THINQon : Personal contradictions and levels of communication

The Living Room Relationships Personal contradictions and levels of communication

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Alan Plum, An explorer at heart: of people, ideas, of...

Personal contradictions and levels of communication

Latest Post: September 16, 2011 at 2:32 AM

32 followers

I spent some time today with someone new. There was what she said and how she said it; and other signals that told me about layers of who she was that I could only intuit or guess at. Add to this the unconscious ways we acted on each other. How common is this complex experience, I wonder, of picking up layers of each other, often contradictory. I sometimes think that we know everything at first meeting, but don't yet know what we know. It can take months and years to pull this knowledge together, to organize it in consciousness. I think of getting to know someone as taking a series of snapshots, each from a different time we've spent together. It can take a long time to integrate these pictures, one by one by one. Some people seem relatively "simple" and easy to know (what you see is what you get); and others are elusive,, complex, contradictory.

I'm reminded of divorcees who told me they knew right away that their beginning relationships or marriages wouldn't work, but went ahead anyway.

So I thought I'd ask people on Thinqon whether this was a common experience. Are you aware of multiple signals from the people you're close to, especially the beginning when you often don't know why you know what you seem to know. Is part of our experience the balancing or integrating of such signals, often contradictory, as we come to know one another?

I'm writing about the "otherness" of the other. We're often stranger and more contradictory than we first appear.

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Arthur Mont

September 7, 2011 at 3:41 PM

72 followers

Your description Alan reminded me of Picasso.

Actually, cubism in general, and even later Picasso, perhaps most notably in his sculptures.

The way we put together into one image the different layers we see.

Montaigne has a brilliant line that I like saying something like: "I may contradict myself, but I never contradict the truth." He says this after describing how the different layers which you describe might seem at first contradictory, but they are not.

My fear though is that many don't collect layers to put them together, as you nicely describe, but give a score, a plus and a minus, to each fact they collect. This I like, this I don't like, this I like, this I breakup.

And mostly, the physical aspect is hard to miss but obviously can't be overstated.

Edna Stern tagged this post as Brilliant.

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Tom Kimmel, Who am I to say that I am not the center of the...

September 16, 2011 at 2:32 AM

15 followers

Alan,
You posted a 5:30 in the morning. Had you been up all night? Had coffee? Yes, there a myriad cues we see and react to within language and beyond, consciously and subliminally. Of course you know that. And yes we do surpress some information willfully.

When we meet a new person with an agenda, theirs or ours, the situation is weighted and the weight itself may be intolerable often resulting in rudeness, or even giggling.

Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos asks if you were really interested in getting to know a woman would you rather meet her on a moonlit Mediteranian veranda with live chamber music or under a table during the blitz as the ceiling falls down.

My test for two gals was to take them boating in a shallow river and overturn the boat. I wanted to see how they handled it and they could forgive me. They did pretty well and weren't too hard on me so I married them. Or they married me, I am still unclear about that. Anyway, not at the same time. Now after 40 years of marriage and single again I have some doubts about this tactic.

Cary Grant was once asked by an interviewer about the popularity of his screen persona. He said Yes, everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. Sure, its OK to put your best foot forward, but not so far you strain yourself.

My great, great cousin Thomas Read was a pegleg prosecuting attorney in Hinton West Virginia. He was tall and chewed tobacco.
Called to dinner, he would take out his chaw and put it on the cornice over the door to the dining room as he went in.
My bride at the time was revolted by this and asked his wife about it. She didn't miss a beat, she looked right up and said. 'He's the dearest man I ever met.'
I'm not say you necessarily ought to take up chewin tobacco, or boating for that matter. Just that gettin' along with folk, women in particular, requires cuttin' some slack. And don't ever suppose that they don't know it.