The Forest

It often seems that an assumption underlies the relationship between a thought, idea, or insight and how it’s expressed. The idea is one thing. How you say it another. Many people when they have an idea will talk about it; they use speech. A writer might reach for their pen or computer. A painter their paintbrush. A photographer or videographer their camera. 

The assumption, I think, is that each way of communicating provides equal access to the idea. The idea is just an idea. As long as someone ‘gets’ it, does it really matter how? 

Anyone who has worked in an office will have probably met someone who says ‘Could you just put that in an email for me?’ because they prefer to read. And it’s just as likely that they will have met someone who says ‘Could you talk me through it?’ perhaps because it’s quicker or perhaps because they prefer to talk. Some may prefer to talk or hear. Others may prefer to read. And some may prefer to watch. People make sense of things in different ways.

People also like pictures. Studies reveal that visual information is more likely to cut through. ‘A picture paints a thousand words’ they say. Which is why film and video, ever since they were invented, breezed into the world of popular entertainment and mass communication. 

So, it might be thought that a solitary idea, if it really wants to reach its target, should have a strategy. It would need to know who it is addressing and a little about their preferences. If the idea is trying to reach a wide group of people it may need to use many different forms of communication and it might want to think, in particular, about investing time in an especially engaging visual demonstration of itself. That way everyone – or as many people as possible – will know about it. 

Of course, some people might like to quibble about the merits of how an idea is communicated. Colourful imagery might appeal to the sensibilities of more people. It might, with a few flourishes or an artful rendering of footage, convey meaning in just a few moments that a writer would otherwise labour to capture. But that doesn’t mean that visual motifs are always better. Might there be circumstances where the analytical rigour of language or the determinate calculations of number safeguard a more stable and reliable meaning? A lawmaker, for example, might balk at the suggestion that the surest way to solemnise the provisions of nuanced legislation is through a stirring montage of film. 

Access to truth, despite the forms that people in different circumstances might adopt, is a shared assumption of our ability to communicate at all. A conversation might be drunken and full of non-sequiturs, a picture might be childish or lack aesthetic qualities, a text might be poorly drafted – but whatever their limitations they will contain a meaning to which other people can relate, however imperfectly.  

In all the examples I have given, differences of quality are at work. Whether they can be measured against an objective standard or not, we have come to distinguish degrees of distinction in the way something is drawn, painted, filmed, photographed, written, talked about or analysed. In the circumstances of the example above (between imagery and analysis) the lawmaker might understandably argue that there is a qualitative difference in form. Language, they might say, is a better tool for establishing the meaning that is necessary to guarantee legal compliance.   

If there are differences in quality internal to each form (the aesthetics of painting, the style of writing) and differences of quality between forms (imagery versus writing, or writing versus mathematical analysis), does that mean that the assumption with which we started is flawed? Different forms of communication, in other words, do not provide equal access to the same idea. They may provide a degree of access in a way that makes them relatable, but they are also limited by the character of the form.

The assumption then begins to change a little. The truth can still be accessed, but its different manifestations limit it in different ways. Which begs the question: is there a way to arbitrate? Is any one form of communication more suited to unveil the truth than the others? Or, pushing it further, does one such form have privileged access to an unsullied version of the truth?

Intuition tells us that the truth in any given circumstance is graspable. We like to think that the tools available to us – observation, reason, discussion, presentation – can be marshalled to meet the challenge. A commonsensical response to the question ‘What is the truth of this matter?’ might be that it is just there. Even if we don’t quite know how to get there, we can sense the answer. Someone who observes a pedestrian punch a cyclist might be asked the question ‘Why did they punch the cyclist?’.  As a witness they would probably have an intuitive sense of the answer, but they would need to do more work to satisfy that sense (for example, speak to the parties concerned and perhaps any other witnesses). A historian, by a similar reckoning, might know the outline of what happened to Thomas Becket, but to explain his murder in the context of his relationship with Henry II, would require a detailed study of the historical context by examining the primary and secondary sources. 

The truth in its various guises requires interpretation to satisfy our sense of the matter, and interpretation is at work in the act of producing or creating almost anything. Writing, like other forms of communication, interprets an intuition and gives it form or shape. In the act of writing these words, I am reaching for ideas and trying to find the language that will describe them. It isn’t long before the toil becomes wearing. It can take time and reflection before you feel confident that the sentence or paragraph says what you (think you) want it to say. Neither is this a one-way street. The thought doesn’t catch a convenient mode of transport and travel towards its destination. It can be necessary to draft something before you realise it isn’t quite right, or that the act of drafting has spurred a subtlety you hadn’t considered before. The act of writing can’t, therefore, be entirely separated from the substance of what you are trying to say. 

And just as the act of committing a thought changes it (however subtly), so in a more elliptical sense it leaves behind something of the original intuition, no matter how painstakingly and lovingly rendered. A piece of writing, with the right flare and flourish, can take hold of the truth, but it is not right to say that it can possess it entirely.  Drafting words gives an impression of transformation, moulding, mediating, or creating. The intuition that inspires the search for words is not objective and neutral and never an entirely dispassionate act of reckoning or representation. A swell of exhilaration carries even the driest analytical task towards grammatical sense and the result is often pleasing, satisfying and sets a kind of psychological seal on the matter. But there remains a sense that ‘the truth’ from which the business started has changed in the act of analysis, and that despite best efforts to do the matter justice, in its purest form, it forever remains teasingly elusive. Joy and sorrow combine in the manufacture of any text. 

This idea becomes a bit more apparent when it’s considered through the lens of qualitative differences in form. In the modern workplace, it is increasingly common to hold ‘hybrid’ meetings, in which some colleagues join the meeting online, and others attend in person. The fact that this has become the norm tells us that, despite any imperfections, discussing matters in this way is efficient. Participants can relate to each other and discuss whatever they need to. 

The imperfections, however trivial, nevertheless reveal important differences. A person joining remotely, will often feel that they are not connected with the group in the room in the same way. They may not be able to hear some of the gentle banter that smoothes the course of serious discussion or they won’t be able to read the body language or unconscious signals on which the more ostensive and purely rational meaning rests. If a joke wraps up a meeting and one of the remote attendees doesn’t quite hear it, perhaps because the person in the room was speaking too quietly or the microphone is not good enough, a rounded meaning is lost. Those in the room can account for it or testify to it, but those online only have an obscured sense of it. Here, the intuition produces two subtle but qualitatively different experiences that are caused by the form each one takes; and for those participating remotely the form they use to communicate leaves behind or occludes the intuitive meaning they can sense.     

In different contexts the same problem can produce more dramatic results. Driving is governed by a set of rules and conventions. The law in different countries will stipulate regulations for speed limits, road signs, driving lanes, and other conduct. Drivers also adopt more informal ways of communicating to each other: flashing headlights, waving a hand, momentarily turning on warning lights. Collectively, these amount to a loose form of grammar that governs conduct on the road. 

These rules and conventions are very often found to be imperfect and limited, even if they are a necessary concession to the cocooned obscurity of life behind the wheel. A driver following another car might flash their headlights several times. This could be taken to mean different things: the driver behind might be impatient and want the car in front to speed up or pull over, or they might be trying to signal that there is something wrong. Other factors about the situation might help to elicit the meaning; if the driver is tailgating, for example, and approached the car in front at speed, this might suggest something closer to the first meaning. The flashing lights in this context are impossible to really decipher without each driver stopping and holding a conversation. Whatever the driver at the rear is fervently trying to convey is blurred into almost total ambiguity by the limited contours of the form their communication takes. The driver in front can sense the meaning, but they can only really interpret it by resorting to another form entirely.

In both these examples transcendence is in sight. In the first, the online participant bears witness to an experience that transcends them because they don’t experience the meeting in-person. In the second, both drivers can intuit some sort of ambiguous meaning, but it transcends their ability to fathom it because they are trapped in the chassis of a vehicle. 

In each case the individuals involved encounter a tangible reality but the form of communication limits or circumscribes the possibilities of apprehending it. We can, of course, see these limitations clearly by resorting to other ways of communicating, but they are also analogical microcosms of a more fundamental experience. 

The sense that all words are inadequate bears down on the business of scribbling with maddening weight, suggesting or implying a ‘perspective’ that simply won’t yield to any sort of synthesis. We are enticed, taunted and tantalised by a reality that, like Franz Kafka’s eponymous castle, is closed to admission. Language and logic might provide us with a more subtle, sophisticated and insightful instrument – a frame in which to paint a more discerning picture – than flashing lights and honking horns, but they fumble towards their limits all the same. We stand in a similar relationship to the truth as the circumstances that occasion road rage among drivers. 

These limits are, again, cast in relief when they are considered alongside other ways of relating. Something akin to road rage can arise easily where people rely solely on writing to communicate. An email, a written document, or less formally, the messages circulated each second on social media or messaging apps, might reveal an aspect of the author’s frame of mind without disclosing its proper context. The result is, not infrequently, misunderstanding, alienation and anger. Make the author stand face-to face with the person or people they are addressing and the context becomes clearer. Intriguingly, the author may also subtly alter or temper what they say, adapting the message to the less ethereal reality with which they are confronted. Form, yet again, mediates the truth.

Returning to the second assumption, the implication is plain: no form of communication provides unsullied access to the truth. Despite differences in quality, all have their peccadilloes and unsightly birth marks. Looked at another way, they have a unique character that provides a frame for an idiosyncratic representation of whatever matter is under observation. 

All of which implies that the same strange balance of joy and sorrow stirs in the heart of all rhetoric. Every act of truthful conversation, which is also to say any form of analysis, must acknowledge that all efforts to bring shape and meaning into the world also leave something behind that resists the enterprise. 

Far from merely ‘the absence of talk’ or worse ‘the failure to say something’ silence is therefore a necessary and natural complement to conversation; it is a conscientious recognition of the inadequacy at the heart of our labour. Without acknowledging the need for it, the business of talking will stray into self-deluding sophistry. Silence is an individual’s obscure sense of a fuller perspective into which they cannot sublate without descending into self-contradiction (or non-sense); it is the implicit sense of a reality that eludes us. And as such it is needful and necessary, enticing even. 

Many people burn brightly on contact with the world. They effuse ebullient speech or rational determination so much so that habit makes their utterance indistinguishable from reality. These custodians of philosophy are really just infectious personalities with an innate gift for fashioning life through their words. But just as an athlete won’t scrutinise the world in the same way as a sedentary observer, so the allure of life for an active mind can easily flash past the gulf between a fact and its interpretation. It was in this sort of rush that the advancements of modern science and technology coalesced with philosophy, producing a uniquely modern sophistry. 

To spot this gap requires a slower pace, maybe even a stumble, a weakness or a failing, something that forces a degree of detachment from the natural appetites that entangle minds with their material preoccupations. A little reflection, a little disillusionment, suggests that people and their conversations are always eclipsed by the objects that cause them such concern, or at least that their conversations are only as shallow as their concerns. Outside the flickers of light they bring, a long and primordial shadow remains. 

Too much analysis in this situation can turn into an especially noisy hypocrisy. To expostulate on the nature of silence must mean starting from self-contradiction. For those who fall into speech, writing (or whatever their chosen form of communication might be) with no more than a moment’s suspended doubt, the tension I am trying to adumbrate will crease foreheads. The notion that craft is not only a quickly silenced cry in the wilderness but insufficient to the reality from which it draws inspiration, and that ‘keeping the silence’ therefore maintains a stronger covenant with our intuition, will come over as eccentrically counter-intuitive. And yet, there is a lure to hold onto the moment of inspiration, to let it dwell about you before you try to grab hold of it, in the hope that some part of it – a feather maybe – sticks between your fingers. This, in some ways, is the most magical moment, in which an intimated presence stimulates, teases and excites without descending into regulated discourse. Keeping silence is at once a kind of surrender and an animus or an illumination like no other.

This should not imply that the interpretation reality invites is necessarily treacherous. All answers to its call are not flawed by their nature, and programmatic scepticism towards the ideas, theories and perspectives human cultures have developed is as unhinged as the claim that the human mind, with the right intellectual credentials, can attain to a peerless analysis. Indeed the moment of inspiration that lingers in silence is one that can easily fall flat in one of two directions; either in a rush towards a fixed and determinate position, or in the failure to respond.  Silence invites a response, but anxiety arises over its most fitting form. The problem is a lack of reflection, or an impetuous impulse to arrive at an interpretation – to satisfy the need for sense too quickly. It is as if reality wants to be savoured, appreciated, considered, before it is committed to paper or entangled within the heavy weave of grammar.   

The modern world is in an historically privileged position in that is has available to it the means – provided by technology, widespread education and advances in the standard of living – to make and promulgate sense easily. The sheer array and abundance of voices is striking, as are their facility and readiness to throw out thoughts with no or little care; and it is just as striking that most of these inscribed thoughts, as satisfying as they might be in the moment, are forgettable. Thoughts have become like the model-T ford: mass produced to meet a temporary consumer need, before they are consigned for scrap metal. The more efficiently we communicate, the more dispensable and superficial words become –  social media, if nothing else, makes this clear, but it has a precursor in the passing fancies of sensationalist journalism.  

The dominant character of modern communication does not savour or stop to reflect, but rather treats reality as a customised possession to be moulded, exploited, and endlessly recycled; it subsists in an overlaying atmosphere of cacophonous noise. This no doubt satisfies an especially persistent and insecure need for assurance that we can compute the range of possible meanings the world presents, but despite the volume, it amounts to very little. The rush for satisfaction and satiety produces something very cheap and short-lived.

Pivoting the other way, a sustained state of contemplation that produces nothing only collapses on itself in frustration. A sort of pressure builds up that must be relieved, as if the possibility of total ambiguity is more than any mind can endure. Human beings are sense-seeking creatures and the abyss is something they don’t want to accept. There comes a point where they must respond to what’s in front of them and they are forced to speak, to engage, in whatever garbled tongue they have available. Form of some kind is a necessity. 

A practical expression of this problem shows up in the  contemporary workplace, or in the idiom of the industrial revolution, through the notion of ‘Labour’.  Many people in the modern workplace have an ambivalent relationship with their job. It provides a means of living, a certain amount of dignity, social contact, and a limited degree of meaning; and it is brokered under conditions of contract and compromise. Employees cede the freedom, character and personal interests that they could otherwise pursue at their leisure for the material benefits that work confers. As more people feel the benefits of prosperity and as pension schemes allow them to retire into comfort, the idea of a ‘life of leisure’ has become more real. 

But it is not uncommon among those who have worked full-time and have since retired into leisure, to miss the dignity and purpose that work can bring. Just as many people cannot endure the abyss of silence, they need the shape and purpose that labour provides. Without some sort of practical pursuit, they cannot flourish. It is an instinct, as ingrained and elemental, as eating and sleeping. Work not only puts the aptitude of an individual to some use, testing, strengthening and drawing out their innate character, but usually does so in a way that relates them to other people and communities.  

Modern economies are, however, in the oddly distorted position that the way they think about work is, like everything else, primarily analytic; ‘Labour’ is a category in the accounts of a business or the systemic analysis of the economy. At its most extreme, it is a sort of expendable unit that satisfies the continued running of a machine, in which we are encouraged to place a rational faith that guarantees our collective preferment. The ‘possessive individualism’ of liberal capitalism masks an implied collectivism. We are asked to make a counter-intuitive but rational (which is to say quintessentially modern) calculation: perform the function for which you have been appointed and you and everyone will benefit; living standards will rise, as indeed they have since the nineteenth century. Except this functional view of work occludes the roots of labour in a person’s character; they cede everything to the operation they are contracted to fulfil. The ambivalence that many people feel about their work is hard-wired into the basic business model of the modern workforce.    

Just as the effortless availability of modern communication is indifferent to the unique circumstances in which anything might be said, so the functional nature of work marginalises the place of character in the workplace. The ‘dignity’, such as it is, that people experience in the modern workplace is really a sort of suffocated or strangulated dignity that works itself out in a compromise between frustration and the trade-off it brings. Education systems, to a limited extent and in varying ways, respond to the different potential that students might exhibit and to that extent, the work or career someone eventually undertakes might coincide with aspects of an individual’s character; but character is always subordinate to the requirements of a much narrower calculation, and it is striking how uniform the models and metrics of success are, especially at the ‘professional’ end of the job market (‘aspiration’ at its most reductive could be taken to mean ‘aspiration to become either a lawyer, financier or doctor’).  

Work has no perspective because, like too much talk, it wants to satisfy the need for sense too quickly; it is desperate for firm foundations from which it can plan.  Since it has no perspective, it cannot recognise anything beyond itself, which engenders an arrogated view of the world and an arrogant view of life. It is a Faustian pact that has traded the intrinsic dignity of its own life.  

A logical corollary of construing the world in purely analytic terms is to remove the idea of ‘form’ at all. The truth is just the truth that the right analysis reveals, and to which we must acquiesce. The further corollaries are that such a world has no place for silence, since nothing is mysterious except where it hasn’t been analysed, and all conversation rallies around a bland and uniform character. The truth makes no concession to circumstance, and so the art of communicating it becomes redundant. Instead, circumstances must bend to the technical authority of truth as such. ‘Talking’ or ‘conversation’ is no longer an art, but a delivery mechanism, one that, since it has a determinate character, innovations in technology, can ultimately fulfil (artificial intelligence, for example). 

This tendency to elevate analysis, which undergirds the trajectory of contemporary culture, is duplicitous and insidious. The pretence to neutrality, objectivity and technicality, really just masks, but perversely and violently accentuates, the particular circumstances – or the form – out of which they emerge. It is a boorish conversation, or something like a droning monologue. If the analogy of driving holds, then the degree to which certain sections of society are privileged brooks more than an incidence of ‘road rage’ and begins to look more like entitled subjugation, with all the internecine politics this might entail. The more technocratic our culture becomes the more it also becomes unhinged.    

Analysis cannot delineate truth in a final sense. An act of interpretation always acts as midwife and by the nature of the act leaves the larger portion of truth in obscurity. Truth-telling, which is to say the way to slowly savour whatever insights or analysis condescend to a particular moment, is more like the delineations of a painting that captures a subject through the lens of the painter’s skill and sensibility. Talking, or the necessary form that reality invites, is always an a priori work of art or a symbol that references something beyond itself. (Where it is only ever sketched in the driest and most monotonous tones of analysis this amounts to ‘bad art’.) Talking, writing, the invitation to make sense out of whatever fortune presents, must start from a search for the character of that fleeting moment, which extends to the character of the subject and the object. So much ‘characterisation’ is analogous to the business of art. However transitory and particular that moment might be it still acts as an armature around which to shape the truth. Time, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, is eternity in disguise.     

To think of talking or communicating in these terms also forces anyone involved in the act of it to recognise its unique character and appreciate what makes it special. This moment – indeed these very words – will never occur in quite the same way again, and the act of casting them requires a certain amount of thought and respect; the act of writing them, the act of reading them for the first or second time, are all different. They should be witnessed as such. To do so is the only way to understand them, their character and limitations, with reference to the reality they are momentarily representing. 

Words carry the breath of life but they are silhouetted by silence. Which means they should not be frittered away.