Mt. Lemmon still burns on its western slopes, small brush is afire but the papers say that is good and will end soon. It still, to the eye, looks perilous. The sky this morning was a smudge above the mountain. I’ve been running around, doing errands, waiting for the alarm man to check out the system and teach me how to work it; the ins and outs are tiring, as the heat and air conditioning put a drain on the human body. One feels spent. I can well understand the native brilliance of siesta and how manana makes sense. Early morning and dusk apparently are the hours for transients like me to get their work done. It’s 12:30 and I feel groggy as my pen writes these words. New thoughts are not in mind; I feel I am blank, so I stop to hear what may be inside herein. . .
It is interesting, engaging and mysterious to speak to a workman, a neighbor or a wife. I often try to hear on several levels, often registering on several levels. Often it is as if a personal ignorance, my own, is trying to snare in mid-air the personal ignorance of another as they blabber, blather or gab as if they knew who they really were, speaking so assuredly that you feel they know themselves, so certain, so adamantine they are. It is all a laugh. Disconnect to disconnect, i surmise; a dial tone engaging another dial tone, drones meeting drones over a wireless, menu enmeshing menu. I used to get bent out of shape when I heard someone tell another — or me — that they understand the person better than he understands himself. My sense of privacy and being a self-styled individualist made me bridle at that “arrogance.”
I’m beginning to believe that another person can be better understood by someone else than they can understand their inner self. However, this presupposes that the more intuiting individual is well-expoxied as a person. Not necessarily so. A therapist might understand what a client is “all” about and so interpret and intervene in session accordingly. But this is a charade as well, for the therapist in his or her own existence is as blind as Oedipus. Teiresias sees Oedipus’ dilemma and forwarns him but Teiresias is as blind as the next man, for clearly Oedipus does not want to know or to hear. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, so says the aphorism. I have enough trouble just keeping my eyes open, even more difficulty squinting. In fact, I think I get most of my knowledge of the world in between blinking. I don’t know anyone who has both eyes wide open; Kubrick said it best, eyes wide shut.
We speak to, at, with one another and, of course, there is commerce and understanding. And we share our concerns, worries and daily efforts as we socialize, chatter. At a greater level it is much like the sounds that have run throughout the universe since the Big Bang. It is white noise, it is the hum that makes it all go, played in the background, beyond hearing, but playing nevertheless; it is the “idle” as the universe goes on. And so we pulse with one another and this is beyond our ken; we seek it not, for we have no idea it is there. We send out a plethora of messages as individuals and most of them are not experienced at all — I don’t experience blood coursing through my body (thank god). We just message, as a kind of connecting to one another because we are social animals and because it is in our genetic search engines. We are Yahoos yahooing to one another. In Gulliver’s Travels the yahoos were lascivious and lecherous creatures. At least they were in touch with their needs and genitalia.
You can work very hard at hearing others, but often one’s own static gets in the way, or you cannot decode or decipher what is being sent out. And if you could, what would you say that might allay, alert or even alarm the other person? I don’t think we communicate because we want to communicate. I think we blast out of our garages with our Ferraris as an expression of self, more than anything else. Hear me. Hear me. I make noise, and I am here.
Dialogue is for listeners, not communicators. I and Thou without background static. Think of how many times in your life you really listened to someone — Heard. Consider as well how many times in your life you were listened to, completely heard at profound levels — to be heard is to be known, often discovered.
