They smiled — and walked off.
My daughter and I got on. We went to the rear of the bus and sat as it started. Then my daughter pushed her ponytail back from her shoulder. “Dad, are you famous?”
I smiled. “Fortunately, no. The band at the theater today is famous. But things like people recognizing me in the street who’ve read something of mine only happens once, maybe twice a year — occasionally two or three times in a week, the way it did right after I was on the Charlie Rose Show, or when that newspaper article came out in the Times. Now, though, it’s right where I can enjoy it. Too much more, however, and it would get really annoying.”
“Oh,” she said.
And that’s the single time in my life — and my daughter’s — where I was able to make such a point, with comparative examples coming within an hour.
Forty-four years after Tom Clareson helped me through a hangover, and thirty years after I took my daughter to the theater matinee, the point is still true.
The lesson, then, is this: there exists a possibility of something happening when someone reads a book that is important enough for the person to respond to the writer who wrote it in that manner. And it doesn’t happen because of direct communication from person to person any more than sunrise occurred this morning because the sun lifted itself from behind the horizon into the dawn sky.
A possibility. Not a certainty. (There are too many other reasons for running up to speak when you see someone you recognize in public.) The lesson is about possibility and potentiality, not about a probability for communication to have gotten through. It is no more — but no less — than that.
In no way is it any confirmation about communication, even when in practical terms you’d be willing to bet on it. That’s because we know that communication doesn’t actually “get through,” any more than the sun actually “rises” in the morning or the moon actually “sets” in the nighttime (or daytime): that’s simply how it feels, not how it works. Sunrise, moon-down, and language-as-direct-communication — all are effects of something more complex: a spinning planet among other spinning planets in their elliptical orbits about a stellar bole of violently fusioning hydrogen millions of miles away that is releasing immense energy and light — which is drenched in information about what created it as well as everything it deflects from in passing. That light spews its information through the multiverse at 186,200 miles per second to tell of the workings of other planets, other stars and their planets, the workings of other galaxies of stars or the workings of other minds a few years, decades, centuries, a few thousand miles behind the pages of a book, behind a Nook or a Kindle or an iPad screen, till it passes too close to a gravitational force too large for it to escape and falls into it — while its stellar source millions of light-years away goes on creating the heavier elements — and singing about them in its light waves. As we careen through the great spaces along our own galaxy’s swirling edge, our own sun takes its planets and their satellites, its belt of asteroids, its Oort Cloud, and its comets along with it (which is why so much of the turning moves more or less in the same direction), while our galaxy itself moves along the gravitational currents flung out by billions of galaxies in a veritable net throughout the multiverse,{7} much of whose material is dark matter that light (I use the term loosely for all electromagnetic waves) doesn’t seem to tell us about directly, but only by its absences.
Then why don’t meanings move from me to you by means of the words that I say and that you hear — or that you read? Why do I say that’s just an effect too like the rising and setting of the sun, moon, and stars?
They don’t, for the same reason we need a lens — the one in your eye, the one in your camera, the water drop on a spider web — to retrieve the information from the light — something to focus the data and repress the noise, which may or may not be another sort of data that to us isn’t as useful or (such as heat when it grows too great) is harmful to organic systems that are largely liquid and ultimately destructive to all systems composed of solids.{8}
Think about the electrical signals in the brain that are your thoughts and the electrical signals that make your tongue move and your larynx stretch or contract to utter sounds when you push air out over them, and the physical vibrations that go through the air and strike your own and others’ eardrums and the electrical signals that the minuscule hammer bone attached to the eardrum’s back that shakes as the eardrum vibrates, the tiny anvil bone and tiny stirrup bone transferring those shakings that, in turn shake the little hairs within the spiral of the cochlea, which transform those vibrations into the electromagnetic pulses that travel to the brain where other electrical impulses are created as sound (already a vast oversimplification) and are associated with the meanings of words, phrases, and much larger patterns of language already lodged in the mind/brain of the hearer, the reader — patterns that must already be there, or else we would say that the hearer does not know the language yet or understand it. (In the late 1920s and early ’30s, a Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky [1896–1934], observed that children tend to learn first to talk and only then to internalize their own speech as thinking, though it’s a continuous developmental process.) And because everyone learns his or her language under different circumstances, those patterns simply cannot be identical for any two of us. That they can adjust thoughts as far toward similarity as they do in many different brains is a result of the amazing intricacy of the learning materials and the stabilizing discursive structures that they are capable of forming.
Rarely do we get a new meaning from the rearrangement of old ones, helped on by language and the part of language (the signified) we call experience. Still, perceived experience is one of three ways we can “experience” linguistic signifieds; another is through memory and imagination — sexual and secular, practical and preposterous — and generally conscious thought; a third is through dreaming. (And all three relate. And all three are different. And none of this should be taken to contravene Derrida’s notion that the world is what language cuts it up into.) But the meanings understood by an other are always her or his own meanings, learned however she or he learned them, and never the speaker’s or the writer’s, though the effect is usually that they are the same — because we are mostly unaware of the stabilizing discursive circuits that we know so very little about, though we also learn those and learn them differently in different cultures.{9}
Unconscious thought, Freud was convinced by a lot of research and study, is a mode of thinking we don’t experience directly as such. I am pretty sure he was right. (Whatever that level of brain activity is, I suspect it controls the discursive levels of language.) But without unconscious thought, we literally would not know what other people are talking about, even though we recognize the words whose meanings we have already internalized.
And, remember, every dolphin and whale and octopus and dog has some version of this problem and neurological solution; every pig, porpoise, penguin, or porcupine; every bird or four-legged animal or six-legged cricket that “receives” communication with its ears or an earlike structure, or emits communication by rubbing its legs together or whistling songs or clicking or crooning underwater or meowing or purring or barking or growling — that is to say every creature who has to negotiate sexual reproduction and/or attraction; every creature who, at a food source or a watering place, needs to communicate “move over” to a fellow with a push or a shove.{10} Without something akin to discourse, they (and we) wouldn’t be able to tell if the other was attacking or wooing or warning, or if they should hold it till the morning walk or until they reach a public john or do it in the litter box, or if they want their offspring to suckle them or their owners to stroke them — whether it’s time to play or to eat or to get off the couch. (The great mid-twentieth-century actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane were famous for owning a pair of dogs named “Get-Off-the-Couch,” and “You-Too.”) In humans, discourse learning and management are probably among the main tasks of the unconscious mind. But that’s speculation.