What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing
structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at
this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects
you realize that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply
intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make
these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs
but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the
nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear
to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's
happening is this proliferation of gifts, which are moving around
singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very
insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a
bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when
it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can
pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do
this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".
There exists, I think, a shared inherent desire for unadulterated understanding and limitless communication. Probably because we know it's impossible and we've got a nasty tendency to want the impossible.
We respect the music makers, the writers, those who can express themselves properly and eloquently, not only because what they say has merit but because they are capable of saying it at all.
(That may be even more important, actually. Meaning may be more facile than we'd like to think.) This is a vague and difficult trait to put to words, but it's easily spotted in the wild.
The most important thing to realize is that the two are separate - the story and the telling, and the skills involved in both. You need both to be truly valuable, to have an impact that is far reaching and disruptive to other people.
Which is what we all want. To influence, to affect, to make a splash. No man is an island, and apparently that saying has something to do with our interconnectedness? I always forget what that quote actually means. I remember it has something to do with for whom the bell tolls. (Spoiler alert: It tolls for thee.)
People can have great experiences or thoughts and be right shit at communicating and they'll never successfully reach out and transmit. You see these people and feel sorry for them, for they are crippled and it is often evident that their failings are less their fault than the product of their larval surroundings. Can you imagine that concept? There are some people who fucking suck at communicating and either can't or don't realize it or care enough to change. Some people never had the desperate and driven need to fill the world with themselves. Some people never had to flex those muscles! Some people don't love language. Languages. Oral or visual. Audible or nonverbal or action-based. They will talk, or otherwise stumble through the existing avenues of information exchange, and you will notice a pervasive averageness to their output. A lack of lilt or imagination. A sort of verbal equivalent of that guy who uses 'lol' too damn much - near inappropriately. A tendency to rely on the preexisting stock communicative tools.
Here is the terrible truth: These people might hold completely valid, even valuable and insightful and invigorating ideas.
They just can't realize them. They are severely limited.
It is like trying to talk to someone who doesn't have a proper grasp of the language you're using.
They could be a rocket surgeon back in whatever country they come from but to you they're on par with a kid because their speech patterns are infantile. We immediately internalize and readjust our assigned statuses and it is ultimately a fucking tragedy.
The other half people are those of us who have the ability to communicate quite well but lack anything to communicate. It's probably less common, just because of the relative rarity of the necessary background components coming together. A developmental period steeped in different media, a desperate and driven need to express the boiling adolescent pressure. Probably a hunger for attention. All sorts of things.
Regardless, you get folks with big vocabularies wanting to emulate their influential masters, casting recklessly about for any scrap of depth or meaning to wax poetic about.
Literally. This is the source of hack poetry about love and the void and emotions and shit.
Do not be fooled: These people might not hold completely valid, even valuable and insightful and nourishing ideas.This is why those people with both attributes can say things five thousand odd years ago and still be remembered today. We ought to revere them because they are rare and valuable, because it required skill and effort to not only perceive the universal truths they uncovered but to capture them and preserve them in a format the general public can consume.
This is the heart of every cliché and bumper sticker saying's appeal - it is true, and we want to associate ourselves with its fidelity in the hopes that we may share some of its resonating trueness.
We want to be seen as people who can see and show and tell, who know and can show that we know in a way that proves that we know rightly.
We are shown things produced by others and it hits us. We go "oh that's it, that's it exactly". We appreciate manifested, proven mastery. We also covet it.
Of course we will forever look like insufferable pricks if we try to directly parrot the transcendent quotes of the past, and people will continually find it impossible to resist doing so even though they know that.
It's an opportunity for people to circumvent their disability - to use the words of somebody else, somebody who not only 'got it' but 'gave it' to the world. We shouldn't sneer. It is the frantic gesturing at nearby objects. It is the mime of charades. It is trying to get an important point across using the only means available.
From mixtapes to devotional prose to Hallmark cards. It's all the awkward appropriation of the words of somebody else, bending them to fit our own burning desire to turn ourselves inside out and finally show the world that we too carry this nova brilliance within, where it is utterly useless.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
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