Things are so dang complex! I’m on a family vacation at the moment, hiding away on the expansive master suite’s picture window-seat overlooking the Pacific Ocean’s beautiful and angry waves catapulting upward like molten silver, falling like an unfurling train of a very expensive wedding gown, first covering and then softly flowing in fragments down the crevices of the jagged rocks, and finally returning to the ocean’s body before being sent out again for another performance.
Yes, I’m a little unsettled in this place, hence the run-on sentence. Don’t get me wrong. I love it. But I cannot be selfish, which I really really really want to be. My kids and husband are here with me, of course. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a family vacation. Duh. It may be by design. Not mine. I’m just the student.
No, I’m not going to complain about my family. I love them. Yet, as many parents know, the opportunities to talk with your spouse are often few and far between. The listening ears are always present, keen to detect tension or concern or sadness, and then react with fear and far too many questions. The young-ins don’t understand that talking about hard things is good for relationships. I sometimes wonder if my husband understands that too. Just a thought.
I brought two books with me. Actually, I brought about 400 books with me, but digital representations on a Kindle don’t really count. So, I brought one actual physical book, and my Kindle. The real book is The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norrestrander. The Kindle book is called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist.
My brain has turned to mush. But there’s hope. I’ve decided to zero in on The Tree of Talking from Norrestrander’s book. It’s about conversation.
Norrestrander shares a story about Victor Hugo and his publisher. After the publication of Les Miserable, Hugo sent his publisher a message. And His publisher responded. Here are the messages:
Hugo to publisher: “?”
Publisher to Hugo: “!”
Any stranger or outsider … someone without any knowledge of the two people involved, would have no idea what they’re referring to.
So how did Hugo and his publisher know?
Well obviously, they knew each other.
They knew each other well enough to make the exactly right associations of an otherwise innocuous punctuation mark to a specific topic; the adamancy of the inquiry, and the response; and the emotional energies behind each message. There is a significant amount of depth to those single punctuation marks … between those two people.
How did they come to know each other? Time together. Time conversing. Time repeatedly sharing information with one another that over time gave each enough of an understanding of the other that more and more details could be discarded in order to arrive at “?” and “!.”
Here is a diagram of two trees of talking, one for each person in a one-on-one conversation. This is taken directly from The User Illusion, page 111. The explanation I’ll offer is what makes sense to me; you really don’t want me to go into binary numbers as a summary of all the information sharing choices made by the person as the conversation gains depth (moves up the tree). I only tell you that because that’s what you’ll find in the book. I will not attempt to interpret on the level of Norrestrander. What I offer is my simple-minded connecting of the dots.
Here is what the tree represents (pay no never-mind to the crooked broken line in the communication tube … it took me two days to draw the dang thing and I pooped out futzing with it):
The bottom of the tree shows a vertical line connecting to a fork with two prongs. These two prongs represent choices. The choice made represents the message or response the person has chosen to transmit. The choice not made represents information that’s been discarded. Norrestrander calls this exformation.
The amount of exformation discarded represents the depth of the message or response transmitted. In other words, it represents the effort of pouring through the details and determining what can be communicated without losing the integrity of the underlying and related details. You might think of it as a kind of rich aggregation process.
The conversation continues. There is a response back from the receiver, also the result of the receiver’s choice between what information to transmit and what to discard.
When the reply is received, the original sender considers their what to say in response and in that process, decides which information should be transmitted and what will be discarded. They send their response.
This time, the receiver is at the next level of their tree, a level containing greater informational depth. There are now four paths to choose from, three of which contain information that will be discarded, leading to a more profound response. The receiver is getting into a little more nitty gritty.
The sender receives this new and more interesting bit of information and realizes that there is more to the other person than they realized. The sender is intrigued, so they step up their game and probe at the next level of depth, probably sharing more about themselves or their own perspective on things.
This goes on, back and forth, slowly moving up the trees, and down into greater depth. It takes time and focus. These two people are getting to know each other, understand each other … even appreciate and trust each other. It’s a beautiful thing.
This whole process can unfold in a matter of minutes … or as long as twenty years. The key is to keep it going.
It’s not easy. Sometimes you hear things you don’t want to hear. Like when your daughter, the one that upended your entire life but now she’s doing better, tells you that she wants to go back to drugs because she likes her self better when she’s high and she misses her user friends. Yeah … it’s not easy to hear that. But it’s how she’s feeling … lonely and discouraged, and needing a lot of good belly laughs like the old days.
I get it. So we’ll keep it going. I have a response that offers a more profound alternative.
Now …
Go climb a tree.