CuppaGemma

All hail communication, except when we don’t understand one another.

A letter is a very different thing than a dash off email or a stream of thoughts interrupting IM- ping flow if there is such a thing.

With a letter, you need to sit down and take your pen or roll the paper into a typewriter and get the ideas out. It’s a conversation in the sense that you can only go forward and not revise, but not in the sense you think carefully before you start putting the words down. And the conversations you have in a letter are different since we are always accessible with phones and email in our pockets. So a letter can be a quite special idea to send and open.

IM on the other hand intrigues me since it as once live but two dimensional. So our own pauses or or little tangential thoughts may make the whole meaning unclear. Skype it appears resolves both since you can hear and you can see. If only there were a hologram of you to sit opposite and not drink the coffee I’ve poured.

Each of these means has a time and a place where it is suited. A letter is the sort of thing meant to be reread since unlike bills or soliciting mail it has no desire beyond the want to hold your attention. IM can help if the query is quick or you are in the middle of one thing from which you cannot quite leave. But I wonder about the distraction to both tasks when you are in a state of hovering between things.

For myself my attention does best to focus on one conversation at a time and to be sensitive to other’s obligations. Even on the telephone we can be distracted. A call from a noisy pub means you compete against all the talk of patrons in addition to whatever game happens to be on. It’s sort of like trying to have an intimate conversation while driving on the highway your attention is split.

Perhaps that too is much of what we forget today in all of our bustling. To be wholly present in the moment of a conversation. To look into someone’s eyes and listen so that all other context is cleaved away and you have nothing but one another to understand.

The phrase I’ve been putzing with for a while is “make ideas audible”. But it is multidirectional. Not only about the speaker being precise, but also the listener understanding the words as they come without the shell games of interpretation we often play to speak so as to be accepted in a certain context.

The shell games get more and more complex when you layer in media like IM or email.  What do you mean gets molded into, this is how I think you can hear me in words that I think might be what you would like to hear, so now of course my point- is absolutely lost.

But on the other hand, when the need for an interpreter- or a redesign of your words before you release them to someone else- or a couching against doubt with safe phrases, when these are stripped away, then

Then you have moments where years happen.

And in those with the candle, or the incandescent bulb alight you sit someplace else entirely than where you are literally. You are inside the moment. This is a rare fine thing.