On Conversations
"Wherever we go, we are friends" -Sloth and Manatee
Sloth and Manatee
Conversations are weird and lumpy and start and stop and there’s repetition and facial tics and interruptions and hilarity and sadness and so much awkwardness and bits and pieces. There are choices made as to where to have conversations. Some conversations are only appropriate in certain places. Some never take place at all because they are too scary or it’s ‘not the right time’ ever.
A decontextualized bit of pixel on a screen is not a conversation, it contains none of those things. A thumbs-up emoji is not a conversation. It’s an acknowledgement, at best.
Conversations are like water sloshing around in a bucket. People make big splashes and then it comes back in their face. People make little ripples and they don’t get noticed. We get subsumed and swim around and become disoriented.
Conversations are who is having them. The person in front of you at the grocery store whose funny little dog (or child) is staring at you from the cart. The total silence between people riding along in a car. A bunch of people shouting over each other in a meeting in a tall shiny high-rise building. The two friends talking about their other friend (hello, middle school).
A piece of art is a slow conversation that transcends space and time. Someone makes something, and someone else sits with it, and then maybe they talk to someone else about it, and so on. A great painting or novel or song is a global conversation with infinite little side-trips. Art is our greatest and highest form of conversation.
A fake conversation does a lot of damage. It gives our brain the impression that something is happening that is not and this chews at our mind and leaves bruises and jagged edges. A confessional video post has been made out of a million takes and edits. Even a seemingly spontaneous clip has a point of view, and you are not invited. You are to consume, and share, but you don’t get to converse.
Comment sections are not conversations. There are no pauses, gestures, gives or takes, unconscious cues. No nodding, no changing of meaning mid-sentence to better fit the context. There is no context.
We work so hard to add context to things that don’t have any. We labor to fill in personalities and meaning but it’s all coming from inside the house. We are making that. We are doing the work. The machine just sits there, cursor blinking. We punch our time card and get to work.
How many millions of times a day do people interpret a lack of response to a text or an email as hostile or neglectful. Using that pause the way you would use an awkward silence when you’re sitting across from someone in a restaurant, fork suspended above your plate.
How many times a day do we burn our precious, beautiful, irreplaceable energy making context out of nothing, from inside our own noggins.
A great conversation embiggens us and our lives. A manufactured non-conversation tires us out and shrinks us down.
I’m aware that I’m spewing verbiage through this computer-machine and that I’m not conversing with you, per se. But I hope you’ll find conversation wherever you go, between yourself and others and places and things. For real, no emojis.
Brainwaves
Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff
Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat
License Cartoons from CartoonStock
Art!
This was by a student on an art tour at Richmond Art Center recently. I want to say she was in sixth grade (I really need to label these!) - and she explained she has this motif where she draws eyes with the word “neutralize.” It’s just fascinating. I wonder if part of her brain is actually saying “neutral-eyes.” She wanted to talk about it a lot and I helped her come up with the shape variations inside each pupil.
BunnyFrogCatSnake
Things Of The Week
I of course love anything that combines images and language and here’s a bit of a toy where you can paint with words
I know I have shared this before but the idea of conversation being the deep water instead of a layer of garbage floating on top feels relevant
Speaking of escaping the unreal slop of decontextualized non-conversation, here’s an interview from Animation Obsessive (always good) of a person doing the good work
Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.
May you have a good conversation, may your imaginative energy belong to you, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy
HELLO AND THANKS FOR READING!!
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