is nothing I can think of which would leave us permanently mad at each other (although we fight all the time). Jette, and perhaps Rose, are the same way. All three of them are people I've known for more than ten years. Perhaps that's how long it takes.
It's interesting that I can say something to someone in email and not feel like I'm giving them a bad impression of me ... but I won't say the same thing to them in person, for fear of how I'm presenting myself. This goes back to the business of Aether friendships and how "real" they are - an interesting argument waiting to happen.
But not today.
© Columbine
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You think too much.
- Kymm
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