Talk-Thoughts.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere in the world”.
- Said some clever bastard who possibly wasn’t talking about a private bottle of Becks at 5.12 am on a Wednesday morning.

Naturally, one surely thinks (‘one’ must think like me), it’s time for a blog.

Hello first time reader, from first time bloggerer; as I crack on with this illuminating entry, I may as well justify what I tentatively consider to be my ‘right’ to write and the aim for doing so.

Or not. Let’s face it, you don’t give a flying hoot.

You don’t do you? You’re just hungry to feel something, or to learn something interesting, or to see something from another point of view, aren’t you? To connect metaphycially, socially, meaningfully to another human-brain-mind-thing, which you can only really do with thought. For which words are so ingeniously created for and also so tragically lacking the capability to convey properly.

Bing. There’s the topic of this entry. Might call it ‘talk thoughts’. Hmm.

If only there was something better than words

I think we all use words solely to try to trigger certain ideas in another brain — the ideal communication would be a copy and paste of my thoughts into your head (rendering words entirely pointless). It’s not the words at all that hold the secret to communication, but rather the thoughts that two or more people share (or even you and your past/future self) and your knack for inserting such particular thoughts in the other’s mind.

I seem to attach a staggering difficulty to talking, which in turn just boosts my respect for communication. The joy of thoughts — and the absolute bitch for communication — is that they can be as broad as we like. Consider the act of ‘telling’ wordlessly of your all consuming love or hatred for someone or something. How effortless the task of conveying such a thought is to someone else and yet how difficult this process sounds when described.

I don’t know about you but sometimes I hear floods of words coming from, well, everywhere, and the words aren’t really saying much. Such that I could have summarised the spiel with a shrug, hug, brow-raise or sigh.

I love that, don’t you? How one moron could projectile hurl in your direction some inordinate number of syllables, could punch you in the face, could accuse every member of your family of being lost causes letting the human race down, all at once, brutally — yet ‘say’ nothing; and, how another person (a stranger even) could subtly catch your eye in a pungent, bustling Chinese restaurant and with a single string of millisecond long looks convey to you such enormous and profound ideas.

A dictionary of words and insults can somehow be less verbose than a glimpse.

Gives me the shivers. But good shivers.

So easy to receive such compact ideas from the sideways look of another brain-mind-thing and yet so dastardly complicated to in turn describe it out loud (or with those mental ghost words we all secretly think we’re alone in having).

Perhaps more to the point (yes there’ll be one smart ass), I actually find this idea quite uplifting. Sometimes it feels like we profoundly understand another’s situation and it doesn’t seem to make sense that we can do it but it’s just flipping great that we can. Sure you die alone and that sucks and all, but we all live in a flowing intersection of foreign ideas and different perspectives travelling at the speed of blink. At least we all keep eachother entertained!

Unfortunately my temporary bubble of introspective optimism must burst. Because I realise that right now, this instant, I can only use the keys on my keyboard to convey to you, dear reader, anything at all.

To put an idea in your head requires: a certain translation of the idea in my head into words, then some hopeful empathetic assumptions about my audience and their reading/listening tendencies, then for you to engage your eyes to decipher meaning from lines, dots and curves on a page, to then think about those markings and, then, finally, construct ideas based on them. Then maybe, just maybe, a thought wave somewhat resembling my own may sprout within your own mind.

I mean it’s just mad isn’t it? We’re moving more and more of our interaction online, where only markings can live, and thus losing our fabulous repertoire of the more efficient glimpses and shrugs. I feel like I should scream at the streets “Go on! Give me the finger! Do it for communication!”

Then again, I guess this whole blogging thing’s pretty easy — a monkey really could accidentally fall on a keyboard and whack one out. So maybe we’re understanding less and less about more and more people?

So we’re understanding less about people and more about humanity?

Huh. Food for thought.