HUMAN INTERACTION
Posted by Erik Frey Thu, 27 Jan 2005 04:17:00 GMT
the physics of human interaction ain’t easy.
it’s kinda like real physics – they start off teaching you one thing, and then a couple years later they tell you “okay, everything we told you was sorta WRONG - look at it this way instead.” and you clamor and strut, high on your own disillusion – you put B where A once was, and this works fine until C comes along. and this can continue for a number of cycles before you begin to suspect something is awry.
back when i was a knee-high kindergartener, i remember my dad taking me aside and quietly delivering this commandment:
“son, no matter what they tell you in school, or even what your mother says, if someone ever hits you, you hit them back. and you hit them harder.”
this blew my mind! at that age, parents are the alpha and omega. and here was a license to kill that shattered a previous directive from on high. imagine a voice booming through the clouds and telling moses “no actually, give me that one back – take this one instead”
i didn’t go around punching kids in the face, but i did take his advice to heart, and similarly, other retractions and clarifications over the years. i remember another course adjustment a few years later, that it was okay to lie, even if auntie asla’s thanksgiving platter did look just like dog food, sometimes the truth was best left glossed over.
so, let’s build a model, even if it’s totally wrong and we may need to revise it. let’s build a primitive model, a newtonian graph of the way one connects with people. it might look like this:
the particles are interests, or even just ideas in one’s head. some things are central to ones personality (close to the center) while other things are entirely periphery. the four colors i’ve overlayed are four people i interacted with yesterday.
delia and eben work in the kitchen at my restaurant. they don’t speak english but they’ve been helping me learn spanish, and so our interactions are usually very base, simple, and friendly. i will put my hand to my head, sigh, and say “soy cansado!” and they’ll laugh, or i’ll point at something and they’ll tell me what it is in spanish.
alfred is a bus boy who follows me around cracking jokes throughout the shift, instead of doing anything useful. at some point last night he cracked a joke about porking fat chicks, and for the rest of the night that’s all he talked about. without being too judgemental, i might say he is juvenile and shallow, and the only way he and i can communicate is through a theme so periphery to me (porking fat chicks) that he has to recount the same shit all evening, till i am sick of him.
i came home from my shift and saw sean. sean drove down from denver for the day, and farren came over and we all had a beer and listened to sean play guitar. at one point sean brought up louise gluck, and farren said to him, “that is my favorite poet!”, and i saw their respective graphs reform right in front of me, as thin sinews snaked across and connected the two of them. like building muscle. another common channel.
of course, over time you realize there are a lot of flaws with the above model. first and foremost, i threw only a couple basic themes up there, but in truth people aren’t made up of a few atomic, indivisble ideas. they’re made up of an uncountable, fuzzy collection of symbology that radiate and reflect and self-refer. so we replace our newtonian model with a fancy wave model, and we feel high and mighty with our newfound disillusionment. for a while, at least. so here are what three people sitting around drinking beers and listening to guitar might look like:
their influence has common overlap, but also reflect and refract eachother. wave dynamics. the mystery of the calculus replaces discrete interactions.
the interactions create commonalities (the brighter areas), and those commonalities have their own shape and character. these might manifest as cultural movements, religions, musical genres, any number of things. as more people interact, those manifestations become more clear. they become their own entities:
look how they weave in and out of us like currents. like arteries, or a web. lots of isomorphism.
this is how we garner identity: cultural, ethnic, or otherwise. the stronger the currents and commonalities, the more sophisticated and powerful the communication, and the more efficiently we organize among ourselves.
it reflects not only the way we connect to people, but a certain small-mindedness that has been a source of activism in the past century. however, racism is real because race is real. locality is still real, even today. today, putting everyone in a room and making them get along would only result in a mishmash grey paste of communication. the wisdom and wonder of our culture is fragmented because no one person could hold it all in their head. maybe one day, that will be different.
anyway, most of this post is b.s. i wrote it while listening to sigur ros, so, you know.