b h a g . n e t visual and conceptual exchange b h a g . n e t
ACCORD
Even with my reputation as a good listener, I sense the ways I fail the task of grasping another's meanings instead of just their words. A word or phrase isolated we can know by name in an instant. It is its own name and nothing more. We spot it, like a tool hung on a peg in the storage shed. Only when taken down and used does it resound with meaning. We use it for a purpose, and what we mean to do with it is what it means to us and what we mean by it. Projects, histories, meanings—a networked context gathered there by use.
And here is the issue: When someone speaks a phrase I know by name, a phrase that, very nearly, I myself have heard or used before, when they lift it from its peg, will I wait to see it used? Or, enamored with myself as always, will I swell with my own plans and take this person's words as a pledge of their alliance with my own cause?
On a January night, I am sitting with a friend in the almost warmed darkness of a Brooklyn pub. We settle into conversation, and she happens upon a phrase, a certain phrase. And like a birdsong that incites the flock to chatter, her words excite a host of thoughts that fly to form my own beliefs. I have made her words voice my idea. But what have I learned? I already knew my own idea. Just as my usage shows everyone my purpose, so does hers. She is releasing to flight, in surrounding claims of truth and promised goals, her meaning for that one phrase we hold in common. Her meaning is the thing I don't know, exactly the one thing I can learn—if I listen.
We delight in finding signs of common destiny with other people. But we are not done until we probe for signs of the uncommon as well. Once I hear her words at work, and she mine, we start comparing projects and exploring cooperation in a venture neither knew alone. And we decide that accord is more a matter of contract than concurrence, more often built than found.
© 2003 John Clay