Misunderstood!
I don't think this makes much sense—which, as you'll discover, is terribly ironic.
Imagine there was a language we could learn which was fail-safe and fool-proof. No matter what point you were making, your thoughts merged perfectly into your speech.
Nothing you had intended to say was left unsaid, nor left to chance. All nuance was accounted for. And your attentive audience was never prompted to interpret what you might have meant. Your meaning was obvious. You never groped amateurishly for the right word, you simply loaded grapheme after grapheme unto a slick conveyor belt of meaning-making. The quality-controlled production of a sentence. Premium and exacting.
As it is, instead we fill our conversations with stray inadequacies: ‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ or ‘Does that make sense?’ or ‘Sorry, please may you repeat that?’
Personally, in my own effort to avoid ever being misunderstood, I have developed the all-too-unladylike habit of over-explanation.
Or to call a rose by another name: talking too much. (A rose crawling with pests, lacquered with mildew, and rubbery with a premature and consumptive dehydration of the petals. An English rose benighted by an unkind August thunderstorm. Destroying and forcefully malign; a torturing spirit. Bathsheba wailing in the kohl-dark dusk.)
Have you ever watched someone dig themselves deeply into a hole as they speak? They say one thing initially, immediately realise that they’ve not articulated themselves all that well, and proceed to then correct themselves. Still unsatisfied, they add something else. Very rapidly they are tying themselves up in knots. Wildly trying to figure out how to say exactly what they mean and leave no doubt nor room for misprision. You rather pity them. Like watching a rabbit getting tangled up in a snare, limbs akimbo and eyes dilated in nature’s drugged fear. For it is not our poor awkward speaker’s fault that language can be so crooked and wily—not their fault that, for one, so much of communication comes down to not what you say but how you say it. Or that there are so many pitfalls in language, embedded into it all like splinters in flesh. (Why oh why the homophone? The tyranny, also, of the double-entendre. Language, English especially, is chock-full of traps.)
But then, sometimes it is the challenge of uncovering what someone else means that we enjoy. When it proves much more fun than flummoxing or frustrating. For one, it piques our native curiosity, and although curiosity did kill the cat and was justly prosecuted, satisfaction did also bring it back, all in one piece.
Two vignettes for you.
Exhausted, you are standing over the crib of your newborn. Outside it could be dawn or dusk, there is birdsong and veined lilac skies. Making slightly more noise than those birds is your baby, warbling a cry. You are quite sure that this baby must be equally exhausted as you are, for it has certainly slept as little as you have. You stroke the baby’s cheek with your thumb and lift him from the bed—wondering if you were right to move him, it’s all still so new to you—and the baby, still crying (good lungs) curls his fist and reaches up to swat your face. What do you want? Helpless—both you and him! You helpless to know; he helpless to tell, though able enough to make a racket. I wish you could tell me what you want. You know I’d gladly do it for you. But this is a process. You are learning how he both what he needs—and how he will signal to you this need—all the time, with each day. Even when he is able to talk, there will always be a way you have of knowing—the way he might nuzzle in close for a cuddle in such a certain way that you can foretell he is probably coming down with a bug. And so you let him cuddle, although you had an email you thought you needed to send, or a dinner which might’ve wanted stirring. Let it thicken unwholesomely in the pot. You are needed here.
A second scene; the stage is remade and repopulated. You are at a dinner with someone. It could be a date; yes, it’s looking rather like a date. (Your best friend is calling it a date even if you won’t.) Now, consider the table. Not the table-scaping—the slender candelabra nor the effete rose languishing in its vase. Rather the way the two of you are seated, one opposite the other. Being seated thus is, frankly, inherently oppositional, even whilst it is convenient for conversation. This could be warfare or it could be conciliation. Anyway, this man on the other side of the table to you—who is he? You there, man, who are you? Will you tell me directly, divulging who you are (or who you think you are!) through a series of childhood anecdotes, passing observations. Or perhaps an array of remarks which you think make you sound clever, that you’ve had squirrelled away in a notebook for months, and which have now like a blubbery French cheese reached their maturity, and are ready to be delivered. (I might also be guilty of this.) There’s so much to find out. This is a whole real person and you know only the tiniest fraction of their lives. After a certain point, one might almost wonder—is there actually now too much to know? Will you always be playing catch-up? If you meet someone at thirty, that’s thirty years of them which you now need to find out about. A summary might not be sufficient. How much airtime do you give talking about your teenage years once you’re no longer a teenager? Another analogue: it’s like starting to study for an exam in a topic you really care about, but aren’t scoring well in. Opening your books to study, if you pause to think about how much material you have left to cover, you’d be forgiven for getting discouraged. And yet the passion which buoys you along. Yeah, there’s a lot to know, but you want to know it. And you will, with patient study. And you will know the complex soul on the other side of the table, if they want to be known, and if you want to do the knowing.
Rhetorically, we talk of knowing something by the book. This means knowing something inside out, knowing it with precision and thoroughness. Practically able to recite such knowledge in your sleep. This sort of knowledge suggests, both figuratively and literally, that there is also a genuine book to refer to. Something authoritative on the subject. People are not like this, unfortunately. They do not come with an accompanying book which details all you might need to know about them. While a person is a subject which we can acquire knowledge about, they are not a subject which can be known by the book, which is a shame, because it might be quite handy to know someone that well. Although we do have phrases in English which echo this sentiment (the arrogant contention that we are very familiar with someone) we think, perversely, that we know someone well. ‘I can read you like a book.’ ‘I know you inside out.’ Oh, alright then. S’pose I’m rather simple, then, after all. And, bless us, we’re difficult and irascible: we do want to be known—but equally we don’t want to run out of new things for people to know about us. We want there always to be another layer to us, something unspoilt and unknown to anyone else—a part of us we have for keeps, to be savoured in secret. We want there always to be something more to know. It gives us the upper hand. You don’t really know me. Think of a plucky PhD student making a very tenuous claim to their department about a topic of research they want to do—and crucially are seeking funding for. They insist that this incredibly niche and overlooked area of history absolutely urgently needs research and that they are just the person to do it.
Writing is easier to control than speech. Where speech errs, delegate the duty to writing. At least I know that when I write each word can be strictly vetted. Patted down and sized up; interrogated. Are you really the best candidate for the job, you upstart noun? Or can you be improved upon? Will a consultation with a thesaurus put you out of business?
On the contrary, though, speech has more falsifiability. Short of being recorded (which we so often are and maybe we live in the panopticon), once something is said, it is vaporised, gone, in one ear and out of the other. The whole of the legal profession rests on the writ. If we do not have it in writing it is as if something did not exist. ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’ But the worldly lawyer is not satisfied unless she rakes her eyes over all the relevant documentation. Those sheaves of paper, for her, is marriage—and not the words frothing on the lips of the officiant.
Someone very clever once told me about extended mind theory. This—summarised woefully reductively—is the idea that when we write things down, that written thing represents an extended part of our mind. When a hard-working student makes copious notes in order to learn something, those notes form part of their brain and their knowledge base. They are an aid. Now that these notes exist, we don’t have to personally remember everything. We can simply turn to our notes and access the knowledge again when we need it. The tricky part is learning what it is vital for us to remember, and what it is allowable for us to need to check our notes for.
I trust writing slightly too much. I have this silly need to record as much of my life—and other people’s lives—as possible. What, and to whom, am I trying to prove? What is metaphysical is real, I know—what is felt and lived through is real. And yet—that second sneaky life of writing something down and re-establishing it, reliving it.
Quite unhelpfully, all of my hobbies have only ever involved story-telling, even if not explicitly writing. Unlike other hobbies which take you outside of yourself, everything I enjoy requires presenting myself to the immediate world. Lying myself out to be seen—like archaeologists arranging a notable skeleton’s brittle bones over a table—and to have others draw their own conclusions about me. All lain out and ready to be summarised. I drew my first picture when I was 18 months old and was scarcely found without a pen gripped in my hand ever after that. All I wanted to do was draw—that is, until all I wanted to do was write. (I can’t draw anymore; it’s gone.) And in between, I nursed a very shy love for acting, but eventually I fell victim to that especially invidious insecurity that sometimes comes with the onset of teenage-hood, and so that was another love I gave up and put in a box, padlocked. Acting is escapism for some people, but for others they seem to only play roles which reflect parts of themselves. In both cases, it involves a conscious piecing together of a character, a plot, a way of being read. Whether we are calculating how a fictional character would speak or behave, or how we ourselves most organically speak or behave, it is possible to become (over-)attentive to the way we present ourselves to others. How to pitch yourself to others as though you were a marketable good.
And I have always been concerned about being legible to others. I dress femininely. I wear floral dresses and whether I like it or not, they say something. And it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that these garments say something, and in some ways they say something true about me, and in fact they give other people knowledge about me which actually benefits me. Sartorial semiotics. Deliberately appearing feminine. Wearing a dress is a bit like a ship raising a white flag. Its thick canvas beats about the mast in the wind. It is my clearest biological cue to predators. Please be gentle. And this benefits me because the thing that I am, apparently, socially conveying about myself is an accurate representation of who I am—it elicits an appropriate response—I am incontestably a very sensitive and feeling creature.
Telling stories about ourselves. This reads like hackneyed scholarship, but I daresay hackneyed scholarship got its ideas from a fairly legitimate claim originally—a truth doled out so many times that we can tease it for being a cliché, and do so with a bully’s impunity. And everything creative which we do is us making a claim for ourselves. Much in the way that the smallest kitten, the runt of the litter, learns to squeal at the most annoying frequency, to stake its fair share of milk from its greedy siblings. A mess of downy fur and swiping paws and nibbling juvenile fangs—and one exasperated mother-cat, trying to settle them all down with a firm lick to the forehead.
Too many years of other children at school snoozling their noses over my shoulders and demanding: ‘WHAT ARE YOU DRAWING?’ — ‘WHO IS THAT?’ — ‘CAN YOU DRAW A PITCH-CHUR OF ME PLEASE?’ Then a solemn miniature me would sigh gently, and would have to explain, all a-flurried, that she didn’t as a rule draw people from real life. No, she could only draw people that she made up in her head, people she often wrote accompanying stories for. So sorry to disappoint.
Years later, in Art class at fifteen, my classmates would be able to produce incredible observational oil paintings. My soft abusable heart rankled with the foul rot of envy. Whether they were capturing a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of fruit, or painting their best friend mid-grin—or even, as I remember, someone’s bottle of Malibu rum, the prized souvenir of a night of underage drinking—the dimension and lustre of life seemed to animate their work. Meanwhile it turned out that I couldn’t paint. I was shockingly poor at it. Vinegary turpentine would soak through my ragged brush onto the paper; I couldn’t get the colour pigments to match and blend; I struggled to make a nose look as it really did without slyly accentuating something or other—building characterful aquiline disruptions into smooth and straight-lined cartilage. Now, this might’ve been alright if I were able to play it off well—be a bit Dalí about it—but one cannot be too emphatic about the fact that I truly could not paint. What’s more is that everything I drew looked like it had come from a child. In more ways than one. For my linework was fidgety and restive; leaves were not just leaves but twisty thorny shapes, not growing from a tree but metastising eerily; the people I drew had a lumpish and illustrative element to them, shaky surrealist apparitions. You wanted to shake me by the shoulders and hiss ‘Pay attention! Concentrate! Draw exactly what you see.’ Once I was told to draw a rose and I could not help but add in a faerie. Gingerly she levitated beside the sorry rose, donning a wispy bodice of leaves and a skirt of crêpe petal, her moth wings beating with all their might.
Always adding something frivolous. An embellishment. An embellished story. Leave well enough alone.
Leave well enough alone. This is the real point. When trying to introduce yourself to others—when trying, furthermore, to show yourself to others—sometimes admit defeat. Do enough. Act with integrity. Say what feels like you in the moment, even if after the fact you do end up thinking of a much better word which you wish you’d used instead. And if what you say is governed by your principles, you will probably seldom ever not sound like yourself. ‘That’s such a you thing to say.’ It’s easy to be both flattered and offended by this comment.
Inevitably though, sometimes when we speak, what we say does get mangled. Lost in translation. Poorly carried sound. A butchered Chinese whisper. Very annoying. That, or our listener is wilful and contrary. They actually want to mishear us in order to prove a point to themselves, or because what we say doesn’t match up with what they think we should be saying.
Arguably, when this happens we could just learn to correct people.
But then, granted, some of us simply will never tell someone else when they have misunderstood who we are or what our principles might be. Instead you’ll just try to show them that they were wrong about you. Make them pay! Prove them wrong. Potentially vengeful, potentially empowering—there are arguments for each. The pendulum swings drunkenly. Be careful or it’ll take you right out.
I think of the little pulse you get when you see someone typing after you’ve sent them a message. Have you understood me? Will I need to clarify myself? I hope I’ve made myself understood. I hope you’ve understood; it would be so very nice if you did. But understanding someone else instantly and without obstacle is not always the basis for a good friendship. Don’t get me wrong, it is truly magical when you meet someone who might’ve been cut from the same cloth as you—it’s why I wrote a whole bloody essay previously on kindred spirits. But our language tools are as faulty as they are fine. If we are being realistic, it is just as important for you to be able to tell the other person when they are mistaken about you or what you’ve said, and for them to allow you to do this—and to be receptive, too. In the end, they still reach an understanding of you—only it might actually mean more this way, because they have had to bother to put in the effort of doing so. The ends mattering more than the means.
I’m as iffy on pop psychology as the next cynic—but admittedly pop psychology did give us a framework of conceptualising the ways we communicate and behave. Love languages. According to this idea, everyone is supposed to operate through one dominant love language; one person is supposed to express their love through gift-giving, another through spending quality time with the people they care for. Sometimes, other people’s attempts at showing love do not register meaningfully for us—or we accuse them of being unforthcoming and undemonstrative—when rather the issue is that we are not able to see their personal forms of love as actions of love. It’s a two-way street, of course, and the incumbency is on both parties to learn to love each other well. Loving someone else, we come to understand, inevitably involves a certain bilingualism, a studied fluency; the pride-swallowing of becoming a fool—a new student, a learner—in another language so alien from our mother-tongue. This is nothing new—in fact it feels logical—and yet the humility of putting this theory into practice is usually initially uncomfortable. This cannot be dealt with bar you sucking it up and patiently improving from novicehood to mastery. These very same pop psychologists probably also spend a lot of breath exhorting ‘communication’; communication in the abstract as a magic-bullet, a panacea.
Language prescriptivists, nobly enough, would perform their linguistic ablutions and purge us all of any of our unique qualities of speaking, any idiolect. Anything which compromises how understandable we are to another person. The prescriptivists would, through honest toil, and all the while sporting their fluorescent jackets and builders’ hard hats, reconstruct Babel.
But to bed with it all. Now (we can both agree) I am just typing words—gamely plink-plonking at my laptop keyboard—and contributing nothing to the sum of anyone’s understanding. I will shut up forthwith. My bedraggled point is made, or thereabout.
After nigh-on two months I come to you with an essay. What has the cat dragged in? This essay was deplorably bad—but in my defence, it could have been so much worse. Therefore we may be grateful. Said essay was going to be a typically self-indulgent diary-esque piece—one of those which I am so given to writing—but just in the nick of time, I remembered that it is for this very purpose which diaries exist. The very charm and utility of a diary consist in the assurance that no one else will ever read it (in fact that violates the diaristic code; see clause #10). That is, unless they are a very light-footed thief and raid your bedroom. In which case it’s fair game.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
Cover image, via Pinterest:
Two Alice posts in one day, truly miraculous.
Do words fail thoughts, or do thoughts fail words?