Fanfic, shorthand & steak houses
Jul. 17th, 2011 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseSince I’m still, slightly, somewhat, determined to not make this a fic journal like my LJ, that X-Men – First Class fic has been relegated to AO3. Not that I may ever have anything else to contribute to that fandom until tessercat writes something else, because it’s most certainly not my intention to start writing the Erik to his Charles. Nor am I even protesting just a little too much. I’m not at all sure that I have much of anything to say about the scenario unless it’s pingback off someone else, mostly because I’m trying to pack up and go on hiatus, and also in a smaller degree because my inherent PolSci nature will otherwise surface and I’ll find myself ranting about the failure of the European project again. I am, after all, wholly disillusioned with the EU as a democratic mechanism because that’s what it was marketed as, when really, it’s just another technocratic solution that expected public validation after the fact.
In an unrelated fashion, I’ve been meaning to write a post about lies as shorthand. Not lying for personal gain or deliberate duplicity but simply because it would facilitate a quick resolution to a situation. I’ve had to do it recently, just last week, because if I hadn’t then it would have devolved into a long-winded and exhausting explanation of my tediously poor health. I have a good ten years history of poor health, a main condition that causes it, ancillary conditions that are a result of the main one and various occasional symptoms that flair up if I don’t watch what I’m doing with myself. All of these things feed back into each other continually so that the entire situation is a rather precarious positive feedback loop that I’m continually trying to control. Usually, I do well enough because there’s little choice other than to deal with the present situation, but occasionally things slip and unforeseen circumstances like extra drains on my energy, a common cold or an unexpected additive in something I’ve eaten will throw everything out of sync. These all being issues that I can deal with, but explaining them in detail is usually completely pointless.
Explanations aren’t truths in of themselves. They’re a means to an end and that end is a certain level of understanding and cooperation. And of course understanding isn’t about the literal truth either. The specific details of an event won’t necessarily convey anything unless the recipient of the message holds those same pieces of information in the same regard as the person transmitting the message in the first place. Human communication relies on floating signifiers precisely because we need a shorthand for things, something to provoke the appropriate emotional responses without having to go into tedious detail that might only be scantly understood or considered with any sort of gravity by the recipient. By way of example, I can use certain phrases or terms to indicate the state of my health with friends who understand that situation from their own experience, and not have to explain any further why I’m afraid that I’m just going to have to nap on their couch rather than go anywhere that day. Explaining it to someone else without that kind of experience or reason to have even considered said experience, on the other hand, would involve a lot more energy. And they wouldn’t necessarily understand what I meant anyway due to their lack of a personalised frame of reference.
Of course a lack of empathy isn’t necessarily an indication of anything other than the limit of human experience. Unless there is a reason for someone to relate to an experience e.g. through personal experience or the experience of someone close to them, there will be a level of incomprehension simply due to the absence of data. That can be remedied. But absorbing and understanding that new paradigm often takes time, far longer than I’d like to spend on the phone for instance, while trembling from fatigue, trying to explain why I’ve called in sick. So the useful shorthand is to say something generally relatable, something along the lines of being sick, which isn’t exactly a lie since I haven’t clarified, which carries the implication of physically throwing up, which most people can empathise with. I have been sick after all, just not throwing up sick, though I probably came pretty close to it if not for the domperidone.
Literal truth is never the point anyway, because the point is emotional resonance. Human beings can relate to a feeling, but what it takes to achieve that sympathetic feeling isn’t necessarily the same for everyone. In the balance of the signal to noise ratio, it’s the literal truth, the unvarnished facts that make up the noise component because the signal is the emotion behind it. Human beings place such emphasis on truth, on speech as the unvarnished truth and yet all we’re trying to do is convey meaning, rather than the specific technicalities of language. We lie, often. Lies are convenient but for some godforsaken reason we like to tell ourselves that we insist on the truth, the whole truth and nothing by the truth, as if we’re honestly rational, knowledgeable and pragmatic enough to act on it without being swayed by emotions.
In the end it’s all part of the game of acceptability, the pretence that everybody operates under. It’s not a bad game per se, it’s just a rather bizarre one, where the only real aim is to get your point across as efficiently as possible. How you get your message through, on the other hand, is entirely your own business.
In other news, I was actually doing quite well with Steak House or Gay Bar, until the name of an actual pub I’ve been to came up. Of course I figured that it must be a steak house somewhere else in the world, only to discover that no, that was the exact pub being referred to. And to think, I’d almost forgotten most of that pub crawl, that criss-crossed most of London, and led to myself and the sole friend who remained at the end of it, cackling over mulled wine in a pub that I’ve never actually been able to find since.
tessercat writes something else, because it’s most certainly not my intention to start writing the Erik to his CharlesIn an unrelated fashion, I’ve been meaning to write a post about lies as shorthand. Not lying for personal gain or deliberate duplicity but simply because it would facilitate a quick resolution to a situation. I’ve had to do it recently, just last week, because if I hadn’t then it would have devolved into a long-winded and exhausting explanation of my tediously poor health. I have a good ten years history of poor health, a main condition that causes it, ancillary conditions that are a result of the main one and various occasional symptoms that flair up if I don’t watch what I’m doing with myself. All of these things feed back into each other continually so that the entire situation is a rather precarious positive feedback loop that I’m continually trying to control. Usually, I do well enough because there’s little choice other than to deal with the present situation, but occasionally things slip and unforeseen circumstances like extra drains on my energy, a common cold or an unexpected additive in something I’ve eaten will throw everything out of sync. These all being issues that I can deal with, but explaining them in detail is usually completely pointless.
Explanations aren’t truths in of themselves. They’re a means to an end and that end is a certain level of understanding and cooperation. And of course understanding isn’t about the literal truth either. The specific details of an event won’t necessarily convey anything unless the recipient of the message holds those same pieces of information in the same regard as the person transmitting the message in the first place. Human communication relies on floating signifiers precisely because we need a shorthand for things, something to provoke the appropriate emotional responses without having to go into tedious detail that might only be scantly understood or considered with any sort of gravity by the recipient. By way of example, I can use certain phrases or terms to indicate the state of my health with friends who understand that situation from their own experience, and not have to explain any further why I’m afraid that I’m just going to have to nap on their couch rather than go anywhere that day. Explaining it to someone else without that kind of experience or reason to have even considered said experience, on the other hand, would involve a lot more energy. And they wouldn’t necessarily understand what I meant anyway due to their lack of a personalised frame of reference.
Of course a lack of empathy isn’t necessarily an indication of anything other than the limit of human experience. Unless there is a reason for someone to relate to an experience e.g. through personal experience or the experience of someone close to them, there will be a level of incomprehension simply due to the absence of data. That can be remedied. But absorbing and understanding that new paradigm often takes time, far longer than I’d like to spend on the phone for instance, while trembling from fatigue, trying to explain why I’ve called in sick. So the useful shorthand is to say something generally relatable, something along the lines of being sick, which isn’t exactly a lie since I haven’t clarified, which carries the implication of physically throwing up, which most people can empathise with. I have been sick after all, just not throwing up sick, though I probably came pretty close to it if not for the domperidone.
Literal truth is never the point anyway, because the point is emotional resonance. Human beings can relate to a feeling, but what it takes to achieve that sympathetic feeling isn’t necessarily the same for everyone. In the balance of the signal to noise ratio, it’s the literal truth, the unvarnished facts that make up the noise component because the signal is the emotion behind it. Human beings place such emphasis on truth, on speech as the unvarnished truth and yet all we’re trying to do is convey meaning, rather than the specific technicalities of language. We lie, often. Lies are convenient but for some godforsaken reason we like to tell ourselves that we insist on the truth, the whole truth and nothing by the truth, as if we’re honestly rational, knowledgeable and pragmatic enough to act on it without being swayed by emotions.
In the end it’s all part of the game of acceptability, the pretence that everybody operates under. It’s not a bad game per se, it’s just a rather bizarre one, where the only real aim is to get your point across as efficiently as possible. How you get your message through, on the other hand, is entirely your own business.
In other news, I was actually doing quite well with Steak House or Gay Bar, until the name of an actual pub I’ve been to came up. Of course I figured that it must be a steak house somewhere else in the world, only to discover that no, that was the exact pub being referred to. And to think, I’d almost forgotten most of that pub crawl, that criss-crossed most of London, and led to myself and the sole friend who remained at the end of it, cackling over mulled wine in a pub that I’ve never actually been able to find since.
